Summer is sticky.  For me.  Letting it go is excruciating.  Difficult to explain really, but when I see the lovely, long spikes of goldenrod feathering the trails, I can feel my heart sink.

No!  Too soon!

 I think of the last few lines of Mary Oliver’s The Summer Day:

                                    Doesn’t everything die at last? And too soon?

Yes.  But that doesn’t  make it  any easier,  Mary.

How we do cling.  It seems a part of being human.  What is it you cling to?   Relationships are high on the list, even when they do not serve us.   Another one right up there is that prison of unforgiveness. Or a particular mindset.  Fears are also high on the list of holding on.  We say we are in the grip of fear, when it is we who do the gripping.

“Letting go” has become a new age cliché and I can attest to this just sorting back through conversations of the past few months.  Perhaps because our world did a big ‘let go’ a couple of years ago.  During the pandemic we let go of things that we would not have believed possible.  But at the same time, we picked up phobias previously unheard of.

The Disney film folks even wrote it into a song that climbed to the top of the charts.  “Let It Go”, the teeny-boppers sang out, emulating the princess in her Frozen tower.

But cliché or not, it is a ‘powerful inward manoeuvre’ says mindfulness teacher, Jon Kabat Zinn.

I am imagining that  I hold a a butterfly in my clenched hand.  With great difficulty I open my fingers so tightly bound,  and I watch the creature’s release into the cosmos.  I have given up struggling, and pretending.  I am over resisting or wanting.   I am allowing things to be as they are.  Deep exhale.

I look honestly at my likes and dislikes — at my fears and insecurities — all in that field of awareness.  That field that Rumi writes of, where the soul lies down.  That is “beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing.” Where “the world is too full to talk about”.  I so love that field.

Shining the light of awareness on the stickiness of clinging or condemning or rejecting, that I am guilty of each year when September dawns, is my therapy.   We can open to these sticky moments and recognize them.  (Helloo, and welcome to my therapy session!)

Any truth seeker  knows that wisdom and stillness and insight can be accessed only in the present moment when we can be complete right here and right now.  It doesn’t work otherwise.

Try it.  See if going into that quiet meditation space and sincerely giving up the fear, the grudge,   the longing or the belief doesn’t feel better than clinging, even though a part of us wants desperately to hang on.

And now if you will indulge me, beloved reader, I will give the last words of my 

“goodbye to summer” to Mary Oliver and her lovely The Summer Day.

                 

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean —

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life.