The Smallness in a Big Summer Solstice

on new terrain and fairy houses, rare orchids and broken tailbones

Today is the summer solstice, and I am lucky this week to have come up on several fairy houses in a national forest alongside a river that both dances and declares shhhhhhhh. This here is a world of bigness. We travelled up from Arkansas and through the full length of Kansas just for that hit of bigness in Colorado, when the Rockies shoot jagged up from the plains. Up here, it’s the big things that can get you: cougars and bears and altitude sickness. The mountains are losing their snowy caps this week, and the waters rise big below. The moose family that greeted us in the yard, Great God in Heaven, the moosen are big. The Haines Family, we are loud, clunky, and came in two cars. We are big, too, and love a shocking disruption to the norm. I cackled like a crazy half-hyena lady when I saw them. We retold the story to ourselves that night of how terrific and RIGHT THERE they were, and we laughed and said moosen because moose as the plural isn’t funny and doesn’t do justice.

Some of the fairy houses are intricate and blend in to their surroundings unless you bend low and up close. Flowers made of pine cone bits, tiny stone walls, and stick establishments are done well and playfully enough that you can’t really tell the age of the artist. You can literally get lost in these woods, but also, you can know exactly where you are and still lose time and space. You can be a grown woman who has to think about debt-to-income ratios, and you can think you’re on a brisk hike. But then you start trying to name things. You squat down. In some places you nearly lay down with your face to earth. You smell things. Mushrooms work magic up from the death of trees. The knotted bramble reveals fresh raspberry leaves. Ferns begin their soft curl upward and wisp across the open floor. Then finally, you are so small that you could fit in a fairy house, and the orchid reveals itself to you.

As tall as a good gala apple, the calypso orchid is a tropical shape and the wild purple I’ve seen smudged across an Oban sunset. All the world opens in this little beauty with white lips, yellow tongue, and red and white striped throat. I went back out again to see it, and it was gone or I couldn’t find it. I was on a mission - too big, I think. I wasn’t lost enough.

There are so many ways I’ve been found in the last couple years that gratitude runs strong through my head most of the time, but not enough. I can tell it’s not enough because I also feel a clear-mouthed bitchiness coming on as I age. My butt hurts all the time (mysterious tailbone ailment), and so I think about how hard seats will be weeks before I have to sit down somewhere. My butt has started acting like the Princess and the Pea, and apparently my attitude (and the whole rest of me) follows suit.  I may not find a cure for my rear end, but I suspect there’s one for my perspective as I cross over into the stage where my body feels unknowable and my kids turn to men. It’s a new terrain.

A thing I’ve noticed is how many of the ways I’ve been found seem to be the ways I also get the most lost. Lost in the good way. I find myself a Catholic in the Adoration chapel and a bunny trail always opens there into history and mystery. Prayer is also the land of the lost and found, the land of paradox, and strangely so is any rhythm we find ourselves in. Seth and I go to bed at night and acknowledge the loop. We’re just going to wake in the morning and do all this again. And the next day and the next ... This is definitely panic attack material, but the truth is that even as I find myself repeatedly taking my kids to the dentist and the orthodontist, the conversations that opens there, one-on-one in a car with a kid can be its own fairy house. We want to rock out to Japanese Breakfast, and shortly after turning it on, we notice the strings on strings on strings. We crawl inside the music together for a minute, and we are little bitty, sharing, nodding, and smiling. Side note: could anyone have told me how much a mother’s life can center around her children’s teeth?

Back home, I didn’t think to ask anyone to water my plants. It’s also a big ask, so I’ve left it to Jesus. Blackberries are already developed and sweet down there, and I hope to get home just in time to gather my bowls full. The solstice means different things in different places. Back home, it means chiggers and ticks and great wide dahlias interrupting the loop. Small things can get you down there, but you learn to not be afraid for the goodness of the bloom.

Either way, no matter where you are, I hope you get tripped up in a paradox. I hope you land soft somewhere, not knowing much more than your smallness and what a great world this can be, especially when its small and adoring and caring for flowers and teeth, feelings and maybe even your own butt.

Amen.

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We’re four months out from the publication of The Deep Down Things. I’ll be back in here with updates and such. Maybe I’ll tell you about how/why I became a Real Estate agent and how much I’m loving it. For today, though, I just wanted to say hi and thank you and happy summer solstice.

However, if you haven’t yet pre-ordered the book, it’s such a huge help to authors when folks purchase early because it lets the book sellers know they need to purchase them so they’ll be available when the time comes. It’s a big deal. We’re beyond grateful and honored that you’d spend $ and time on our words. Below are a few places to find The Deep Down Things. Also, please do ask your local bookstores to pick it up!

I’ll be back soon, and in the meantime, please consider this your invitation to tell us about the solstice in your neck of the woods. I’d love to hear!

Amber