Late Summer Friends

The Graces In Nature Benefit From Nurture

It’s dahlia season! Those spectacular late summer blossoms are here, in sizes from platter to golf ball with a spectacular array of colors.

Similarly, during this late summer of my life, my abundant and varied friendships are also blooming.

That perception came to me in my prayer time one recent morning. Beginning this past winter and spring, and now into the summer, I cannot miss how blessed I am with friends. 

Knowing dahlia devotees, I’ve witnessed the thoughtfulness and care they provide their beauties throughout the year. The benefits of that care come from hard-won experience. Dahlia devotees learn how their resilient yet vulnerable tubers respond to the conditions of their winter dormancy as well as their particular soil, changing climate, and the continual variations in sun, rainfall, pests, and weeds.  

The graces embedded in nature benefit from the nurture of those who appreciate those gifts.

During this season of my life, I appreciate how, unless something goes terribly wrong, we humans are graced with the capacity for friendship and so many opportunities with potential for friendships to develop. I am very clear that by far most friendships do not just happen. Their potential, vulnerable yet resilient, is nurtured.  That thoughtfulness and care benefits from experience.

Early this year, when I wrote the acknowledgment section of For Crying Out Love, I opened it with the question, “Is there anything more valuable than friends and the graced relationships with other open and generous people who contribute to our life paths?” Then in March, I reached out to most of my friends to let them know about the publication of For Crying Out Love. With those events, I began to perceive and appreciate the many perennial friendships still arising in my garden. Many first bloomed decades ago. That is the backdrop for how I now perceive this late summer season of my life. Then, through a combination of nature and nurture, all graced, over the last few months I began to meet up and reconnect with many of those friends.

The highlights were my 50^th college reunion during which we spent hours with each of two special people on the staff back then; two quick trips to Chicago where we met up with longtime friends and family; a local wedding of the son of a friend whom I met on my first job post PhD; a party with former prayer group members celebrating the publication of For Crying Out Love; my men’s book group discussing For Crying Out Love; and a recent trip to the Cleveland area to see family, visit the graves of my parents, and connect with friends from high school and friends we made with my mother’s caregivers as she declined and died. Scattered amidst these graces were wonderful meetups with friends from graduate school and my days in training; my work with the Jesuits; and my work as a clinical psychologist, both colleagues and people with whom I worked professionally and stayed in touch with. We had an emotionally moving dinner with the family of friends who are vulnerable immigrants. And soon, we have an unusual mid-year get together with our local group of four other couples whom we have shared so much with over 40 years.

While my friends are not as plentiful as the acorns currently falling noisily on the deck of my home, I feel my life is full with friends in my late summer season, and I am overflowing with gratefulness.

Is there anything more valuable than friends and the graced relationships with other open and generous people who contribute to our life paths? Even as I sense my autumn gradually approaching, my answer remains, No.