July comes in simmering, steaming, scorching, sweltering - all the alliterative “S” words for summer. After a long period of gloriously moderate weather in June, summer has galloped in and raised high a banner of blazing sunlight.
I find myself moving through life a lot more slowly in the summer, do you? When it’s hot, I allow myself to give in to the torpor, to sit quietly in the shade of a tree with my eyes closed, taking shallow breaths, listening to the birds and squirrles chattering. Just now through the window from where I sit typing these words to you, I spy a chipmunk rooting around in the damp soil surrounding the impatiens in my flower bed, and I stop to watch him while he scratches and scrabbles, then sits up on tiny haunches for a nibble, found treasure gripped tightly in two tiny foreclaws. Yes, he’s a nuisance in the garden, but I can still find him delightful to watch.
As energy lessens in the summer, so does appetite. Breakfast nowdays is often a small bowl of fresh fruit, maybe a bit of yogurt on top. Lunch a scoop of tuna or chicken salad with some wheat crackers; dinner a bit of salmon or grilled chicken and a big green salad. Easy peasey – to make, digest, and clean up.
Of course, all day, lots of cold, filtered water.
Simple and so good summer breakfast.
I have taken up a new habit – one of dubious goodness for health and fitness, but I’m enjoying it anyway. After decades of drinking my coffee black, I’ve started treating myself to a second cup in mid-morning laced with vanilla almond milk creamer in what I’m calling a “two-fisted mug.” The sweet creamy coffee is delicious; but there’s also something truly satisfying about cupping my two hands around this mug – it really feels like a bowl – and tipping it up to my mouth.
Something about the holding of this cup between my two palms connects to a question that keeps rising for me in the living of these days.
How do I – do we – HOLD all of it? All that life offers in grace and glory, but also in grief? I return to an ancient memory of a record I used to play as a child (He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands) and on the jacket cover, an image of two large hands cupped around the earth, holding it tightly between them. There is safety, but also offering in this image. Here, it invites, this is for you in all its fullness. Put your hands on top of mine, and together we can hold every bit. I imagine the hands of my dearest community of family, friends, ancestors, layered on mine; I feel my palms warm and tingle with possibility, with strength, with good willful energy.
Usually I mark the beginning of a new month by setting up a new Notebook – one of the old-fashioned spirals I use for a daily journal. I write the month and year on the inside cover; what I plan on reading; and also those questions I’m holding and want to consider about life in general and my own in particular.
Today I’m reorganizing my Paper Republic notebook system. I’ve been using the Paper Republic for three months, and I still absolutely adore it. It’s a sensory pleasure to hold, to touch, to write in, something I find satisfying in its form quite apart from its function – quite like that coffee bowl I was just telling you about, yes?
I use the Paper Republic for reflections about my reading and writing life; notes on books I’ve read, poetry, podcasts with authors I listen to. I’m adding a new notebook to the mix this month exclusively for notes on the Substack posts I read. Having noticed I’ve been skimming and scrolling through those without closely reading them, I’m hoping this will slow me down and encourage a more thoughtful approach to the very fine writers whose work I follow. Also, it gives me another reason to write in this journal I love, and turns reading on a device into a more tactile experience – something else I find myself craving lately.
How I love my Paper Republic journal system
Last month’s poetry study was the work of Marie Howe, specifically, her New and Selected Poems. Every month I turn to a new poet with a mix of excitement but also sadness. This immersion into a poet’s work and life, reading their poems, memorizing a couple, taking those with me throughout the day, listening to interviews and podcasts with the poet – a relationship develops, and it’s one I feel some tenderness around leaving behind.
But, this month, as has happened every month so far, I quickly become attached to this new poet I’ve chosen, coming to know her through the words she writes, but also through interviews and videos I may find online.
As we’ve been speaking of holding and containers, these words of Howe’s come to mind. “Poetry holds the mystery of being alive,” she said, “holds it in a kind of basket of words that feels inevitable, incantatory; that has the quality of a counter spell. Poetry holds what can’t be said.”
One of the poems I chose to memorize is called The Maples, and when I read the first line I knew I had to memorize it. I asked the stand of maples behind the house/How shall I live my life? They said, Shhh, Shhh, Shhh.
Right behind my house is just such a stand of maples, and whenever my back door is open, I hear that same answer: Shhh, shhh, shhh. It was so easy to memorize that poem, because I live it every day, every time I stand still on my back porch. And now I can recite this poem in their honor.
The Maples
The Maples
I asked the stand of maples behind the house
How should I live my life?
They said, shhh, shhh, shhh…
How should I live? I asked, and the leaves seemed to ripple and gleam.
A bird called from a branch in its own tongue.
And from a branch, across the yard, another bird answered.
A squirrel scrambled up a trunk
then along the length of a branch.
Stand still, I thought.
See how long you can bear that.
Try to stand still, if only for a few moments.
drinking light breathing.
Some other things I loved in June:
The Calamity Club, a summer blockbuster, all 649 pages of it. Read it with a big glass of iced tea with mint, and a box of tissues (better yet, an old-fashioned lace handkerchief). I read most of it in the shade of early morning on my back porch, listening to the maples (and birds and chipmunks).
These You Tube videos by Caroline Chagnon, that really invite me to slow down, and create beauty in my everyday living.
My flower garden, that’s flourishing and offers daily delight to my eyes and good work for my hands.
So tell me, what are you holding for this month of July? Are there hard things you might hope to set down? What is flourishing that you’d like to hold tightly and safely? How are you holding it all right now?