August 2021 - New England Summer

Many complaints have been made against the hot and muggy southern summers, but I have always loved them. There's a calm and stillness in the humid air that is not as unpleasant as it's made out to be, and provides a lovely contrast to three other seasons who's scents and breezes are filled with eagerness and expectancy and energy. So I really do love a southern summer, I love the tall iron weed and the garden's abundance and the few, brief months in which there are leaves on the black walnut trees.  But this summer I experienced what I have not seen for many years, a New England summer, and it was spectacular.

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Great is the sun, and wide he goes /Through empty heaven with repose; 
And in the blue and glowing days /More thick than rain he showers his rays. 

 - Robert Lewis Stevenson, The Summer Sun

A few quiet corners of New England beach and bike path became my Thoughtful Spot this August. The colors struck me the most,  just the endless, shimmering shades of blue would  be enough to instill wonder, but then there is the neon pink of the beach plum flowers and the dusky red of their fruit against deep, green leaves and many-hued pebbles and fallow sand and suddenly this seaside world is a vibrant, exuberant tumult of of perfectly clashing colors.

My grandmother and I went shelling at my New England Thoughtful Spot. This odd promontory of land that wraps around a little harbor has provided us with many treasures in years past, and today it turned up the rarest find yet, a tiny shard of tumbled blue beach glass.  The tide nearly trapped us on a cluster of rocks between the beach and the path - isn't it marvelous to watch the tide come in?  It seems as though you can see each wave inching just the slightest bit closer, ever so slowly, but if you stop watching for only a moment, the beach is suddenly, all at once, several feet narrower that it was before, as though the waves are playfully teasing you, and creeping up while you aren't looking.

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In small proportions we just beauties see;
And in short measures life may perfect be.

 - Ben Johnson, The Noble Nature

There's a wonderful feeling of smallness that only the ocean can inspire. I stood at the top of the seawall, staring first down at a gentle surf collapsing against stones and dissolving into clouds of raindrops below me, then out to the indiscernible  horizon  It is impossible not to think that every worry or trouble is somehow less significant, for if I, in all my vastness and power respond in an instant to His word, the ocean seems to say, how can your cares be too great?