“There wasn’t time enough…”

School has been starting for K-12 students round here this week, and even though my university’s classes begin after Labor Day, there’s already been the building thrum as we all return to campus with a more regular pace for meetings and welcome parties and all the rest. Like our friends the farmers, our work as academics is seasonal. That said, I’m not quite ready to be in the field full time. It’s been a lovely summer–the first with real rest for me in a number of years, and I relished it, realizing just how much it was needed.

And I’m still trying–even deep in middle-age–to build better patterns. So, though I had originally thought I might share a reflection on an important new book today, that can wait. Instead, I’m marking a final celebration of summer. We’ve had lots of heady and heavy thoughts here at the Reformed Journal of late–and that’s important. But, as I drove home under that incredibly luminous moon, I thought of Mary Oliver’s poem and how nice it might be to have something different: a chance to simply read and think on a late August morning. To resist the rush to the next thing and linger in the goodness for just a minute or two more. There’s never time enough for that.

“Patience,” by Mary Oliver

What is the good life now? Why,
look here, consider
the moon’s white crescent

rounding, slowly, over
the half month to still another
perfect circle–

the shining eye
that lightens the hills,
that lays down the shadows

of the branches of the trees,
that summons the flowers
to open their sleepy faces and look up

into the heavens.
I used to hurry everywhere,
and leaped over the running creeks.

There wasn’t
time enough for all the wonderful things
I could think of to do

in a single day. Patience
comes to the bones
before it takes root in the heart

as another good idea.
I say this
as I stand in the woods

and study the patterns
of the moon shadows,
or stroll down into the waters

that now, late summer, have also
caught the fever, and hardly move
from one eternity to another.

Photo by Jake Hills on Unsplash