Summer starts in August.
Temperatures swell to the 100s.
Kali Ma, the canine goddess who deeply dreams on the couch until 10am, now must adjust to a new walk schedule. Her options include a morning walk or a tail-wagging saunter later in the evening, on a bleeding, sweltering edge of a darkness that still conjures beads of perspiration to form on elbow creases.
She chooses the morning. She swiftly and eagerly adapts to this alternative routine.
I still choose the early morning. My work schedule from the past few months has trained me to wake at 6am, and now I do without an alarm. I’m keeping in tune with a schedule that no longer exists. Unlike Kali Ma, I struggle to shift into a rhythm that is my self-proclaimed “summer break.”
The sudden spaciousness unsettles me.
So I take my uneasiness and coffee out to the front porch and sit with Kali Ma after her walk. She is perky, alert, reigning over a garden whose lush green has evaporated into scalded yellows and crisp browns.
“It’s like walking into an oven,” my earth-whispering roommate declares and up she weaves through the garden to the clucking chickens. Even the chickens have a new morning routine. They are anticipating their extra-hydration treat of cucumbers to ease their sweaty feathers during this baking heat.
The hot tub air simmers my thoughts, mirroring the intensity of my emotions that sting and surprisingly spill when caring and polite people ask me if I am doing all right.
The tears interrupt my sing-along to Chance the Rapper’s “Work Out.”
The tears stream when I resurface from my bedroom to the soft concern of my roommate who soothes, “You’ve been lucky. Not everyone feels that way – ever – about the work that they do.”
The tears hint around the corners of my eyes when I am back at the theater and a performer kindly asks about the summer camp. And she reads the emotion before I can explain the swampy melancholy.
My heart instantly discerns the source of this sadness, a parting gift of love.
I sway in this late summer ache. She accompanies Kali Ma and me to the garden for morning coffee. She settles close beside me on the rocking chair and tells me what I now can bravely claim as truth: working with children in the creative arts shines as my joy, as my ignited purpose.
I grieve the end of a work that granted me the opportunity to teach and collaborate in coordinating a kids’ improv camp, and the work is THE WORK that energizes – even and perhaps especially, in its challenges – and integrates creativity with the soul-service of empowering youth.
I cry, simply, because it’s over. A clear-cut end. An ending I saw coming and still I swerve in emotion.
And I live in the in between space where sadness honors what-was and speaks to what-will-be.
There is buoyant relief, a heart-deep sigh and a freeing of energy to catalyze the next step, and all in aligned timing.
I glance around at the garden and revisit a memory from early spring. I contemplate my summer plans with my intuition leading the discussion and realize that I need to change course, I need to backpedal on commitments while I still can without consequence and go to work this summer at my home improv theater, with a vivacious and talented creative from whom I will learn interactive storytelling and imaginative play.
And I do. And now I am here at the end of that intuited decision in a sadness that glimmers in joy and ushers in a peace that lets me surrender to trust, and to this breath, and to this summer break of my own making in August.