A Summer of "Delight"

These last few days have been great, and a little terrifying. I haven't been unemployed since I was 15 years old (and I worked alongside my parents when I was a lot younger than that, too). I have always worked--and generally very hard. This is a whole new experience for me. It sort of feels like I'm being shown how to just relax. For instance, I had an interview at an organization that works with Spanish speakers to help them get their Spanish GED when I first got here. The interview went really well, but they aren't looking for help until the fall. I have also applied for probably around 15 jobs and have two interviews next week. There are a few more places I think I would like to apply, but maybe it's time to just cool my jets for a while. So, I have all this time on my hands (although I do have a class starting on Monday, so I'll have less free time once that starts), and I've been trying to figure out what to do with it. I've been asking myself what it could mean to have unstructured time.


At my last mediation workshop, my teacher kept talking about "delight." I find this word totally strange and un-relatable, but it stuck with me the whole time we were meditating together. At the time, I remember thinking it meant that this is my summer of delight. Once I got here, though, I forgot that for a while. I've been working so hard to find a job and ways to be part of the community that I got all tangled up in my own thoughts. I had to look up the meaning of the word delight. Hard work, I understand. Pride in my accomplishments, I totally get. Constant busy-ness and an inundation of demands upon my life, call it my bread and butter. But delight? Turns out the noun "delight" means great pleasure. I don't quite know what to make of it, but as my dear friend, Ellie wrote: "Sounds like enjoying your days and not feeling pressured will be part of the unfolding delight." Wise words.

For some reason this poem (that I wrote in the above park in Lake Bluff, IL on my way to MA) seems pertinent:


Cottonwood seeds like
summer snow
cover us.


On our backs
facing sky
we are born anew.


Like those tiny seeds
commissioned with hope
toward disparate horizons,


we find ourselves
alone
and together.