Welcoming Summer
The contrast is what brings the gratitude
The life of summer in northern Michigan as a local is something of utter beauty, challenge, and gift. To understand the word abundance is to understand a summer on the Northwest coast of Michigan along the sparkling clear fresh waters of the big and small waterways that twine together through the rivers above and below the sandy and mineral-laden soils here.
On solstice in the north, the sun lights our life nearly endlessly with only a short period in the night when it is truly dark, which this year aligns where that won’t be possible as the moon will be full when the sun takes its rest. This day is one of gratitude and pain. As we know in the north Summer solstice marks the slow descent to the shortest day. It is a time to remember the gifts of growth from spring that came with the challenges, aches, and longing that wash into the abundance as we dive under the cool waters we call home. The soil that covers our skin from the work in the shifting heat of the seasons once covered us floats off into the ripples of the gentle lapping waves of the cool water we know as home.
It is easy to romanticize life in the summer here. Something I do because I feel that about it; utter romance. I feel love. I feel longing. I ache for the ways and rhythms of the seasons as anyone would ache for their lover. I feel the calling of it, which may be why I keep my hands nearest the earth and my days now find me switchbacking down dirt roads to wooded lake shores to talk about maintaining the magic of a place I love with every inch of my being. I am certain in fact this is why I work with the soil now because I know the preciousness of this place that if I cannot own it all to protect it I can work with others to do just that in their own way.
Though I can over-romanticize the beauty of this place, I also know that with any great love, there are challenges, sacrifices, and ebbs and flows. If anything these days here have taught me more about love and its depths than anything else has. The love I have for the shoreline, sandy soil, forests, and lakes that welcome me most in the height of the coming months and the golden hours of summer has taught me that love doesn’t come conditionally at all just because of how it looks on the perfect day in July. Instead, it is knowing the beauty it has through every season even when harsh and hard to love. The pain these landscapes can instill in winter feels jolting and like something to run from, but the patience I have learned to wait for them to shift into the one where they hold me and cleanse away the harshness of a season such as these warming summers will once again come so I have learned how to sit with her. I also know that to live here year-round is a constant challenge. The rising costs of land. The shifting demographics and costs of living this life are not lost on me. The way the gray will hang in the winter is like a blanket we cannot emerge from. The biting winds that keep me away from the very thing I love; the woods and the lake aren’t easy to embrace. Yet, what they have taught me is that to love something means we must accept the imperfections as much as the beauty.
The shifting seasons have taught me that life isn’t meant to be lived in the mild. A life that creates a story worth reading is one where we edge towards the hard and the undeniably beautiful moments. Summer is the culmination of what it is to live in that exact thing. The contrasts exist in every corner you turn. The land is hot and then lands into the crisp waters of the freshwater that gurgle from springs deep in the earth. Fresh and clean like gold emerging all around us.
Living on the windswept shores of the Leelanau and the northwest coast of the mitten of Michigan has been my greatest teacher on how to live a good life. To be in the harshest moments and the good that will always come on the other side have remained a constant in my ability to endure the shifting tides of life in all their complexity. How there will be winters that shake us to our cores and summers that follow that bring more than we can ever fathom in beauty.
It is far easier to live in a place where you never fully experience the darkness of winter and the brightness of summer. It is easy to sweep ourselves into a world where we live in the 5-7 comfortable level in life. Never digging too far on either side, but I have learned from life here that life is best lived in the fullness from 1-10 on the comfort scale. Feeling it all. For how would I ever find the magic of summer without the harshness of winter? How would I ever know the gift of the cool lake without the sweat of a hot day in the fields? How would I ever find the diamond glitter on the snow magic without the intense cold and gray for days in winter? How would I find joy in summer rain without the brutal dry heat of summer? Contrast is necessary in life for us to gain perspective, gratitude, and wonderment in the magic of living.
Sitting here after some very warm days and the cool rain falls on the garden, I feel that once again as summer rises in front of me there is a gift amongst the contrast. I feel that abundance is rising all around me as I feel gratitude for another summer where everything will grow in me, my kids, my garden, and in life at a rate I won’t fathom fully but one day will have a gauge to contrast the growth against. It gives me comfort to feel every emotion. Every single thing whether I want to or not. Summer is our moment to learn just how to be present in life as we navigate periods of abundance in life. It is a time to feel the beauty and challenge of the amount of it all while feeling immense gratitude that we can say those two things. The complications and cross-sections of it all.
This is the beginning of another season of feeling the ache, the burn, the abundance, the growth, and the gift of being alive breathing in this summer air. Rising to the sky like the plants do overnight in the silence of the star and moon fill the brief darkness of summer.
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Nothing could ever be more true, without experiencing the lows we can never truly appreciate the highs. I am looking forward to dipping into the river as often as possible this summer!
Thank you again for your writing Megan, it really is like medicine.