My Heart Belongs to Summer

“There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.” Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes

My grief is palpable. All summer I planned a singular week by the sea – one week in which to process the vast changes my life has wrought these past few months – one week in which to reacquaint myself with my family – one week in which to actually rest.

It is not enough, I know. It is not even minimal. But it is what we can afford, given our status as small business owners over the last two years. So we took it.

Now it is over. With it, the summer is over. The pain empties my bones.

Each year it is like this. We pull away from the beach house that was home for all of seven days and six nights and I want to leap from our loaded SUV and plaster myself on the deck – daring the next family to invade its perimeter. It is a bitter end to a beautiful time that never ripened – never fulfilled it’s potential as the vacation that changed me.

I’m not an easy vacationer. I abide in stress, not because I like it but because I cannot seem to help myself. Vacation has been known to cause more stress for me than my normal anxiety-saturated life. I regret this. It isn’t by choice, I assure you; it is from well-worn patterns of dealing with expectations – or some such thing my therapist said as she gave me a prescription for Xanax.

Let’s just say I’m an anxious person and leave it at that.

But I’m also a terribly sensitive person. Not a lot of folks know this about me. I appear to have it all together. But given a moment to pause and take in all the goings-on around me, I find that my heart cannot hold it all and I fairly faint under the weight of emotions. There is love, yes, but there is also pain and joy and pride and sorrow and longing and gratitude…. The multitude of feelings leaves me overwhelmed, billowing in tears and confusion. You understand why I don’t oft pause for reflection. I would get nothing accomplished, slurping through a sentimental bog.

I gave myself all I could afford: a solitary week to process it – a week with nothing much to do but sit before an ocean and stare at it. Sure we ate and went places, but there was no schedule – no expectations to fall short of, nothing to miscommunicate, no competition whatsoever. All that was demanded of me was my presence and being present in return.

Here’s what happened: I broke out in whelps all over my body because of an allergic reaction to grass. I was stoned on Benedryl for three days. After the whelps, came the sinus infection. I’m still on antibiotics. Oh, and it rained nearly every day. We planned our beach time by the hourly weather map. The ocean was too rough for me whilst stoned on Benedryl, and the breezy temperature was too cool to float in our pool.

It was the best vacation I ever had.

Why? I met the expectation. I offered my presence and was present in return. Nothing else mattered.

But I needed more time to deal with the emotions of the last year. When I got home, I wandered though the rooms wondering where the ocean had gone. I needed to empty my tears into it once again. I needed the salt air to carry away the chaff and leave the nourisment. I longed for the water to saturate my fears and carry them to its depths where the monsters live. I needed to hear my family laugh and squeal and dance in the sand, where the ghost crabs wink and run, and the grains stick to you without shame.

But summer is over and I’ve not had the space or the time or the place to grieve my time in the sun. I cried in each breath to be changed by a season that is taking its exit without me.

My first obligation upon my return was to go to church to fulfill my duties as a Vestry member. I chose to be late to worship as a passive-aggressive smack at God and God’s people who expect too much of me. Lashing out felt good.

Just before the bread is broken during Eucharist, we recite the Lord’s Prayer in unison. I began the prayer, as I have ever since I memorized it at six, but this time my eyes wandered to Kyle in the front pew. Kyle has a brain injury. He’s in his sixties, I’m sure, and still has memories of a life once lived with purpose – a family, a house, a successful career. One day, a car accident took all that away. He now lives in a home with other adults, who like him, cannot care for themselves. Kyle is also blind and has a crippling limp. He was praying the same prayer that I was praying, but unlike me, his eyes were fiercely shut, his head bowed in reverence, and his face in utter concentration. Tears spilled out of my eyes and over my face.

The truth of it is – every person in that church that morning welcomed me with unbearably loving, kind, and tender faces. I couldn’t bring myself to look upon them. From Julie and Jack at the door, to Rev. Sue giving a sermon about the Kingdom of God, to Marcia who offered me the cup, to Lane passing the peace – I was included. It didn’t matter that I didn’t want to be included. I belonged all the same. I burned with shame of it.

After the service I excused myself to bury my feelings in the bathroom. They bubbled too close to the surface. I had paused a moment too long and was entirely overcome by the waves of emotion. The water from the faucet helped me clear away the distractions in which I was floudering so I could run a meeting, offer advice, and generally fulfill my duties to the church. It was all I could do not to run home and hide.

You see, I had caught a rare glimpse of something I didn’t expect to find upon my return. I stood in a space that demanded nothing of me but my presence and being present in return. I had a clear vision that maybe – sometimes – these places can exist apart from the ocean, apart from beach houses, apart from permissions or rules or judgment.

If this is true, then I can afford more than a week. I can begin to change now. I can heal now. I can release my fear and anxiety and anger and stress now. And I can let it overwhelm me until I’m strong enough to hold it all together and call it my life.

I have always loved my church – but I never expected in a million years that it could be such a place. And yet it was. I’ll bet no one even knew they were creating a sanctuary that morning – except the one who needed it.

There must be other places like this – fissions in the walls of our own making, clefts where we can find refuge, where others feel included too. I don’t think it’s necessarily attached to religion, but I do think it’s attached to a sense of belonging. I must find these places. I must. For if my heart breaks from grieving a summer gone, how can I possibly carry the desolation of not belonging anywhere or to anyone?

At the end of A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge declares, “I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.” Not I. My heart belongs to summer. And because I belong to it, I will honor the warm winds, the thunderous nights, the sound of cicadas reverberating through the oaks. I will honor the ocean – the chaos and the serenity that lies within it. I will honor the sun, the light, the heat, and the burning. I will honor places where we belong and become present. And I will try to create a culture of belonging all the year and in all places and with all people, for as long as I possibly can.