The Summer of Not Much Love

Oh how I yearned for a long, languid summer. Dreamt of sinking in to a deep ease in my body and the days. We bookended the months with an early June and a late August holiday. Quiet, beautiful country times to enrich the experience. Lovely as those weeks have been (are being) this has not been the summer of my dreams and desires and therein as ever lies the crux of the hurt. Wanting my experience to be other than it is. I feel like I've written so many versions of this post over the past few years, there's frustration with that of course but also some understanding that this is the way it will be until I find a rhythm of acceptance and surrender. Underneath knowing that perhaps it will even always be this way, perhaps this is always going to be my brick wall, thumped into periodically as I spiral around my days and that is okay. It's not about how you fall, it's about how you pick yourself up.

I have been surrounded by love and beauty and yet closed off from it. Fixated on what feels like the rock bottom wish of 'I just want to be healthy'. That isn't the bottom though, as I discovered at the start of the year. It's that old friend 'earn your place' in disguise. Be healthy to have energy to do more to prove I am worth the space and resources on our spinning disco ball. That this is my default setting is just the hardest lesson for me to learn, the fear that puts on so many different sets of clothes and sneaks up on me time and again. Somehow even dotting and dabbling abandoned me by the end of June. Physically spent and emotionally just too vulnerable for all the angst and the tragedies in the wider world this summer I've basically put myself in a bunker. No social media, very consciously used and limited time online and stripped down social engagements to just try and find some place where I felt like I could breathe, where I felt a flicker of interest in and excitement about this wondrous world. Numbing out in front of the tv. Diving in to fluffy novels or stripped down detective fiction without any emotional pitfalls to fall in to. Wrapped up against the woes of the world, coping with our own domestic drama as we said farewell to the head of our house, Queen Nina, our dear old Siamese. I think it was something of a shock to us all that even she had to bend finally to the rules of nature.

Writing this from the end of the summer it feels like I've coaxed my way through the deepest levels of grue. My eyes are open again, my spirit communicative. I'm managing the sinusitis the best I can and have accepted that I can't find an elusive combination that will make it go away. What seemed like giving in now feels like acceptance that strips things back to the original hurt not the layers of story on top that end up being the hardest aspects to deal with. Feeling for what feels enriching within those limits, day by day, moment by moment. Going slowly. Reading a more varied diet again. Letting the Olympics shed a golden glow on the tv viewing. Picking up some simple, simple crafts: tapestry and mistake rib knitting. Accepting, accepting, accepting.

I'm not sorry to feel erratic days of heat and chill. To see ripening fruits and the earliest of turning leaves. Happy to be beginning to say a farewell to a not much loved summer and welcoming the change of seasons with open arms.