It’s a perfect early summer morning here. Lush and green and pink with roses, rich with birdsong and sunlit through the maples.  It feels like every summer morning of my early life, growing up in a small town in South Jersey or early days in Philadelphia.  Humidity has its gifts, especially in the morning before the heat comes on.  The grass is wet and fragrant, and everything green glows with plumpness. Just now, hanging some jeans on the line (that I can be sure will take all day to dry in this ninety-two percent humidity), I was struck by this full sensory beauty.  I’m relishing it, the morning’s coolness, the windows open, the shifting shadows of leaves on the screens and the brick wall of the house next door.

Being here for this brief week just before and after the Solstice is nourishing in its way.  June has special resonance for me as it’s the month of my birthday and my mother’s birthday, Father’s Day and my sister’s wedding anniversary.  It seems that it’s always had a lot in it, the end of school and the start of summer vacations in childhood.  I’ve been aware recently how certain times of the year, this month for example, hold a special resonance for me, for most people, I would think.  There are the obvious ones like Christmas or Thanksgiving, Memorial Day or the 4th of July.  But then there are the less public times, those that live in the synesthesia of memory where smell, sounds, light and body sensations merge into a deep energetic response familiar only to the particular body that is perceiving it.

There’s a haunting almost deja vu quality to this for me; it’s like the sensation before a sneeze, a sort of subtle body orgasm of perception.  It’s like the wave of memory just before it breaks into whiteness and recognition.  A tantric resting in the quivering is-ness of the moment without the release of realization, expression, limitation.  It’s the way a dog lifts her nose, eyes slitted into the light, huffing in with deep satisfaction the full body gratification of Being.

June.  Just her name is a song to me.  I knew a girl once whose name was June Rose, and that was always a kind of music to me, rich with luscious dewy optimism.  Wet grass against my legs.  Sun on my head.  Beetles in the blossoms, bottled milk in the box by the fence.  Everyone and everything alive in the wafting light of her lengthening days.

Open your window.  Take a deep breath.  There? Do you feel it?