Let June Overwhelm You

My baby does not want to sleep this week. She wants to stand. She wants to place her hands on my stomach, get her feet under her, and lean gently back. She wants to stand there in bed and show me she can wave her little hands. I resist the urge to be frustrated by this, the voice like television static in my brain that tells me she needs to sleep so I can go do things. Tidy the house, get the honey business in order, make more money. She of course, is simply embodying exactly what this season is for. She is nine months old and life pours from her: a deep spring that has no end. She is June manifest, all fullness and unfurling. The grass outside is tall and bending under its own weight, the hive boxes are heavy, the days are long and glowing and, like her, impossible to contain. Everything is blooming all at once, including her. June does not want to be managed and be put to sleep. It wants to spill over. My baby does not want to sleep because the season and life itself is rich, loud, and bright. We need to stop trying to get ahead of it and instead let ourselves be overwhelmed by the vitality of it all.

Now that the spring hunting season is over, the turkeys have returned. They march out of the forest and strut across the garden rows, royalty tossing mulch aside with their talons imperiously and pecking at anything that moves. It is annoying. It is also beautiful. There is something deeply comic in how proudly they move, something oddly triumphant in their reclaiming of the fields and trails. “I did not die. I am here.” Their presence is inconvenient, yes, but it is also a reminder that the woods are never empty; they are full of life, burgeoning, waiting to spill out when the pressure lifts. The turkeys that scratch through the newly tilled field are doing exactly as they should in June, in the time of abundance. When I see them scatter as I round the corner with a wheelbarrow or watch them sunning themselves in the long grass, I try not to shoo them. Their disregard for the boundaries is charming. They have survived the blasts and arrows of another spring and this is their reward.

The other fields are being hayed now. The roar of the machines starts early, and by late afternoon the air is thick with the scent of cut grass. It is a smell that pulls on memory. Step into a barn, long unused, and note how it still holds the sweet green ghost of hay from a decade before. Life sticks around. It presses into wood, settles into rafters, soaks the air. The first cutting of hay is an old harvest, one that comes before the tomatoes or the squash, and one that always seems to sneak up on us. The fields do not ask whether we are ready. They give what they give when they give it! In the barns, in the bales, in the very beams of the old buildings, the evidence of this abundant generosity remains. It is tempting to try and schedule your joy, to plan for a slower season, to wait until things calm down. June will not wait though. June bursts forth. It leaves its mark. You will smell it years from now and remember, maybe with tears, how alive it all once was.

Eastman Johnson, In the Hayloft 1878

The bees too are swelling. Hives are booming, spilling over with new brood and bright pollen. I spoke with another beekeeper this week who had just added a second deep super to one of her hives. Without the space to grow, the bees will leave. The queen will abscond, taking her workers and their ambitions elsewhere in search of a roomier home. You must make space for growth or you will lose it. This is one of the central challenges of June: how to make space for all this life. It is tempting to try to maintain control, to keep things manageable, to keep the grass mowed and the fowl out of the garden. Life does not want to be manageable though. Life wants to fill every crevice. It wants to stand up in your bed and wave its hands when its time for sleep. The beekeeper adds a box. She expands the space. She allows for more. This is wisdom you too can learn from the bees about all this boundless June life: do not contain it. Make room. Say yes to the overflowing. When the good green pattern this time of year offers you more than you expected, do not flinch. Just make more room for it.

This is the truth of June: it is too much, and it is perfect. Everything is blooming, and there is no possible way to hold it all. So don’t. Let it spill. Let the baby stay awake and the bees keep growing and the turkeys walk all over your tidy plans. You will not regret having witnessed it. You will regret having missed it because you were trying to get ahead, however. What June offers is not efficiency. It is abundance. It is the fullness of the fields and the scent of old hay and the riotous growth of everything good. If you are lucky, it will knock the wind out of you. It will remind you that your job is not to master life, but to receive it.

Go ahead. Let it overwhelm you.

You will be ok.