The Fourth of July is over.  Without any big fun events coming around for months, we could get a little bored, like kids on the in-between stretches of a road trip.   In the spirit of livening things up, I’ve got a little game to play that’s good for at least a week of distraction, and maybe even fun:

• Choose a color from the selection below.  This will be the color of the day.
•  It will pop up, like magic, everywhere.
• When you see it, breathe your color in on your in breath, out on your out breath.
• Play at being a color resonator for seconds or minutes, you and your color just hanging out together.
• Tomorrow, choose a new color for the day and do it all over again.  Delicious!

I am a student of humans.  Also of a few kinds of animals.   Dogs, cats, snakes, and horses at the top of the list.  Also porpoises, who I have discovered see themselves as our brothers, have a consciousness connection with us and try to help when they can.  That may be a later post. . . .

In my on-going study of humans I have noticed that things stick to us.  Or, what is likely closer to the truth, we put stuff in them and then we can’t seem to let them go.  Because now they have meaning.  I, for example, have a drawer of pens that have meaning.

No one gets to use them.  They have gone from being the messengers of thoughts to holding my thoughts of them.  We are in a relationship.  Completely one-sided.

If you are a human observing my one-sided relationship, essentially keeping pens from being pens, you will at the least overlook it.  You may even see it as being not all that strange.  Because lots of us, and maybe all, do this.

I point this out so that what we choose to have sticking to us, and we are going to do it, is done with our eyes open.  Then we are in the position to know what we have invested our energy in and see what has crossed from creating comfort to weighing us down.  And then we are free to let go.

Summer and I were having another chat the other day.  You know Summer, she comes in June and stays until the end of August.  I’m telling her about the bugs and the heat and the humid air and the sun burns and the rattlesnakes she brings along and how it makes for a giant minus side to her stay.  She squints her eye, figuratively of course, and points out that she and Earth put up with gallons of bug spray, sun screen, exhaust from recreation vehicles and boats, piles of party trash and lord knows what else, like the horrendous and scary things we light up on the Fourth of July.

She has a point.  We could try harder to have a care about the destruction we’re capable of when we’re having fun.  Summer offered a slogan, which I reluctantly pass along:  Be more of an animal and less like a party animal.

I’m feeling a little used as I realize Summer has tricked me into mounting a soap box for Earth.  Before she has a chance to slide in another slogan, and I can just see her saying “Earth–love her or leave her!,” I collect my weeder and trimmer and trowel, dump the weeds in the green bin and head back to the house and out of the H-E-A-T.

On the twenty-first of June, not far from when I write this, we will be enjoying the beginning of luscious, hot, seductive, lazy-making and impossible to ignore Summer, with a giant moon hanging low in the sky on the twenty-third to kick things off.  Summer, being the bighearted gal that she is, asked me to pass this message on to you:

Dear hard working humans in the Northern Hemisphere, pleeese do come play with me!  I know you have to do the things to pay the bills, deal with disputes and other pressing concerns, keep the car going and the kids from running dangerously loose.  I’m not asking for you all to commit to earth-shaking, lallapaloosas of elaborate vacations (and I have heard some of you mention that the worst blow-outs you have ever experienced happened on one of those).  I just want you to give yourself over to play.  Simple fun.  Cheap, even.  I’ll be there to enjoy it with you.

Your ever-dedicated friend who happily shows up every June and stays til September, Summer

I live in a forty-nine square mile city.  It’s big enough to have a ridiculous number of neighborhoods.  If you live in one, you find out you have neighborhoods inside yours that outsiders have yet to recognize.  If you drill down a little further, you can find neighborhoods with sort of floating neighborhoods passing through them.  We do not appreciate the floaters.  We call them homeless.

I bring this up not in the interest of making a political statement.  I am wanting to ask if you have found your home place and what it is that makes it so.   First, so that you recognize what is the core of it and you will keep even though things around it change.  Second, so that if you have not yet found it, you can begin to become clear about what you want it to be.  Because when that becomes clear, what it is you want is given the seed to draw you to your home place.