Holding On and Letting Go

A transitional practice

I’m sitting at my desk for the first time after weeks upon weeks of summer holidays. Windows still open, the yellowing light illuminating what now feels more like a drop zone than a workspace. Breathing out, I survey the scene of seasonal talismans I’ve accumulated the last few months — bright beachside faces smile from already fading polaroids, zoo trip animal drawings, whelks and cowries, seabird feathers, dogeared poetry collections… sand. So much sand, its grains have found their way into all the crevices of my home and mind.

What’s filled your interior and exterior spaces this season?

The stack of reference books that elevate my laptop to eye level remain neatly aligned albeit crownless and I realize I must go find the device, likely to be sofa-side or shoved under the bed, shelved sideways alongside food-splattered cookbooks — the places I’ve balanced it on my lap and written in haste to the soundtrack of Octonauts and endless asks for snacks.

It’s the first day of school but I’m not thinking about emails or to dos.

I never feel particularly functional on the outer edge of summer. Do you? The work of constructing an entirely new rhythm is daunting after weeks spent unwinding rigidity and structure. It felt counterintuitive, unfair even, to put uniforms on my 7 and 9 year olds on one of the hottest days of the year, to tame their octopus limbs and usher them back inside, into routine. And yet that’s exactly what I did, holding their small hands a little too tightly on the walk to their new classrooms on the kind of morning when the sea disappears into the sky, blurring the horizon.

Where exactly does the season go?

The popsicles and tan lines, bare feet on barnacled rocks and sprinkler squeals of delight, spacious days and nights of tangled legs over kicked off sheets… the loose, feral energy of summer. Does it simply evaporate into the ever earlier sunsets? Are we absorbing it into our cells? Has it fortified our connective tissues?

I look closer and summer winks right back at me. I see it in my kids’ now longer legs and beach blond hair. Freckles cresting nose bridges. My shoulders, fully descended. Ease.

(Read on for your summer cento practice.)