Who is watching the summer slip away?  As I was mowing my lawn the other day, I could not help but notice a distinct change in the feel of the grass.  In contrast to the spring, when it was rich, full, abundant, and green, today, the second week of August, the grass seemed markedly drier, now longer deep green but pale and transparent, looking as if it would any day now stop growing altogether.  I marveled at the way the land changes, unprompted and right on schedule, year after year after year after year.  No one tells it to change, no one makes it change; it just changes.  Its rhythms never cease.
     This led me to think that, in the fading grass of August, we see a picture of the patterns of the medium in which we live our lives.  We are born, we live, we die.  This is the unfortunate truth of a finite existence.  Nothing, as the late Chairman Mao once remarked, is eternal.
     But doesn't the land always come alive again?  Rhythms, particularly the rhythms of the cosmos, do not occur in a vacuum.  They occur in presence, a presence that, necessarily, never began and, oddly, will never end.  The universe is itself, yes, but it is not everything that is.  It has to be somewhere.
     Enjoy the rhythms of the seasons.  Enjoy that they began, enjoy that as long as the planet is here, they will never end.  Yet enjoy most of all that there is order and predictability in the cosmos.  There is intelligence, there is form, there is eternal presence.  We are not running into nothingness.