These early summer days write white, passing slowly and softly and sweetly, like my favorite lines in "Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle": The bites are fewer now./Each one is savored
lingeringly,/Swallowed reluctantly. Some days it worries me, how well things seem to be going, how happily I seem to be spending most of my days, as though the universe might notice and take it all away again. Some days I think that being superstitious is really just common sense.
In college someone gave my a copy of Annie Dillard's The Writing Life, which I read dutifully even though I have only ever been a girl who wanted to read books instead of writing them. In it, she advises the reader not to save ideas for later stories. She says, "The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
I find this to be equally true about happiness.
Maybe this is just how summer goes, all new each time, but I have so many adventures planned, weekend trips and parties, dinners to cook and ice cream to make, dance parties to have. My instinct is to keep this all cupped safe in my palms, to store it up like a squirrel in the fall, but that would be a waste of all of this. I'm not sure yet how best to find the words for all of these sunbursts, but then I guess that's just one more thing to look forward to.
In college someone gave my a copy of Annie Dillard's The Writing Life, which I read dutifully even though I have only ever been a girl who wanted to read books instead of writing them. In it, she advises the reader not to save ideas for later stories. She says, "The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
I find this to be equally true about happiness.
Maybe this is just how summer goes, all new each time, but I have so many adventures planned, weekend trips and parties, dinners to cook and ice cream to make, dance parties to have. My instinct is to keep this all cupped safe in my palms, to store it up like a squirrel in the fall, but that would be a waste of all of this. I'm not sure yet how best to find the words for all of these sunbursts, but then I guess that's just one more thing to look forward to.
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