The Weight of Light

Summer - Week 24 - On the Longest Day and Being Enough

In Her Nature is a year long exploration into the healing power of the natural world. Season by season, setting out to awaken the spirit, and rekindle joy. The weekly journal of a neighborhood, its plants and birds and creatures — and how they are helping repair a heart and rebirth a soul

I've spent most of spring writing and editing my garden, moving sentences of sage and paragraphs of peonies, crossing out the experimental plantings that never quite worked and adding commas of cosmos where the rhythm felt off. Now, on the eve of solstice, I find myself standing in what feels like a finished draft. Not perfect, but complete enough to exhale.

The earth seems to be doing the same thing. After months of urgent revision, of shoots pushing through soil with the determination of a writer racing toward deadline, everything has settled into its intended form. The roses have opened their full-throated declaration. The delphinium stands proud as an exclamation point against the fence. Even the herbs, those humble workhorses of the garden, have grown confident in their purpose. The rosemary standing tall and resinous, the dill feathering out in delicate yellow umbels, their scents released with each brush of my hand.

This is midsummer's gift, not just the longest day, but this moment when the year takes its deepest breath. The frantic energy of becoming has given way to the satisfaction of being. Spring's rough draft has become summer's clear voice.

But even as I walk through this crowning moment, I feel the weight of it settling on my shoulders like the Colorado heat that has returned with record-breaking force this week. Summer arriving right on schedule, as if the earth itself were keeping time with the universe's own heartbeat. The weight isn't unwelcome. It's more like the feeling of holding something precious that you know you can't keep forever.

All week, herons have been crossing my path - over the garden at dawn, above the Left Hand Creek as I rode my horse at midday, silhouetted against the evening sky on an evening walk. Their prehistoric grace catching the light as they navigate between earth and sky.

There's something about their flight that speaks to this moment. The way they carry themselves with such deliberate purpose, unhurried despite their size, as if they understand something about the value of moving with intention rather than speed. They seem to know what this moment whispers: that the peak of anything contains within it the knowledge of its own passing.

The longest day is also the first day of return. Even as the sun reaches its highest point, casting the shortest shadows, the earth has already begun its slow lean away from the light. It's a paradox that makes my chest tighten. How the moment of greatest abundance is also the moment we begin, imperceptibly, to let go.

Perhaps this is why the heat feels different this year, more insistent, more final. The temperatures climbing into triple digits feel like a kind of punctuation mark, summer underlining its arrival with bold strokes. The garden, which has been building toward this moment for months, now must learn to endure what it has created. The delicate balance of growth and sustenance shifts toward the harder work of survival.

In Colorado, we understand survival in seasons. Winter asks us to endure the absence, of warmth, of growth, of light. But summer asks something different: to survive the abundance, to withstand the very thing we've been waiting for. The growing season here is so brief, pressed between frost dates like a held moment, that even midsummer carries the urgency of borrowed time.

I think of the herons again, their wings spanning the space between seasons, and wonder if they see what I cannot - the way this moment contains all the others. Past and future, the way the garden's fullness holds both the memory of bare winter soil and the promise of autumn's harvest. They fly with the wisdom of creatures who have witnessed many summers, who understand that the weight of light is not a burden but a gift.

Standing here in the evening garden, feeling the day's heat still radiating from the stones, I realize that writing and gardening are more alike than I ever imagined. Both require patience with the process of becoming, both demand faith in the invisible work happening beneath the surface. And both teach us that the moment of completion is never really complete. There's always another season, another draft, another chance to begin again.

The herons have disappeared now, but their flight remains imprinted on the air. Silent messengers, a reminder that some things are meant to be witnessed rather than held. The garden exhales around me, releasing the day's heat and light, and I feel myself exhaling too, letting go of the need to capture this moment and simply allowing myself to be present within it.

The earth has reached its fullest expression, and now it begins the slow, graceful work of transformation. The weight of light is the weight of time itself, precious because it is passing, beautiful because it cannot be held.

It occurs to me how light carries memory. How this evening's golden hour holds within it every sunset that came before, every dawn that stretched the darkness thin. The same light that coaxed the first green shoots from March soil now bathes the garden in amber abundance. It has been companion and catalyst, the steady presence that transforms seed into bloom, bud into fruit. Now, at its height, the light seems almost solid, something you could reach out and touch, warm and thick as honey.

But even as I stand here wrapped in its warmth, I know tomorrow's light will be different - a degree cooler, a moment briefer. The light that seems limitless now will begin to show its edges, will become something precious in its boundaries.

This is what the herons know, what the garden whispers: that abundance is not about having forever, but about being fully present in the time we're given.

Tonight, in this quiet pause between the longest day and the slow return, I stand witness to the garden's ancient conversation with time itself. And I catch a glimpse of what it might feel like to simply be enough.

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—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let's experience nature's gifts together.

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane