Summer: Where Everything is Wild and Free and Fleeting

Summer reminds us that it is a season.

The water is warm, the nights are long, everything feels soft and light, hot and bright. As a kid summer felt like a year in and of itself, as an adult summer feels like the blink of an eye.

How can summer feel so big and yet so fleeting? How do I get in alignment with it before it's gone and I find myself in line buying school supplies and musing about Halloween costumes?

Because if there is one thing that summer does well is that it reminds us that it is only a season and it will pass. 

This is the only "Summer of 2014" that we will ever have. 

At this month's Parent Forum with Pattie Mercado we discussed "GEMs." GEM stands for a "genuine encounter moment." Basically, it's what we live for as parents and as people. 

Those eternal moments in which we stop, connect and encounter. The moments when we feel truly alive and the world feels like it stopped for a moment, the moments of peace, the moments that take our breath away.

That afternoon after the Parent Forum I got a little "nudge from the universe" reminding me that gems can be found as close as the backyard and as soon as now.

"There is a story of a friend who took his family on multiple summer vacation getaways. At the end of the summer he asked his teenage son which of all the summer vacations he enjoyed most. The father learned from the reply, and was taken back to hear is son say 'The thing I liked best this summer was the night you and I laid on the lawn and looked at the stars and talked.'"

May your summer be filled with gems.