Dog Days

It happens every summer. Just about the time my squash plants begin to wither up and die, succumbing at last to the insidious squash vine borers that I’ve been fighting since early June, something begins to wither inside of me. I pull out my little sleeveless smoked-yoke dress which is the coolest thing I own, I crank the air conditioning down to an unlawful 74, and, thumbing my nose at the mosquitoes outside, I officially enter survival mode. And there I remain, digging in my heels as it were, until that magical day when I turn the calendar page to September and everything begins to freshen up inside of me again. (Don’t ask me why this is; September in Georgia can be hotter than August. But September is always the beginning of everything, you know, even things that go along the same way, day in and day out…)

Thus ends my yearly love affair with summer. In May I am up to my ears in roses and in June I am giddy over the long hours of daylight and the fireflies and all the pretty clothes the season affords, but by this time in the year I am done. My forays into the garden are furtive, covert affairs, wherein I delight in outwitting the bugs that are laying in wait for me. And my poor garden itself, alas! is under a dictum of ‘survival of the fittest’ which means, quite plainly, ‘those that don’t require water will survive’, a condition which will remain in effect until Labor Day when all those bedraggled things will get pulled up and replaced with cool season crops. Ah, the very thought is like a tonic!

All of the ‘barn babies’ seem to be of the same frame of mind. The goats and the sheep venture into the pasture in the early morning and the early evening, and much of the rest of the time, if you chanced to stop by, you’d likely find them hanging out with the dogs and the cats and the chickens in the cool shelter of the barn. (I wish you could have seen the gay procession out to pasture this morning: Puck and Pansy leading the way with long Nubian ears flying as they pranced, fleecy white lambs ambling daintily along the track they’ve already worn on their perfect little black hooves, the two Pyrs, Juno and Diana watchful on either side and black kittens scampering behind. I think if I’d let the chickens out of their run they’d have fallen in line, as well!)

Caspian thinks that Dog Days mean that spoiled little indoor doggies get to just flop around on the cool wooden floors all day and have occasional ice cream treats (any of you dog lovers heard of Frosty Paws?) and popsicles (don’t tell him they are only ice cubes) and that a day’s work can be summed up in giving the mad rooster a quick run for his money around the yard. Yes, even daily walks have fallen by the wayside, and won’t be resumed till…you guessed it: September.

But as much as I anticipate this yearly doldrums—as much as I even look forward to it in a way as a fallow pause between the bright industry of the spring and the jam-packed poignancy of the autumn—I am always surprised by one aspect of it. I make such high writing goals for these languid months, calculating on the long, quiet afternoons and self-imposed borders within which words will spring up like obedient little flowers in a well-watered garden. The trouble is, and I’ve seen it perhaps more this year than others, the garden isn’t well-watered at all. In fact, it’s quite miserably parched. It makes my vegetable plot outside look like a verdant pleasure ground. The wells of creativity that I’ve been counting on are dry from little rain and choked with the debris of rushing about and hurry and frantic ‘doing’. For, much as we would all like to convince ourselves otherwise, inspiration is not an effortless flash that seizes us in a frenzy of output: words or music upon paper, brush and oil upon canvas, a delicate arrangement of hues in a garden. It is the result of quiet commitment to a passion that life would be colorless without, a daily and disciplined reckoning with what is important to us and what God has put within us.

I stand corrected before Him this summer as I’ve sat hour after hour before a blank computer screen. Replenishing is a slow and often painful process and it absolutely cannot be forced, a concept so utterly foreign in this ‘hurry up and do it yesterday’ culture of ours. We don’t like to have to wait for anything, whether it’s a meal or a line in the grocery store or a word beneath our itching fingers, poised on a breath above a keyboard. But the fact of the matter is that writing, as any other creative expression, is a process that requires nurturing outside of that time seated at our desks. There is a gentle reproof for artists in the words: Neglect not the gift that is in thee…

And we are all artists, of course. Every single one of us has our unique abilities and our unique way of looking at life, which are gifts of the Almighty and not to be disdained. This life is where we see God, and we see Him in two ways: In the merciful and mighty acts of His own creation, whether it be a violet and crimson sunset or a bird’s wing painted to perfection or the tender miracle of incarnate Love which He pours into our hearts and upon our circumstances. And we see Him revealed in the creative acts of His people. (Of course, there is the whole tangent here that He can reveal Himself just as well in the creative acts of those who are not His people, granting glimpses of eternal verities the artists themselves may be quite unaware of, but that would go into the whole discussion of what is creative and what is destructive, and, frankly, I’m just not up to that right now—I’m in a slough, remember? ) We all have to give an account of what we do with our talents. Or if talent sounds too pretentious, our affinities, which are really just divine endowments often muffled under a blanket of reticence or timidity or fear of making a fool of ourselves. I don’t call myself a writer because I think I am a good writer but because I absolutely must write. Because the created longs to lift a tribute to the Creator.

But when you’re walking through the mud and mire of writer’s block—or any other artistic mire—it never hurts to know that there are others out there that have experienced the same thing and that it’s a normal part of the creative journey we’re all on. And if it helps anyone else to hear of some of the means I’ve discovered of coping and hopefully growing through these arid seasons, then I’d be only too happy to share them in a later post.

But for now I have a frittata to put in the oven—you see, I did dash out and gather some vegetables and herbs from the garden, and the hens provided the rest—and then it’s down to the barn to tuck the babies all into their stalls for the night. It’s my favorite time of the day, the sun going down at last in a softened haze of pale gold and the breath of relief in the (somewhat) cooling air a promise of the regeneration to come.

For it will always come. We have our Father’s word on it…

I will turn the desert into pools of water, and the parched ground into springs...(Isaiah 41:18)