spring: deleted, rewritten. summer: anticipated, feared. life: life.

Miri wrote about spring on her blog... including this: "I am not a summer person, and I have noticed the poignancy of spring in a new way this year - I do not look forward to loud stereos and too much sun."

I do like sun, and all the flesh it brings out for my visual delectation, but was initially inclined to say that I dislike spring.

So I spent over an hour writing a long blathering post in which I wrote - with increasing difficulty - about how I like summer but dislike spring. I had lists of bad things that had happened in spring, I quoted from Eliot's overquoted "Wasteland" (of course!)...

...but gradually I thought of more and more good things that had happened in spring, and began to feel that whenever it was that I decided that I like autumn, don't like spring, etc. - whenever those moments were, they were utterly arbitrary, meaningless, and dependent on how I felt that moment... but I decided to attach a lot of weight to that feeling, codify it as "my opinion," then carry it around with me... could walk around much lighter without.

(None of this is meant to disrespect or distort Miriam's words - I'm fairly sure that I've wandered far, far from their connotation if not their denotation - and certainly far from the openness of the mind of the writer as expressed in her post).

So instead, a few fresh and immediate thoughts about seasons right now.....

I love the wave upon wave of flowers that break across the country, across the region (from Chicago to Madison in twelve to eighteen days), and across the street (from the sunny side to the shady side in three to six days)... i suppose across the hemisphere as well... don't know anymore how long that takes. We are just past the last of now-fraying tulips; glorying in the first full burst of lilies-of-the-valley; and just glimpsing the earliest lilacs and irises.

For those who have spent much of their lives on the academic calendar, spring tends to bring mixed feelings of the end-of-semester craziness and anticipation of summer pleasures.

For me personally, this particular year, the mixed feelings are intense. I look forward to summer, and dread, utterly dread, the job search and the unstructured time.

There are many simple summer pleasures that I anticipate cheerfully. First of all, hanging out with Loopy. Summer is our time to enjoy each other, and this year, as we renew our communion, I am really looking forward to that a lot. It makes me happy already to see how those things that should always be hers - my attention, my thoughts, my check-in texts - all these things are hers again. Feels right, makes me happy... And soon we'll spend all our time together again, which we love to do... and this year we're focusing on healing our individual mental health and our health as a couple, so as long as that doesn't turn inward too much, I think that this could really be a very happy summer for us.

Other summer pleasures.

Watermelon. Peaches.

Summer blockbuster movies. Loving the thrill and the popcorn. Coming outside blinking in the blazing heat.

Planting new plants in my pots outside... futzing with said plants... training morning glories to grow over my fence.

Warmth, heat, walking around in a skanky lil sundress (need a new one - shopping!), sweat running down, dress sticking to me...

Having time to let myself enjoy little things that only i enjoy, like watching insects doing insect things...

...as i did this morning on my way out of the front gate - there was this amazing, gorgeous spider, whom I watched and examined, and just now identified online by her iridescent green mouthparts - she was a Bold Jumping Spider. maybe she should be my totem.

(Yes, I'm not just a nature geek but specifically an insect geek - check out this post all about a giant, six-foot weed that I couldn't bring myself to pull because, among other fascinating insect life, it featured an enormous colony of aphids being methodically destroyed by a few ladybugs.)

(Ok, so spiders aren't insects, but saying "insects and spiders" or "members of the Phylum Arthropoda" wouldn't flow as well in the writing).

But over all this looms a lot of fear about ... in short... not being able to handle unstructured time and the job search very well. about teaching again in the fall. about my life.

But here's a ray of hope.

This morning I woke up and went into my usual unstructured time mode. First I poked and prodded myself into misery. Then I moped anxiously about how I was depressed and not being productive. Finally I called dear Miri and cried freely. There is sadness in me and it's reasonable, it has reasons, many. It comes out.

But somewhere in there I forced myself to eat, and Loopy reminded me to take my pills.

And in spite of myself, I feel better. That last bit about Loopy and summer and insects, I wrote after the pills kicked in. You can tell, can't you. Well I know I can.

I'm still really terrified of how this summer will go. But I deleted a lot of anxious blather about that. Somehow, the movies and spiders and morning glories now seem to dominate the fears as easily as the fears dominated the strawberries a few hours ago.

Maybe we're getting close to the right combo of meds. Maybe, finally? this year will be different. Is it too un-Buddhist of me to hope that it will?