I should leave it at that

As I head out the door this morning I pass by the hall closet and grab a jacket off its hanger. Finally, a cool summer morning. It feels good, right even, to this Pacific Northwest native son. As Timothy Egan writes in The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest:

From June till September, nearly every day is perfect, with the 10,778-foot volcano of Mount Baker rising from the tumble of the Cascades to the west, blue herons and bald eagles crowding the skies, killer whales breaching offshore. The water is exceptionally clear, the result of a twice-daily shift-change in tide, when it sweeps north toward the Strait of Georgia, then back south toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca. In some places, the rip tides create white water like rapids on a foaming river. Being is bliss.

Being is bliss. Making time to be present for that awareness, though, is not always easy. It takes effort to pull back from (as Walt Whitman calls it) "...the procreant urge of the world."

There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
     - Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself (1892 version)

I love Whitman for many things. Chief among them are his ability to distill, in his writing, the act of being present, and his ability to be wholly and apologetically comfortable with himself.

Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,
Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.
     - Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself (1892 version)

When summer cools down for a few days, like it is doing here now, I find it so soothing. As if I was suddenly aware of something that had been bothering me, but only through the awareness of its sudden absence.

Yet have I drawn a lesson from the spot,
And shrined it in these verses for my heart.
Thenceforth those tranquil precincts I have sought
Not less, and in all shades of various moods;
But always shun to desecrate the spot
By weak repinings, sickly sentiments,
Or inconclusive sorrows.
     - Henry Timrod, from The Summer Bower

So I'll leave it at that.


Today's Commute Playlist:

• Sherlock Holmes (audiobook read by Stephen Fry)