Summer Journal: Heat

It has been hot. Really hot.

Fourth of July sparklers have faded into memory, their brief glow drowned beneath the weight of relentless heat. We hurl defiant sparks into a night as humid as chowder, then escape indoors, where air conditioning wages war against the thick, stifling air. Sweat beads on our skin. The atmosphere hangs—dense, still, and heavy in our lungs.

Winter feels like a fond, distant dream. In clinging T-shirts and with damp brows, we yearn for January’s sharp bite, the blank canvas of snow, the cold hush of the woods. Never satisfied: in winter, we ache for summer’s warmth; in summer’s grip, we long for snow’s cool mercy. Nothing is ever quite right.

This unease walks beside us through life. Hungry, we crave food—but at the dinner table, we count calories. Youth rushes forward while age looks back. We demand progress, then grieve its price. Contentment visits only briefly—like sunlight dappling through oak leaves, a shifting pattern gone before we can trace its edges. Joy flares quick as a struck match, leaving only smoke and cooling wood.

Beyond our restlessness, the world moves in perfect rhythm. The sun warms soil where seeds wait patiently. Rain falls. Shoots rise. Deer move like ghosts through morning valleys. Stars circle overhead. Galaxies spin. Cities pulse with countless heartbeats. From microscopic cell to distant nebula, everything flows—cause becoming effect, becoming cause again. Each moment blooms from all that came before.

To exist—to stand apart—is to suffer endless want. To consist—to stand together—is to join the sacred dance.

From the cold void between galaxies to the fiery hearts of stars, from the slow waltz of planets to the frenzied jitterbug of subatomic particles, reality unfolds. Life erupts in countless forms: patient lichen on stone, delicate orchids in air, humans with their grand dreams and petty fears. One breath leads to the next, like water flowing over river stones. Nothing truly begins or ends. A fallen maple feeds beetles and fungi, then nourishes saplings. Stars collapse into elements that build new stars. The air in your lungs was once mountain breeze, sea mist, maple leaf.

Instead of chasing what isn’t, witness what simply is—complete in its becoming.

Like a stream that never questions its course, reality unfolds at its own pace—perfect in each instant, seeking neither approval nor correction. Perfect because it simply is: beyond our notions of beginning or end, unblemished by concepts of this or that, good or bad. Perfectly complete in its endless becoming. Perfectly eternal in its fleeting transience. Perfect, because no other perfection could possibly exist.

One vast mind, luminous and eternal, endlessly thinking in countless forms—dreaming up mountains, butterflies, and blue whales. Trying on thunderstorms and desert silence.

And we, in our brief moment of awareness, stand inside this grand mystery. We suffer, yes, but in that suffering, we touch the infinite. Our discontent is the flame that illuminates understanding, the hunger that propels us toward meaning. Perhaps this, too, is part of the universe consisting—the whole experiencing itself through the exquisite pain and joy of its countless parts.

In the end, we are both the observer and the observed, the question and the answer, the seeker and the sought. And in those rare moments of clarity, when the veil of separation lifts, we glimpse the profound truth: there is no divide between the droplet and the ocean, between the spark and the cosmic fire.

We are the universe, conscious of itself, standing together, standing in awe, standing in rapture at poems being written in the language of atoms, songs being sung in the key of starlight.