Moving Towards Midsummer
Relishing peak fizz and booking for yoga this week.
We are approaching summer’s apex. There is and will be a peak fizzing. A deluge of light. All of which has the uncanny feeling of being both long awaited and far too soon.
Everything, now, is about the light. The abundance of it of course. How it stretches every day. And now near to maximum. There is plenty enough to get drunk on. Peeping in curtain gaps, if you close them, or pouring in from too early if- as I insist- we don’t. It is too much sometimes, these early awakenings, but I am greedy. Maybe even insatiable. I know I can’t store it away for the darker months but that doesn’t stop me trying. June feels like a banquet of mornings and I want to fully feast. And on the evenings too, longer and longer days followed by light infused nights and twilights- them long too- that are veritably translucent.
When I muster the energy, after a busy day, to go for an evening walk, or even just sit outside, I determine that I will do so daily. Which of course I don’t because we are rarely ever our best intentions. But it makes me acutely aware of the luxury of it all. And that wherever we are will inevitably, and too soon, be gone.
I saw this morning, in a book my husband is reading, a picture of our lives plotted as dots in a square. I had, despite its apparent fame, never seen the image before, but it is a visual representation of Oliver Burkeman’s famous ‘4000 weeks’; the ‘if we are lucky’ sum of our lives. 4000 weeks doesn’t sound like much and it looks like less still. So few weeks. So few days. So few Junes. So few light filled evenings that we can, if we choose to, revel in. Or even just notice. Which is often more than we do and more than enough.
It rained overnight and rained heavily, and the earth feels like it is singing this morning as a result. The birds, who had quietened a little since the heights of their orchestral spring, are out in force again. I can imagine they might be lifting their beaks between verses, drinking up the remnants of rain that still falls in audible drops from the yew trees. Trees that sit protectively, one at each window of my bedroom, and which seem to have greened overnight, as greedy for the rain as I am for the light. And as grateful.
YOGA CLASS this week
I am taking one of my boys to Cornwall this week to write and surf together- I am working on a very new and embryonic idea and he is working on a short story- but I will still be teaching my Tuesday class from there, at the usual time of 9-10am. As always the recording will be available to anyone who books on but cant join live and it will last the usual week. Would be lovely to see yopu on the mat.
We are spiralling up the body, as we move towards peak summer and the session will be a combination of soulful movement, lots of tension and energy releasing and some pranayama - all delivered with a dose of sea air.