A post made in loving tribute to all of my fellow hippies, slackers, boulevardiers, and couch potatoes. Yes, I can get the job done–if I really have to–but I’d much rather rest on my laurels Barcalounger, thank you very much. Join me, won’t you?
As another Summer slips toward her torrid latter days, I thirst mostly for a sense of serenity amid the ache and struggle that transforms everyday deeds into Herculean tasks by mere virtue of the sizzling sun. And as I do, and sip the simplest glass of cold clear water, I recall that Summer has a range of beauties all her own. Contemplating them can bring a water-clarity to my heated thoughts and gradually, I find that slipping sense of refuge in the burning day has righted itself again, if only for a moment or two, and that is quite enough.
Here, then, I salute the summer. I salute water, and the wealth that lets me have it in cold clarity almost whenever I should want. And I salute, with deepest peace, the calm that comes in recollecting all that’s good and fair and simple in that harshest place, the burning midst of the high season of the sun itself, knowing it is its own sort of beautiful and will be missed again some other day.
Reading
A heavy braid of brown-black hair
Coiling over her shoulder frames
The mourning dove-brown collarbones
That rise and fall in subtle flight
As she breathes, sitting back there in such quiet repose
As if to lend some grace to that so humble vase of white
Field lilies at her side, and when she turns
The antique pages of that favored book,
She spares a moment’s look to watch the lilies catch
The kitchen windows’ waning light
Just as the late-day sun tips in
Behind those distant trees to
Chase the night
Let us look for our peace wherever we can. Let us embrace it and rest in it. And let us always share that peace with whomever, whenever and however we are able, inviting them all into our places of peace so that they and others all around the world, too, can find and disperse the sweetness of true and deep repose.
Art-Colored Glasses 