Gather Ye Rosebuds

Embracing the heart of the year

WELCOME TO THE COTTAGE!

Please consider signing up as a free or paid subscriber. The Cottage is named after a real place — a tiny studio — in my backyard where I write and reflect upon being Christian in this contentious, chaotic, and confusing time. My door is open for those longing to feel less alone — and who want to rediscover a capacious and thoughtful faith that embraces the world with joy and justice.

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We’re welcoming summer in the northern hemisphere. Even with all the problems of climate change, the seasons still put on their yearly show. The roses in front of my neighbor’s house are beautiful right now — a red plentitude of blooms. Those roses, that color, the flower of love.

In many places, roses are the floral blazons of summer. They seem to preach to the heart, wooing the summer soul to awareness.

The poet Mary Oliver wrote of their seasonal homilies, “When the Roses Speak, I Pay Attention.”

“As long as we are able to
be extravagant we will be
hugely and damply
extravagant. Then we will drop
foil by foil to the ground. This
is our unalterable task, and we do it
joyfully.”

And they went on. “Listen,
the heart-shackles are not, as you think,
death, illness, pain,
unrequited hope, not loneliness, but

lassitude, rue, vainglory, fear, anxiety,
selfishness.”

Their fragrance all the while rising
from their blind bodies, making me
spin with joy.

This poem is from Oliver’s book, Thirst, which is a collection that interweaves grief over the death of her beloved partner, Molly Malone Cook, and a sense of religious awakening. And, perhaps because Cook died in the late summer, Thirst uses the images of summer — fragrant fields, lilies on the pond, fresh grass — as the gateway into a kind of bittersweet embrace of life, even fully aware of its impending end.

Summer is wonderful, yes. But there’s a melancholy to it as well. A friend of mine who lived in New England once remarked to me, “Eight weeks. The New England year comes down to eight glorious weeks.” She sighed. “But perhaps because they are so fleeting, I want to drink in every moment as if it is the last.”

Mary Oliver’s poem called to mind my friend’s comment — a wisdom long noted by tender observers of seasonal spirituality. Seize the day, make the most of the life given. In the centuries-ago words of Robert Herrick:

Gather ye Rosebuds while ye may,
    Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to day,
    Tomorrow will be dying.

“Gather Ye Rosebuds” by John William Waterhouse

There’s a question that nags at me when it comes to summer — why don’t I embrace it as I should? I confess: I’ve had a hard time with the seasonal carpe diem, with the rose-filled abandon, of picking the blooms only to watch them fade. My heart often feels the shackles of Oliver’s second stanza, my breath too shallow to drink in their fragrance. My mother used to say I was a “born worrier,” alert to whatever negative thing might arise along my way. How can one be joyful when so much is wrong with the world?

And that’s where the middle part of the poem speaks to me — that which we worry about might not be what truly binds our hearts.

Our failure to embrace life fully doesn’t arise from “death, illness, pain, unrequited hope” or even loneliness. These are the things which will drop into our lives, “foil by foil.” Death, illness, pain, betrayal, loneliness — all make up parts of the “unalterable task” of being human. There’s no avoiding them; there’s only how we come to terms with them.

But those other things — lassitude (weariness or apathy), rue (regret), vainglory (excessive vanity and self-regard), fear, anxiety, selfishness — these are things over which we have some choice. These are the “heart-shackles,” a kind of six affections of despair that inhibit our embrace of life’s summer joys.

In recent weeks, about a half-dozen friends or acquaintances of mine have suffered heart problems from relatively minor to complex ones. People of different ages and differing levels of fitness — a cardiologist told me that his practice is overflowing with patients.

Is the world around us so shackling our hearts that we are manifesting our arguments and challenges in our bodies? Are we so trapped in our winter of discontent that summer stands no chance?

My heart
sings but the apparatus of singing doesn’t convey
half what it feels and means. In spring, there’s hope,
in fall the exquisite, necessary diminishing, in
winter I am as sleepy as any beast in its
leafy cave, but in summer there is
everywhere the luminous sprawl of gifts,
the hospitality of the Lord and my
inadequate answers

— Mary Oliver

I’ve chosen to make this summer my summer of the heart — to unlock what shackles me, embrace the gifts of the season, accept the invitation of the Lord, and rest in not-knowing.

Maybe we all need a little carpe diem about now. I think a lot of hearts need healing.

The summer task is joy. Listen to the roses.

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INSPIRATION

Another morning and I wake with thirst
for the goodness I do not have. I walk
out to the pond and all the way God has
given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord,
I was never a quick scholar but sulked
and hunched over my books past the
hour and the bell; grant me, in your
mercy, a little more time. Love for the
earth and love for you are having such a
long conversation in my heart. Who
knows what will finally happen or
where I will be sent, yet already I have
given a great many things away, expect-
ing to be told to pack nothing, except the
prayers which, with this thirst, I am
slowly learning.
— Mary Oliver, Thirst

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Some music to go with today’s post. “The Rose” by Bette Midler.

Just remember in the winter
Far beneath the bitter snows
Lies the seed that with the sun's love
In the spring becomes the rose

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Gratitude is not a passive response to something we have been given;
gratitude arises from paying attention,
from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us.

— David Whyte

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