I yearn to go back…I want the days to be mid-summer all year long.

Posted on by Live & Learn

Notes:

  • Inspiration: Brian Kirk – “I want the long hours back but you can’t give me that. Sometimes I yearn to go back even further, to a world defined by family, fields and railway tracks, the sham abandon of the long school holidays. I want the days to be mid-summer all year long, those childhood games that lasted until darkness fell and twilight was a midnight walk back home with a ball at my feet and my head completely empty. Each night I close my eyes and we are young again, before time dragged us down its hungry maw. On waking I can feel I’m falling, but reaching out into the dark I find you, hold on tight.“
  • Photo (via newthom)

37 thoughts on “I yearn to go back…I want the days to be mid-summer all year long.”

  1. Ohmigosh yes. And free from.the day-to-day needs to DO… Those things that mom and dad did while you just could just BE because now, I’m.mom and dad…and I want to BE.

      1. When there was air, when you could
        breathe any day if you liked, and if you
        wanted to you could run. I used to
        climb those hills back of town and
        follow a gully so my eyes were at ground
        level and could look out through grass as the
        stems
        bent in their tensile way, and see snow
        mountains follow along, the way distance goes.

        Now I carry those days in a tiny box
        wherever I go, I open the lid like this
        and let the light glimpse and then glance away.
        There is a sigh like my breath when I do this.
        Some days I do this again and again.

        ~ William Stafford, “Remembering” in The Darkness Around Us is Deep: Selected Poems of William Stafford (Harper Perennial; January 12, 1994)

    2. These days, he said, I live very simply. In the mornings, at sunrise, I drive to a place I know twenty minutes outside Athens and I swim all the way across the bay and all the way back again. In the evenings I sit on my balcony and I write. He closed his eyes briefly and smiled. I asked him what it was he was writing, and his smile widened. He said, I am writing about my childhood. I was so happy as a child, he continued, and I realised a little while ago that there was nothing I wanted so much as to recall it piece by piece, with every possible detail.

      ~ Rachel Cusk, “Outline: A Novel” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, January 13, 2015)

      1. Yes, yes and yes. I need to find that place again. I’ve lived in the moment all my life that so much of it is a blur. That’s why I never claim to be a writer. What kind of writer has almost nothing to look back on? How could I have been so oblivious to what was going on around me,?

    3. You said “I just want to BE”. That line had stuck, with me.

      “We have to become as simple and as wordless as the growing corn or the falling rain. We must just be.”

      — Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941-1943; and Letters from Westerbork. (Picador; unknown edition, November 15, 1996)

  3. I dream this scenario often…. it truly helps when all looks bleak! Thank you for all these wonderful, truly uplifting and smile-producing quotes. And that photo; loveliness overflow! 🙂

      1. I was a bit in a rush to comment, so didn‘t have the time to read the whole poem. Now, that I have, I‘m even more blown away – such a beauty. Aaaah, the Irish!!!! 😉

  5. WMS. And this fragment…. “before time dragged us down its hungry maw.” Yes, yes, yes…eaten alive by all the ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’ and ‘have tos’. Free to be. As a kid, there’s simply no way to appreciate the blessing of that. None.

  6. Reblogged this on It Is What It Is and commented:
    Oh, how I get this! … ‘Inspiration: Brian Kirk – “I want the long hours back but you can’t give me that. Sometimes I yearn to go back even further, to a world defined by family, fields and railway tracks, the sham abandon of the long school holidays.’

  7. OK Dave, you’ve done it again. Off to read more of Brian Kirk and William Stafford, and there goes the morning … thank you …

  8. I feel more alive now than I ever did as a child. It’s not in the past! It’s here in front of us, all of it! We have just forgotten to see and feel it ✨🌿✨

  10. It’s sucks us in to memories and how we envision the past … or yearn for parts that would have been different and our ego mind thinks more satisfying.
    And then we realize that there is only right now. Our job is to honor the lessons and get rid of what doesn’t serve us. Let it all go and find our middle ground in the present. Being open. Seeing what evolves. 💕

  12. The healthy baby is so darling!!! Love how an adult is steadying him…giving him just a little bit of assurance as he has an experience of tasting tasting the world…

  13. Brian Kirk…I ran across his work several weeks back…I like what I read…and in your share of him…I do recall some carefree days of freedom, too 🙂

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