Listening to Suncity, my “summer” jam, I “miss” the sun on my skin. Probably because I talked about him with someone today, because I talked about Spanish writers (without naming names, but I was thinking of Gabriel García Márquez),

I lay awake thinking about summer and what that means. I consider listening to Cuban music right now to remember that sense of joy again. And then it hits me that perhaps part of the answer to “recovering” a way of being, with proximity to land, may lie in the four seasons, the fact that winter comes and as surely as the sun rises the warmth also comes back, the rhythm of nature and life that can only be experienced physically, as an embodied being, on a peninsula that allows for distinct seasons, not a pleasant climate year-round. By enduring the freezing winter and being ushered into spring and summer, fall and winter again, year after year, without fail (though climate change threatens this, immoral on so many accounts), we learn that goodness is steadfast, that now is not forever, that once terrible will pass and joy becomes possible again, engendering hope. All because I live on this soil. What a thought.