The Lavender Field and the Long Summer

Summer practice is rarely written about. A patient guide to the long bright quarter and what the lavender field has been teaching about it for a thousand years.

Spiritual content disproportionately favors autumn and winter. The thinning veil, the dark moon, the long contemplative inward seasons — these get most of the patient writing. Summer, by contrast, is treated as either pure celebration (Beltane, Litha, midsummer fires) or pure distraction (vacation, social calendar, the practice gets put down for three months). Neither is quite right. Summer has its own working practice, and the practitioner who learns it produces something the winter-focused practitioner cannot.

What summer offers, plainly, is the long bright stretch where the work is to receive rather than to introspect.

What the lavender field demonstrates

The lavender field, in Provence and elsewhere, blooms for about six weeks each summer. The bloom is the result of the entire previous year of patience: dormant winter, careful spring growth, the slow drawing-up of sun and water and mineral through the plant's roots. The bloom is also, in any practical sense, the plant's whole purpose. The bloom is what makes more lavender possible. The bloom is what makes the honey. The bloom is what fills the air with the smell that sustains the bees, the practitioner walking past, the perfumer twenty miles away.

The bloom is not the plant being productive. The bloom is the plant becoming what it has been preparing to be. The practitioner can borrow the model. The work the practitioner has been doing all year — the patient winter inward, the careful spring beginnings, the steady early-summer tending — is now ready to bloom, briefly, in this long bright quarter. The summer is not for starting new things. The summer is for being what the rest of the year has been making the practitioner.

The three small summer practices

One: receive. The practitioner who has been giving all year is invited to receive in summer. Sun on the body. Food that is in season. The warm evening. The unstructured weekend. The party with people the practitioner loves. The lake. The honest version of vacation. The receiving is the practice. The practitioner who refuses to receive in summer because they feel guilty about not producing has missed the season's whole instruction.

Two: show up to what is blooming. The work the practitioner started in the previous winter is, in many cases, now ready to be witnessed in its finished form. The book the practitioner spent the year writing is being read. The friendship that has been steadily built is becoming a real friendship. The job that the practitioner took in the new city is now the job they have. The summer is when the practitioner gets to see what the year was for. The witnessing is its own work.

Three: let go of last summer. Summer is paradoxically the right time for some kinds of release. The lavender lets the bloom fall, in late July or August. The energy returns to the roots for next year. The practitioner can do the same: a small inventory of what was promising last summer that did not last, and a small honest release of it. This is the only inward work the summer asks. Most of the rest is bright receiving.

The smallest summer ritual

Once during the bright quarter, the practitioner takes a walk — in a garden, by water, through any landscape that is currently in bloom — with no goal other than the walk. No podcast. No phone (or in airplane mode). No timer. Walk until the body wants to stop. Sit briefly. Walk back.

This is the summer practice. It is simple. It is uncomplicated. It is also where most of the year's quiet integration actually happens. The lavender field has known this for a thousand years. The bee knows it. The patient practitioner, after a few summers of receiving rather than producing, knows it too.