Letting August In

It is as if the entire month of July everything is happening.

Summer is at long last true summer and there are lake days, “high days and holidays, and bonfire nights.”

It is as if in July there is only ever today. No looking back, no looking forward, only today. One ever-blooming day where everything and nothing is happening all at the same time.

There is only this moment, this one hot, glorious day where everything is alive and teeming, so full of life.

It is as if July is one beautiful day on a beach. One perfect, laughing, warm day. Your people are there, the best people. There is sand, endless miles of water, lapping and roaring and there is peace, but an excited peace, the kind of peace that comes with knowing this is the day you have been waiting for. And your skin, oh, your skin is warm. So warm. It makes you deliriously happy and deliriously contented.

And then August slips in, and its as if August is the setting of the sun on your one beautiful day of July. A cool breeze sweeps off the waters, and a thin light of twilight comes over you like a cool sheet at bedtime.

The brightness of day fades, sweaters are donned, but no shoes. Colors deepen, and slowly, the happy shadows, dancing, silhouetted against the sky, the water.

You are running the still warm sand with your people, and the bonfires are just being lit, and the sharp goodness of the smoke blows around you—when you pause—as if something has tapped you on the shoulder. Gently, softly, like a tug at the hand, it holds you back.

But when you turn and look there is only empty beach, the breeze, and one wisp of thin white line across the waters where the ocean and sky kiss.

It’s as if you suddenly remembered something you’d forgotten, but you’re not quite sure what it was.

But oh—then you do. And it makes you smile before you run away with summer once again.

August, the first gentle reminder of something that seemed so far away no one thought it existed any more.

The looking back month.

The remembering month.

The penny whistle notes lilting, haunting, music you’d once known but lost.

The wind is laced with something you thought you’d left far behind. Something you can feel, quiet and sweet, like the touch of seasons, drifting, playing, singing, whispering everywhere.

But it doesn’t make you sad, this knowing change tugging at you from the breeze, the end of the day.

It only ever makes this day with no yesterdays or tomorrows longer and more delicious.

This is how you let August in, let it slip in around the edges of the hot, dry days of goodness, and the cool, heavy nights of stars. For when you let August in with grace and the opening of hands, you learn what it means not to fear the tides that change and sweep by, that bring for a time something light and gracious, or something deep and foreboding.

When you let August in you are letting in the winds of a new season. A season that will hush and pull, blind and free us, change us.

The season will change regardless.

The days will change, unaware of our tight fists against fear, the unknown depths of tomorrow, and how it may hurt. And change is a hurt that is not to be reckoned with. Change is a hurt there is no cure for. Change is a cruel master.

Change is needed.

Because when there is no change—you would never know August. You would never know the last hurrah of summer on the other end of September.

You would never know the deep darkness of January, the rest of a snow laden earth.

You would never know the cold and what it teaches you of warmth. If you never knew cold, you would never know warmth.

If you never knew August, you would never know July. Or June. Or spring. Or October and the golden colors of autumn breaking out over prairie and forest.

If there was only ever July, there would be no love of it.

If you did not know the hurt of losing, you would not know the joy of having.

If we did not change, there would never be the bittersweet being of knowing better.

So we let August in, to change us, to rest us, to remind us, to let us let in change.

For change is a like a long, hard, painful tug that dulls over time, but pulls you to know things you hadn’t seen before.

Change is like the needed painting of a room. There’s a disheveled mess for a time, but then it is clean and new, and known anew.

Change is bloody fists in a fight—confused and pained. Change is an ever, on-going battle to stay the same and to be different.

Change is the seasons—showing us the lovely ways in which to graciously let go.

Change is wishing July to stay forever, that August would never come, and letting it come anyway.

Change is knowing things will and must change. Knowing the good will come, will be there in the opened hands, in the struggle, in the bloody fists, in the cold, in the hard and the unknown.

The goodness of August comes in the knowing that it will be, regardless. That it will come not to take away, but to give.

The goodness of August is letting August come anyway.