You Have to Let it Linger

Resisting the Heady Rush of June

The urgency is real now. You feel it in the long stretch of daylight, the way everything grows all at once, in the good green pattern absolutely bursting forth now. Gentle May makes her exit ushering in heady June. The sun is up before you are and lingers long past supper yet somehow the days feel too short. Daylight runs close to fifteen hours now, and still it is just not enough to complete everything you want. The natural world is hurrying: bees rise earlier, the dandelions bloom and seed, trees race to fill their canopies, and we too are swept into the momentum. There’s planting to finish, wood to cut, children to chase through wet grass. You start early and end late and lie awake thinking of what you did not do. The season runs hard. The earth is moving fast and it is hard not to be moved by it. Amidst all the fervor and rampant work however, June extends an invitation to us with verdant hand to linger a moment.

It is an invitation we should accept

Our eldest daughter wandering amid the dandelion puffs toward our freshly tilled wildflower field. Photo by my lovely wife.

Even as nature rushes forward, it does so deliberately. The forest does not panic. The wildflowers do not fret about order or scheduling. They come in succession as they are called. The edible ramps are passing on, making way for lily-of-the-valley and her delicate ivory bells. The trillium bows out, and jack-in-the-pulpit springs up from the cool understory. The maples leaf out in a green so pale they glow. On the meadows’ edge, the violets now give way to buttercups, then chervil and red clover. In the low wet places, the skunk cabbage opens in a yellow riot. This is not frantic blooming however. It is the steady, ordered abundance of a world that knows how to wait its turn. The trees do not envy the grass. The bees fly when the sun allows. The bluebirds, still fresh from their long migration, do not rush to build; they settle in and they sing. There is a pace here, but it’s not the one we were taught. It is slower, wiser, and deeply beautiful.

The urgency we feel in our sinew and bone is not only from the natural world, it is from the systems we’ve built around it: calendars, commitments, summer programs, performance metrics. This is the time of year when everything shifts. There are forms to fill out, gear to find, bags to pack. If you let it, modern life will push you into a rhythm not of your own making. You’ll be swept along by deadlines and sign-ups and the subtle pressure to “make the most” of every summer moment. Ironically, this pressure leaves little room for savoring anything at all. Even rest becomes a checkbox. Even joy is scheduled. We are told to be efficient with our leisure, to optimize our days off, to always do more.

This is disordered in the most literal sense of the word. It is out of the good, true order of our being.

We rush through the season we longed for in the dark of February. The result? We miss the very thing we were trying to reach.

Norman Rockwell, Summer Vacation

The wisdom of June does not lie in the productive rush, in the feverish sowing of seeds after work but before dinner. It is in the lingering. The garden doesn’t demand all of you in one day. The birds do not wake and worry about what they’ll sing. The lilacs bloom extravagantly and drop their petals with no apology. The natural world is not wasteful, but neither is it hurried. What if we were to match that pace? What if we asked not how much can we accomplish today, but how fully can we notice? Can we stop long enough to hear our daughter say, “He’s carrying his house,” when she finds a snail under the rhubarb leaves? Can we let the northern flickers sing us out of a task and into a pause, wondering if we will catch a glimpse of their majesty at the woodline? There is a different kind of success to be found here: not in achievement, but in attention. The world teaches us that productivity is the goal but creation tells a deeper story; belonging, slowness, and delight are the actual rewards.

A northern flicker photographed by Jun Forest

June arrives. The season will turn whether you’ve kept pace or not. If you’ve rushed too hard however, you might miss what it offers. You might miss the tiny footprints in the mud beside the pond or the way the evening light catches in your child’s hair or the hush that falls between the first call of the hermit thrush and the last breeze across the clover. Have you stopped yet to wish on a dandelion that has puffed to seed? The rush is real but it is not the whole truth. Beneath it, beneath the dual din of the rampant growth and the neon hum of the modern world is the quiet, old, and true. A pace at which you can live, but only you choose it. Let the beans go in late. Let the to-do list wait just a little longer. Walk the meadow. Sit by a hive and listen.

You don’t have to keep up with the earth. You only have to witness it.

You don’t have to keep up with the world. You only have to endure it.

Allow yourself to linger a while this June.