this sacred summer

Summers in the PNW still take me by surprise. We can have weeks of rain that never seem to let up, until fields are swimming and pockets of water appear on the roads. Those days look like fall, and curled up on the bench of a downtown café, I can already see the leaves begin their final descent through a water-soaked window.

Then, before we are even prepared (although we'd say that we are and we have all our summer clothes stacked up, just waiting), we wake up to find one side of the house drenched in sunlight, the air already hot and muggy. Out comes the sun, and doesn't leave for months. Lawns begin to dry up and the smell of berry fields sweltering in the heat fills the air. When we go out to pick the raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries that hang in clusters so tight you'd think they were grapes, the fruit is warm in our mouths.

During these heat spells, evenings make me catch my breath. Driving between cities, where green fields stretch out in front, and mountains all around, the sky goes from cobalt to the insides of an overripe apricot. On one night, washed in the faintest of watercolors and mountain peaks illuminated in the lightest pink, I grab my fiancé's hand and he twirls me around in an empty street to the accompaniment of a sleepy world. I am constantly left with a lump in my heart, my soul drawn to the beauty around me with a kind of longing.

I haven't been writing much recently, pulling out my words like a procedure. I'm not used to it feeling like stumbling, but I'm trying.

This summer has seen me sitting in the stiff blue seats of the ER. "Stroke symptoms", my doctor crisply said.  I've jumped from doctor to doctor, from nurse to nurse. Tests upon tests. Everything coming back clear, except my symptoms. How do you talk about pain that isn't supposed to be there?

Right now, the turntable seems stuck, the same line in a song playing over and over again. I've realized that it starts moving again when I sit down with the questions. With the pain. I pull up a chair, take it's shaking hand and ask,

What is your purpose here?

I still don't know the answer, but I know it's in the seeking. It's in the staying for the grit of it, the waiting. Here's a confession: I hate the in-betweens, the murky shadows of a hallway. Yet as I navigate their silence, the simplest of things come alive in my heart: the hazy outline of a mountain, or a sunbathed bookstore, and I am a mess of tears. I don't know all the ways God comforts and holds, but these I do.

I feel like I've been watching the world from a distance, wrapped in a daze. I get on a train and see the people standing all around me, but I refuse eye contact. A customer comes up to my counter at work and I see her, but I am okay with the distance between us. This lack of vulnerability, of a story. I want to say that I've been too tired, too fragmented to piece together a welcoming gesture. In truth, I know that wading through someone else's grief means being willing to walk through my own. There's a stubborn defiance as I relearn a handshake, a smile that doesn't betray my unsteady breathing. Still, my coworker calls after me one day and asks, are you okay?

I nod.

Finally one night, it takes my friend into the early hours of the morning to pry the words from my mouth. I hurt. She instantly grabs my hand and says, I hurt too. And isn't that the beauty of it all? Because as we sit in semi darkness and my voice begins to shake, we start to pray. To laugh. To talk. Healing places its hand on our hearts and as we speak, we begin to mend.

So, I am once again learning the sacredness of honest conversations. Of sitting together on a blanket covering the bare bones of a hardwood floor. I'm realizing that I don't have to be whole to give. I don't need all the right answers in order to set the table with good food and invite someone to share that space with me. I can grieve. I can be hurting. Because chances are, so are you.

This summer, we'll need each other.