summering

lessons from an epic summer

This is the newsletter version of Sara by the Season, where I explore what is piquing my curiosity as I try to lean into nature’s wisdom and rhythms. I’m skipping the podcast version this week because I’m slowly wading back into things, and I can get a walk in with the dog before the rain if I don’t have to record and edit a podcast! If you know someone who would like this sort of thing, I’d be so grateful if you would share it.

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I think this happens every summer since my kids have been in school - I fall off the writing wagon altogether for most of it. Summer at our house isn’t conducive to me writing. Our kids are loud, and our house is comparatively small. Despite my best intentions of teaching them to fend for themselves, I find myself getting sucked into breaking up arguments, policing screen time, or yelling at them for getting on the roof of the barn again. And that was just the days that we were home, which were not many. 

Grant and I had the summer of our lives - he won a trip for work for the two of us in June to Grand Cayman, in July to Switzerland, and then we wrapped up the summer on an extended trip to our favorite place as a family: Black Mountain, NC. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so spoiled in my life, but now that our kids returned to school this week, I find my hands itching to write about all of the notes on fragments of papers that I scribbled on at some point over the last few months that surely made sense to me when I wrote them, but that now I have no idea what I meant. 

quintessential summering!

Instead of forcing myself to make meaning out of all of these scraps of paper, I thought I would share a few lessons that I want to remember from this truly epic summer. As I wrote out this list, the lessons from our trip to Switzerland took on a life of their own, so I’ll publish those on their own later. 

A caveat for all of these: these lessons were largely possible because of our enormous privilege to be able to afford trips and camps for the kids, grandparents willing to help out with extended childcare, and jobs with enough PTO and flexibility to make our summer possible.

Why do we live like this? We had more time off this summer than we’ve ever had - other than maternity leave for me (doesn’t really count) and when Grant quit his extremely stressful job nearly ten years ago to stay home and handle childcare (also doesn’t really count as “time off”). While we were in Switzerland, we met many locals who take at least six weeks off every summer, telling us that no Europeans work in August anyway. Our favorite place, Black Mountain, NC, boasts lots of retirees, but, because of the nature of the place presumably, many of them are young and active, trading in bigger retirement accounts and advancing their careers for smaller homes and capping their lifestyles to make it work. It’s hard not to be in places where so many people are living differently and wonder what we’re doing with our lives and what we Americans are thinking just accepting our paltry ten public holidays instead of fighting back in some way¹. 

This graph that I first saw in May and have thought of at least once a week since explains a lot, I think: 

Also, this from Jessica Wildfire on the real reason for the war on remote work is adjacent to this whole conversation. The pandemic gave us a real life example of how different things could be, just like my travels did this summer, but in a much more dramatic and wide-ranging way. Why are we willing to rush back to the way things were just because “they” want us to?

Just do the fun thing. We had planned a short end-of-summer trip to the aforementioned Black Mountain; but then Grant had a big work thing get canceled, and we realized that we were staying in town for two kids’ basketball games. We decided to ditch basketball and enjoyed a leisurely extra week in our favorite place before the onslaught of school and activity schedules. We hiked and mountain biked and swam in swimming holes and lakes and rivers and had Taylor Swift karaoke contests on the porch. It cost more than we had budgeted, we probably shouldn’t have taken off more work, but I decided that I’m 42 and sick of being so damn responsible all the time.

Easy for me to say with my stable job and house and education, yes, but I’m an oldest daughter who has mostly done what was expected of me for 40+ years, and I find that I’m weary of it. I need more fun in my regular life. Not forced fun, which gives me the shivers, but real, actual fun. What do YOU do for fun?!

Traveling personalities. Grant and I have this theory that we’ve developed over the years that, just like regular personalities, people have traveling personalities too. We’ve decided that we’re “homebody travelers,” in that we enjoy traveling, but we prefer to dig deeper into a place versus crossing 19 cities off our list in two weeks. Hence, we’ve been going to Black Mountain, NC for 20+ years. The popularized travel personality is the jet sitter who has tons of countries on “their already visited list” and even more on their “to visit list,” but that is just one way of traveling and not the only way. As usual, you do you. (Also, we should all find places to explore and enjoy closer to home because the climate crisis is here, and we all need to drastically minimize air travel. Kettle, black, yep.)

Looking at my place with fresh eyes. I live in central Indiana, a place memes are made about how boring the scenery (and life) is. But I’ve traveled a decent bit, and I’ve never seen a sunset that comes even close to an Indiana sunset. I’ve seen a New England fall, but I don’t think it matches the slower-paced Midwestern ones. I like how easy it is to grow things here. I like how I can live very comfortably here without working myself to death. I love my place despite the things that frustrate me about it (and there are many), and I think my complicated love is more honest and true than the crush I (still) have on Switzerland after a short two weeks there.    

I posted daily about our Switzerland trip because our kids were back home, so it was an easy way to share with them and, selfishly, it was an easy way for me to record things that I otherwise would have forgotten had I waited until I got home. But so many people messaged me that, after seeing our pictures, they wanted to go to Switzerland. I loved the Swiss people, culture, and the land itself, and I’m happy if other people go visit because I posted some pictures about it. But their responses got me wondering about how I do get really blown away by the beauty of our place, but I rarely go on and on about it because it doesn’t have the “wow factor” of a village in the Swiss Alps. I’ve been wondering how my own life might be different if I exhibited some of that excitement and enthusiasm about my home place, as I did when I visited Switzerland. There is something here about awe and gratitude that connects with some of those bits of notes I referenced earlier, so I’m sure I’ll be writing more about this later. In the meantime, though, I’m taking more videos of the way the breeze makes the perennials in the garden dance this time of year because they’re so spindly and tall, I’ve been staying up late to watch the Perseids in the backyard, I’m enjoying the birdsong without trying to figure out what kind of bird it is. Basically: I’m paying more attention and finding, in the process, that the exuberance I found about other places this summer is available all around me, here and now. 

Scattering Seeds

I’m always finding stuff that supports the thesis of the book I’m writing on the benefits of leaning into nature’s wisdom, as well as other things related to this newsletter’s topic that maybe didn’t fit into the actual newsletter, so I thought I could start sharing those links and things here with all of you in hopes of some of the seeds I share germinating into something beautiful at your place.

• Speaking of travel, Agnes Callard is in The New Yorker with “The Case Against Travel. I liked how her conclusion wasn’t necessarily to quit traveling, but to be more honest about what you’re actually doing instead of assigning morality to it. And I liked this snarky piece about your perfect vacation.

• I liked this bit of summering wisdom from Van Gogh via Mason Currey: “[I]n order to write a book, do a deed, paint a picture with some life in it, one has to be alive oneself.” If summer is for anything, it is for doing that which brings you more aliveness.

• In yin, all season, we’ve been digging deep into one practice: Metta or loving-kindness meditation. I’ve been teaching it this way for at least five summers now, and I’m always in need of the shot of compassion a full season of this practice gives me for myself and others. Metta is one of the most researched mindfulness practices, as well as one of the oldest Buddhist meditation techniques. After this summer, I’m thinking that I might need to only do Metta for my sitting practice come 2024. Practice for yourself.

Here’s to some more summering before the season’s done,

Sara

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1. I know the answer to this is mostly: we’re freaking exhausted.