As a kid for me the start of summer was always Memorial Day weekend because that was the first weekend we went to the beach every year. Like it really was startling to me, one of the openings in the field where I thought, ohh now I’m an adult, when I realized there were warm and lovely beach days that happened sometimes before that holiday and that I get to go whenever I want! It’s silly maybe to think of adulthood that way but I have battled to keep central in my life the gift of living near a beach, of getting to be as much as possible a freewheeling beach bum. The beach has always, always healed me, and also part of my becoming an adult was concerned directly with my own accountability to my mental health and the belief in resiliency and healing.

And so if beach bumming is mental health then beach bumming is life for me, and so it has gone. Anyways after living a long while on the eastern shore I came to realize that for me, summer now starts at the first honeysuckle whiff. This year that was with Winnie on the new moon of this lunation, a beautiful omen indeed. Right when she was talking about finding her poet again, too. That actually all was right after Memorial Day, which this year was the same time the weather on Delmarva c h a n g e d. From a long, lazy, mostly winterfied-spring— overnight into Summer. Just like that, like on a switch.

I haven’t known what to write given the latest developments in my life. Around my birthday, which is just on the equinox tide when spring begins, something went down that’s had me doing the rounds for my own mental health and soul work actively again, actively like battling for transformation not like for good maintenance actively. Activity that for two and a half months has looked like battling for safety basics day after day, week after week. The drudgery in it can be so hard, I had forgotten that. It is hard and has been hard and for the sake of my own boundaries and those of my kid it has affected my family. Which is also a bigger my family issue as well, as in me saying I can’t carry this part that’s not mine for you. Not my job. The overlaps and so forth at times have been hard to bare.

Still the seasons press on. Last week the first tiger lily in a ditch, sienna orange rounded by tangles of bushy green. At the forest’s edge in my back yard this morning I felt the headiness in my chest of honeysuckle, she intoxicates my bodymind and I felt grateful. Grateful to be connected to nature again, to feel her the way my body likes to which is like wearing her as a dress.

Mother Nature heals. It is the Solstice tide, when the tiger lillies come and the first black-eyeds and summer begins, and for now under this moon almost full, under this last week’s day moon sun, I pray me and those who need it simplicity
that becomes harmony
and
REST.