late june

The rain and the clouds and the cool have melted away, and at last late June has come, as late June is meant to come, a time of rolling days and enveloping nights, a time of evenings, evenings with skies of a soft taffy beauty like no other time in the year, each like no other before and no other again. Warm. Comfortable. Immortal. Fleeting.

I walked down streets this evening whose trees, houses, and lamp-posts raised me. I walked past human beings who I had never seen before and would probably never see again, whose houses I had passed hundreds, maybe thousands of times. I saw familiar cracks in the pavement.

Tangibly, luxuriously, the tight rigidity of Michigan ice and office AC and books and plans and fears and concentration softened, melted, and fell like warm sweat out of every pore, vanishing into the close atmosphere. Jungle sounds, cinematic, out-of-place, emerged from the darkening edges of my path.

Liturgy, ritual, is a framework for humanity, a coming-back in order to see ourselves and our lives in perspective. It connects us to one another and to our own past. It humanizes us. The trees were a little taller, really they were. The perfect little house on the corner with its lovely swimming pool still made me sad somehow, as it stood serene in the sinking light. I felt the changes of my past year, at last, in a calmer way. I saw them, as if I had discovered a photograph of a statue before I had chipped away at it, and could at last compare what had been to what was. More than seeing clearly what changes had been made, I saw all that was still the same. I breathed. The air was sweet with flowers.