Catalyst Strategic Consultants

We have finally arrived. It’s too hot to sit out on the deck and the dreamy summer somnambulance is upon us, like a hand that has reached up from the foundations of the sunbaked house and grabbed us, drawing us down into a malaise of ennui. We just can’t get motivated to achieve anything – keeping the motor turning: that’s all we can manage before succumbing to healing naps that make up for the energies expended in winter. Drowsing dragonflies dart in the back door and before we can be roused to usher them out – exit on their own – helicopter wings precisely delivering them back to the verdant garden where they go about their business. This time, this blowsy greening hour – resonates with the benefits of heat and heaviness – in the full warmth of the day before ebbing and gradually cooling into the gathering thunderstorms of evening. Every night, they rise, like tide, to thump and blunder. like an cantankerous ruler reasserting his position after nearly letting it slip his grasp.

The risk of harm later having passed – the golfers in their shelters awaiting the all-clear – the gardeners anxiously checking their blooms – the car dealers fretting hail might have ruined their crop of cars – the air is magnificently cleansed and supercharged with ozone: everyone wants to be out and breathing the invigorating, cooled air and splashing [a bit] in the puddles. The backdrop of extravagant and dense violet of the cell just passed casting such a dramatic backdrop for the sunlit rinsed brocades of branches vibrating yellow-green.

Now is the hour of high summer – so long wished for – as we drift onto our decks with gins and tonics – have friends over for easy long afternoons with no particular agenda. In our neighbourhood, we have magical back pathways between the lots. So with the dog on his constitutional – traversing them, we overhear the gatherings at tables of animated outdoor folk, who’ve been holding this very natural congregation off for the whole winter, only now to experience it bursting forth like a leaf from a bud. The quiet talk, just barely overheard from a distance as we pass, like a buzz of contented bees, and the glorious light bringing out so many variants of green, from lime to olive and every shade in between, renewing our senses and charging them for the distant winds of winter.

Just finished Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – what a piece of magic – available – for free on Kindle. Your kids – of any age – would love it. I didn’t want this dream to end. It did, but not before it had opened up the doors of imagination to the wonders of summer – those dreamy, half- conscious blends of reality and fantasy that this season offers those who can let go and slide into it.

Sincerely,
Doug Bouey
Catalyst Strategic Consultants Ltd.