Life Lately: Summer

We started our summer driving to the Rocky Mountains to be with many of our favorite people. But first, enjoying the drive through Iowa in June with her stunning, lush, green rolling hills. Nebraska hosted the largest, fluffiest, most vibrant white clouds and in them we found the backs of sitting ogres, a boy riding a winged dog, and other spectacular wonders. Lately, we have been cloud watching and looking up more than down. Meeting thirty friends for a hike at Emerald Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park: the friends who visited us in the hospital one day after the birth of our first child and sang in our living room “Cath” by Death Cab for Cutie in a way that still takes my breath away. The much younger friends who were still in college but befriended us early-30-year-olds and our very particular and shy daughter. The friends that became aunties and uncles. The friends who creatively gathered during the pandemic in empty Old Navy parking lots to have dinner together. Friends who brought the silliest, strangest games over to play every Saturday night. (Ahem, I'm looking at you Mysterium as my favorite). So many friends who have been so significant and so many who eventually moved away. It was beautiful to be with all of them again, in one place, cheering on my daughter who hiked in the snow to the top of the Emerald Lake in hot pink Converse. Friends taking the hand of my six-year-old son to cross the icy brook that weaved down the mountain. Lately, I am thankful for all the people who have made life so absolutely stunning and in a way I never could have imagined for myself.

I thought I would spend the summer evenings of 2024 painting and writing. Instead, I took a small detour and started a tiny new job requiring a significant lens shift and learning curve. Lately, I am immersed in podcasts and online continuing education classes studying the neurology of sensory systems, the science of play, and learning about neurodiversity affirming practices in my field from neurodivergent voices. I am trying to carry out what I am learning in a small therapy gym with fantastical play schemes that weave in all the imagination we can muster. I keep thinking back to the fact that play helps release dopamine which is a feel good hormone. When we are engaging in play AND learning new things, we are linking learning with feel good hormones. Why do we ever stop doing this? But then I think of how I am absorbing all this delicious information: over headphones while I am moving through the garden, on long walks in the evenings, during pilates videos in the early morning, on the drive home from a friend’s house, and by creating informational handouts on Canva (and making sure the pictures and font are also “just right”). My learning curve is starting to flatten and with these last few weeks of summer, I hope to find the space for painting and writing. But I can also say I had a lot of fun learning this summer too.