Tag: Summer

The Garden as it Ripens

Wake up, little bunnies! Mr. Gloom, be on your way! Beaches, pools, campgrounds: ’tis time to have fun. Picture the garden as it ripens. Imagine those tasty veggies, those delicious leaves of lettuce. There are reasons for our bellies to feel full again. Pizzas and milkshakes in New York; salads here at home. Meals will become again things we savor. We’ll go motorboating; we’ll become godparents (ceremony in a church — the whole bit). When I wake each morning, it will be to the light of the sun as it shines on the roof of my tent.

Monday June 14, 2021

Harmonica on the beach. And a golden sun at the center of the sky gleams down. Mind clear, inner chatter silenced, I listen to the waves. We trade rides on a store-bought boogie board. The world hisses, sprays / spits with love. Day of summer, day of sizzle. Application of coconut oil to bare skin. Afterwards I sit on the deck feeling “happy, happy, happy!” as the baby’s fond of saying here at our macrame / woven-art Airbnb. When Sarah returns from taking Frankie to the park down the street, I take over and do the same. Frankie marches me around, marches up slides, climbs a set of plastic mountains, majesty arranging herself to her liking on a swing. Birds sing as wind rustles the leaves of a neighbor’s palm tree. What a life. “What we need,” you say, “are places like this, but free.”

Saturday May 29, 2021

We kick off the weekend relaxing beside a community pool in our neighborhood. Frankie loves it. After some initial skepticism, I too come to like it. It’s a bit busy, but Sarah packs us a great lunch. And in the afternoon, we gather gang-like for a barbecue in a friend’s backyard. It’s a good group; we all enjoy each other’s company. And the friend is a great host. For all who make events of this sort possible, for all who labor in their preparation and/or facilitate their happening, I give thanks.

Thursday May 6, 2021

We gather with colleagues on several occasions to celebrate completion of classes, abandonment not yet a fait accompli. There is a shared exhaustion that many of us bring to these events. This has, after all, been a long and difficult schoolyear. We’re fatigued by Zoom – but we all show up, knowing summer’s arrival is but a week away. Summer is time away from Zoom. Time ours again to cast amid the sea of the possible. Time for reading groups, and vinyl nights, and visits to Hades for drinks with friends.

Sunday September 1, 2019

Two women walk past chatting about a celebrity chef as I float on my back at the public pool. Here is the Multitude: friendly, assembled for play, with lifeguards instead of cops. From it we scale upward: from the playground to the festival to the tent city with gardens. Children blowing bubbles, adults reading and tanning, seniors lounging in the shade cast by an umbrella. Through the scene floats a yellow butterfly. Afterwards, trees silhouetted by the setting sun, I sit on my stoop listening to cicadas. Neighbors play Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” and Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” as a bat flies overhead.

Tuesday August 20, 2019

Sarah and I arrive to the coast and set up a portable temporary architecture, chairs and a blue umbrella. Sandpipers and seagulls play by the shore beside boogie boarders, kids tossing balls back and forth, swimmers. Beaches present life at its most joyful — life measured out in waves of guiltless play. A squad of pelicans fly past hanging low, close to the water. I imagine fields and sets of objects undergoing phased modulation and metamorphosis as in the interior of a kaleidoscope. It isn’t until after a brief swim that the objects focus into grains of sand. I think of my brother, a lifelong surfer, and begin to sound out intersections of surf culture and psychedelic philosophy. By that I mean more than just The Beach Boys. I mean Rick Griffin and Surfer magazine’s 1978 interview with Timothy Leary. Unfortunately, despite abundant prompting beforehand, I let my fear of bad dining experiences interfere with my ability to heed the recommendations of others. A sign with adjustable letters reminds me, “Fears we don’t face become our limits.” Time to face those fears, I nod. Outgrow them. As always, it means learning again to trust others. Don’t just sit around in a funk watching the sunset from the hotel balcony, I tell myself, rousing myself from circumstance.

Friday April 26, 2019

My favorite moments are those that allow me to experiment with novel forms of sociality and self-care. Hello, summertime: for academics, a T.A.Z., a seasonal utopia, release from bondage. Yet I feel so isolated and diminished, caught in an entropic well. Let there be good vibrations. Let us crush once and for all this miserly neoliberalism that rules everything around us. For there are reasons to celebrate, reasons to dance late at night, pasts to recast and futures to speak into being.

Wednesday May 23, 2018

Sarah passes on to me along our walk gleanings from her readings on occult philosophy in Elizabethan England. We pass a bluebird, a cardinal, roses, peonies, neighborhood flora and fauna offering to the senses an abundance of sights and scents and sounds as sunlight yellows the greens of a world ripening its way toward summer. Afterwards I purchase a new shirt for myself in preparation for an upcoming trip to Los Angeles—and for once, I allow myself to disengage a bit from the grudge I usually hold (and thus the tensions I usually bear in my back, chest, and shoulders) in reaction to the wage relation, so as to enjoy for a few moments both the cerebral and the sensorial pleasures, the simple bodily procedures and the imaginative comparison and assessment of potential fashionings of self, involved in the act of shopping. Nonjudgmental receptivity of this sort is essential now and then if one’s hope is to grow, I tell myself. In his essay “Eupsychia—The Good Society,” Abraham Maslow suggests as a guide for this mode of being a book by British psychoanalyst Marion Milner called A Life of One’s Own. Milner’s book is the product of a seven-year experiment in introspective journaling — a technique that resonates, of course, with the one informing these trance-scripts.