I've been meaning to do a piece on summer - I kind of like the idea of sounding off a little something on each season, as they are at least fairly distinct here - and now that the summer here is on its way out - lingering a bit like a guest starting to wear out its welcome - it seemed like a good time to put out a sketch before it fades from immediate memory.
In some renditions it is the fall in which the active, energetic events of the summer slow and come to a close, in which the summation of one's actions begins to be evaluated, and so on into the dead of winter, where there is plenty of quiet, fallow time to ruminate on the fading year, before cycling back to the clean open of the next spring, to try it all again.
But I think that recursive reflection process stretches well back into the peak of summer itself, when one is cresting on the peak of one's energies, which are set against the peaking energies of the rest of the earth. And one begins to discover the limits of one's will and the stores of energy backing it, as it comes up against other wills exhausting their own energies. One's successes may mount up yes, but one's failures mount up in this time too. One may overpower and best others and be saddened by this, and one may be overpowered and bested by others and saddened by it all the same. By the end of the summer one is growing tired of the striving: "Enough! Let me rest!"
The sagging nettle tell the story well: they've towered as far as their stalks could hold their bursting flowers, and they peak and begin to surrender again to gravity, curving back towards the earth, an air of exhaustion overtaking them as their leaves burn and whither in the sun and are chewed through by insects. The same story is told by many other plants in the understory. And the trees above sigh and drop their seeds, leaves, needles, and cones.
What's changing is the slow rolling smoothness of this process. Because with the augmenting heat cyclically put into successive summers, it gets more difficult to put the lid on and keep it there. The early fall cold fronts roll in with the clouds, and the cool air blows through, and the rains come in, but they are unable to extinguish the sun, which burns back through, still quite summer-hot, further and further into the fall season.
So everything begins to wind down, and then summer flickers back on for a week or two, and the insects stumble back out to resume their chores, confused, and the fruiting plants go back to producing their fruit, which bears a consistency of confusion itself, some of it overripe, with others not quite ripe enough, and then some ripening wonderfully and late.
The changing sound and texture of the forest itself bears the signature of changing distribution and accumulation of energy and heat. New plants, insects, and birds suddenly make their appearance and proliferate. And the growing heat and moisture leading to an explosion of tree frogs sounding off in the canopy above. Slug season is greatly extended this year and they are everywhere still. The energy moves through the forest in light and heat, and then new faces and voices follow.
The past couple of years it was hotter and drier, and now it is hotter and wetter, the various associated dangers of each surplus shifting and oscillating throughout the season, and so the act of predicting itself becomes fraught.
It of course depends on the region and the culture, but here in the West you would find a lot of mythical dread represented in the Winter, in which the precious little energy wanes, and dark forces emerge in the dead of night to take their pounds of flesh. But at least for me, where I am, it is the peak of summer that I dread, when the forest becomes a tinderbox, and there is much heat and energy setting everything into a kinetic overabundance: the ever-present danger of wildfire, the suffocating smoke of nearby wildfires, the nutballs kicked around at work and cranky in the heat, coming up into the canyon after they get off work to discharge their firearms and drop off piles of garbage that occasionally catch fire, the sudden heavy, explosive rains, and so on.
Here we can contrast a winter evil (in which a dearth of energy sets vampiric life leeches into motion) with a summer evil in which an overabundance of surplus energy meets itself and crashes into itself. In some ways this is a privileged (and geographically localized) position, as I usually have something to eat and a warm place to land, but I am finding that for me the seasonal dread has shifted and inverted in some ways, and I have come to yearn for the deadening quiet of winter, to take refuge in, and to pause the frenetic pace of work (keeping up with the rapidly growing plant mass for one thing) to focus back on things I've missed, such as reading, writing, thinking, making music, and the like.
To repeat this from a different and personal angle, the shift has occurred over the years in the following way: for me as a child the summer was supposed to be a time of carefree play and open-ended free time, with the fall cooling experienced as a dread of the coming sobriety and rigidity of the public school year. As an adult, and moving more towards traditional, seasonal labor, in a rapidly changing global climate, that feeling has gradually inverted.
But also too, the world system and the global ecology are in a state of instability, and shifting to something else, which could take some time indeed, but then currently it is difficult to settle on a clear picture of the way things are. All we know is that they are changing, and on a very large scale. So I'll keep putting out various impressions of that process as it becomes appropriate.
