Summer is Coming
Written in the garden June 1, 2021 with revisions today. How do we spend summer so that we have something bountiful come fall?
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Madness at the MET
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If it’s true that we create our own reality, I'm not sure where the seed was sown that led to me ending up in a pile of dirt on the Metropolitan Opera stage. The evening of magic had occurred the previous week when I went on for Diana Damrau in La Fille du Regiment
If you’ve been with me from the start, THANK YOU! I’m excited to start sharing poems and other short stories as the summer progresses. I’m glad you’re here. Stick around for more stories from the opera stage very soon. Leah
Ah, summer. It can be my favorite time of the year, or very quickly, once the flowers have shown me they are ready for showtime, a frustrated tangle of thorns. I don’t settle and watch things grow very well. I move from thing to thing, screaming for it to be ready, ripe, and presentable. I start feeling the urgency for it to end.
There's just so much ambiguity and free time in summer. It's hard for me to know what to do, what to allow, what to accomplish, and what to say yes to. With other humans and life responsibilities involved, it’s just a constant juggle of time, and it's so easy to give it away and find fall arriving with nothing to show for the long days and ample sunlight.
Now that Covid is waning and things are opening back up, I have this nagging sense of overwhelm.
I’m being brought out of the cocoon, and it’s just a little too bright.
We went to the lake this past weekend. It was gorgeous—Lake Burton in the north GA mountains. Serene, opulent, and dream-worthy on every level.
But I was exhausted most of the time. The constant chatter, the cooking, the cleaning, the being, the accommodating, the living with others. When you are an introvert, it can really wipe you out.
Oh, I enjoy these times. However, after nearly two years of not being on the opera performance road, I am very aware that I deeply long for my own time.
I want my summer to feel like those gigs in Spain, Italy, and France. During those times when I worked, I had just as much alone and free time to ponder, read, walk, and not hurry. It’s hard to do that here at home.
Why?
Every single waking moment here at home in the United States involves some sort of work. I'm either cleaning the house, answering emails, learning something new for business, teaching lessons, changing my branding and website info, making calls, or keeping up on social media supposed to's. Some days I think about practicing and contacting my management for a kick in the butt, but I stall there too. There are bees in my head and I can’t land on one particular thing to do. When I am in a foreign country, there is nothing extra to distract me. I settle. I linger longer.
When I’m there, I go to work for the allotted time, return, possibly review the show, take a walk, make some food, read, and repeat. There are days I can walk even longer; I can get lost. I don’t hurry to make dinner or even have food in the house if I don't want to. It’s my personal cadence. Yet, I long for the cadence of others each and every time I’m away.
What is it I need?
Perhaps quality alone time with a shortlist of options.
I don't mean to be so delicate about things, but I have truly enjoyed my time without tremendous expectations these last months. I have realized I don't enjoy gatherings that are too large anyway. It perhaps is a bit odd. Opera is big, spectacular, and the grandest form of art. But even the operas I've done and the tons of people I've worked with granted me ample time alone, and I mean complete alone time, with no other person for a few days in between. It was a time I could hear my inner voice, the one who wrote in all those journals. The one who was brave enough to invent stories. Who sat and looked at the different ways life moved in other parts of the world.
The irony is that the alone time often made me sad because even though I desired it and needed it, I felt I was living a life without people, without the messiness of others.
Well, I've stocked up on those experiences during the pandemic, and what I wouldn't give for the opportunity to go on a European gig somewhere alone and be that part of myself again.
I write this as my stepson enters the house after I wait to start writing once the house gets quiet. There are roofers on the house across the street. The noise of traffic and unnecessary trucks in the neighborhood clangoring outside reminds me to join the neighborhood association. Texts from the stepdaughter asking, “Can you pick me up from my friend's house?” are flashing on the bedside table.
These beautiful rhythms of life tug away from creativity as much as they give us the material to be creative.
I am longing for depth right now, to create, to embody something larger than me. I usually express that through music, but maybe it's time to express that longing depth in new ways.
I know a cleansing of unnecessary things must happen soon, too, not only in the house but also in the mind. I’m always served by the removal of items in my closet. I must let go of what I continue to hold as part of me that no longer serves. What I give my attention to matters and I miss the ritual of unpacking my suitcase.
Why is there a feeling of a knife between my shoulder blades as I write this? What kind of anxiety am I harboring now, and why? Why do I feel the need to run? To reinvent. To reconstruct?
My garden has been such a refuge this year. But I look at it and nearly grieve over how much I'm not able to do because I got a late start and because I have other responsibilities tugging at me. And then I think what it would be like if I only had it to focus on, like last year. What would be blooming instead?
And then think of what all of my creative pursuits would look like if I only gave my energies to them. What would each of my projects be if I stopped giving to so many things? If I could somehow find a way to drive that focus back into the cocoon with me. But there is only one cocoon and so many directions I seem to go.
Pulled.
But I must write this summer. I must.
(End journal entry from 2021)
And here in 2024, as I feel much the same way, I’m happy to have cultivated better tools to help me through the summer. I can have the European gig summer right here in the U.S. I just have to create it.
How?
Well, I’m working with my coach on my executive functioning skills. Flailing around all over the place and hoping to get things done might turn up a project, but it doesn’t have to be filled with such anxiety and doubt, nor does it mean I have to shut the rest of the world out. Who knew? Flailing around and overworking without a plan might seem more akin to the American way of production, but I want to lean into that European je ne sais quoi: a relaxed and easy life but still potent and prolific.
So, instead, I’m taking some time and listing out the things I want to do, and I’m putting them on the calendar in little itty bitty bites. And while it feels strange at nearly 50 years of age to be planning my naps, housework, weeding, writing, editing, visiting, planning, and staring into space-time, I’m seeing that the planning is making me calmer and more present to the thing in the cocoon. While I’m doing the thing, I’m invested in it and less likely to have one part of my brain thinking about how the essay I’m longing to write is wilting on the vine.
Growth isn’t always fast. There are projects like cucumbers. They burst through the dirt quickly, and before you know it, you’re sick of them, not able to keep up with their ferocious bounty. So, you leave them on the vine to rot and for the deer to nibble.
Then, there are those projects and life lessons that take a bit more time. They require a few more steps, tender pruning, planning, and 120 days until maturity. Those are usually worth the wait and extra effort, and you relish having tended to them and are eager to share them with friends.
Here’s to a summer with both the quick and the potent prized projects.
Are you looking for ways to get things done this summer? Do you need to keep the bees at bay? Consider working with Jess at True Colors Creativity. She can help guide you so that at the end of the summer, you have something magical to show for it. She’s starting a ‘get it done’ group the first of June. Check her out!
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