Summer in yesteryears

When summer comes around, there’s the usual complaint about heat and oppressive discomfort that weakens the body and dulls the mind. Especially these days when climate change holds sway. Decades ago, when the grass was much greener to this writer, the sun was less ferocious in its dominance of summer, and savoring the beach even sans protective cream was possible. Now it’s different. Just a few minutes of exposure is enough to give you the prick of a dozen needles and the threat of a heart stroke.

But summer’s pain must have something to do with age. For how come the young are still splashing it out delightfully in sparkling seas? Are they too mesmerized by the magic of summer like we were decades ago?

To me summer used to be a time of adventure and excitement. I was then a young instructor in a big university where thousands of teachers, mostly in their early twenties, did their tryst with study and fellowship sojourn. One of them was a young and demure grade school teacher, daughter of a farmer, whose quiet charm was a thrill to me. After we became engaged, I used to take an occasional trip to Ormoc City and from there proceeded to Kananga, where her family resided. Summer was therefore sweet to us, the young at heart then, and we embraced it as only the young could embrace the season of joy in mutual self-discovery.

But there was another reason for the wonders of summer. In the school I used to be a member of a klatch of campus journalists whose craze was in classical literature, philosophy and the works of contemporary writers. In summer, there were workshops and seminars usually in rural scenic spots where we immersed ourselves in the cool waters of youthful abandon spiced with harmless pranks and wild wishes. In these forums we discovered our weaknesses and the vanity of aspiring to be an acknowledged literati or a top rate journalist. But this was of no moment to us because we knew even then that while old men see visions young men dream dreams.

One thing however was that exposure to acclaimed writers and classical writings imparted upon us a sense of sobriety and an awareness of the truth that man is more than flesh and bones and that bread alone does not make him live. To these budding writers therefore summer was not just a splash in the waters of juvenile joy but was also a prick on their conscience on the question of right and wrong, on goodness and evil, and on the supernatural dimensions of life.

In our quest for learning, and perhaps intellectual seasoning, we started reading Indian literature such as Bhagavad Gita, the Mahabharata, Ramayana and the poetry of Gibran, Tagore, Kalidasa and others. We also tried poring over the works of Spinoza, Mills, Kant, Hegel, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. Heavy as these works were, we must have understood only a morsel of them. Nevertheless, this made the summer of our youth less wayward and more attuned to traditional values.

What is in summer that makes a man or women open up to the wonders of nature? Is it the reality of a season ending and a season beginning?  Is it the consciousness of time flowing as the river flows in its inevitable journey to nothingness among the seas? We really don’t know. For when the heart is full of joy there’s no moment to ask why. In conclusion here’s a poems I wrote years ago which was published in a national magazine in 1964:

Summer is a swirl of many colors in the mind /And in the heart a longing undefined. /The sun stabs the soul with vague obsessions, /Not the beach which pulsates with youth like a woman’s bosom, /Not the hillside with a vanishing trail, /But of something keenly needed yet unnamed. /Summer is a search into the caves of the self, /A painful gaze beyond the stars.