Summer Splendor

These early days of Summer are some of our favorites.There are reasons for this:

The light has grown -- in both general intensity and length of days (the Solstice being the most famous example of long-light-wonder -- and the official first day of Summer),

Things that had only begun to bloom in March and April are approaching full flower,

School is out (or almost out),

Any and all nature suddenly seems especially beckoning,

And an indisputable sense of something close to (if not actually) magic

hangs in the air

(like morning mist still might for those of us in coastal places)

(like the first few fireflies you or your children spy)

(like the last bursts of pollen that coat our windowsills or outdoor tables)

And suddenly (but a soft kind of suddenly, a gentle unmistakable OH, MY, YES suddenly)

we’re more than inclined to give in to wandering impulses,

Be they the daydreaming kind

or the moongazing kind

or the beachwalking kind

or the innerjourneying kind

Or any combination of the above kinds

Or more

Wherever we find ourselves. Even (espeically) nearby home.

The last two are important -- the ‘wherever we find ourselves’ and ‘nearby home’ parts,

because this swoonymagic week or so around the Solstice

is not limited to location or particularly tied to any one place or climate.

It’s for all of us, wherever we are, whoever we are, whomever we are with, and with whatever level of wonder each of us has on hand or is game to allow.

And so are the following words:

WONDERMENT is a word we know (and love), meaning (perhaps unsurprisingly) “a state of wonder,”

WANDERMENT is a word we recently (and delightedly) learned is *actually* a word, which means “the action or state of wandering,”

SERENDIPITOUS is a word we’ve long enjoyed but never until recently knew could also be used to describe a character trait, namely “having “the faculty of making happy & unexpected discoveries by accident.”

Why share these three and why now? Because:

1) we’re in that interpolary zone we described earlier

2) WONDERMENT, WANDERMENT, and becoming SERENDIPITOUS accurately relate to something that can (if we let it) happen to any of us: moments of mini-transcendence that might happen (or are already happening) very close to home...

Like this walk I took recently with Lu Where we decided to engage in local wanderment:Where we found evidence of others being or becoming serendipitous (fairy offerings)

Where there was tangible proof that more than one someone wanted to leave a reminder of joy --

whether it was for fairies, whether it was in gratitude of rain and blooms after so much drought,

whether it was a tiny altar or a place of prayer, whether it was the grounds for a picnic of sprites,

Whether it was the work of children or the gift of a sly gardener

What matters is that we let ourselves notice

(apparently we are all already serendipitious souls, we just have to accept it)