From The Innkeepers

August 2021-The Fullness of Summer Beckons

This month, I’d like to share with you segments of a poem by Mary Swenson which I found inspiring. In the beginning lines, she encourages us to
“Enter each day as upon a stage
Lighted and waiting for your step”

It is easy to imagine entering days this way here at the Rustic Gate. The land is our stage which is set daily for the opening curtain call in such a lovely way. The performance begins this time of year at around 5:30 am. Sand hill cranes, Canadian geese, Great blue herons and their smaller counterparts the green heron, red winged blackbirds and red-breasted grosbeaks and a whole host of other winged companions make their presence heard. The birds help set the stage with their morning orchestral prelude and if we are really fortunate we can hear them being joined by the soulful loons that summer on nearby Hungerford Lake and occasionally add their notes of sweet melancholy that echoes over the land.

“Give your eyes to agony or rapture”
Personally, my preference leans toward rapture. Humans experience enough of agony over the years, especially most recently framed by the events surrounding the spread of Covid 19 which began in early 2020. But we can take the experience of our agonies such as hunger, poverty, illness, and discrimination of all types, and learn from them and learn to heal them as we live through them.

Those experiences help form us and prepare us to enter the stage of each day with appreciation. The “rapture” as she calls it in her poem, is all around us here on the land and awaits our appreciation of it. There are feasts for the eyes everywhere you look from the towering pine and hardwood forests to our wetlands and rolling meadowlands, to the sequential blooms of the plants in the gardens surrounding the Inn.

“Take the earth for your own large room
And the floor of the earth with sunlight
And hung around with silver wind
For your dancing place.”

The three of us who call this place home are privileged to welcome you here to this stage of nature’s beauty. For 18 years we have been able to watch people come and join us and appreciate the beautiful pieces of earth that surround us. We experience how they fall into its rhythms slowly and make of this earth their own “large room carpeted with sunlight” and make of it their “dancing place”.

May it be so for you.
Marcia, Pat, and Sharon

PS

We have been open since mid-June for our retreat groups whose members are fully vaccinated and all has gone well. We are impressed with the amount of safety precautions that our guests have been willing to use. We look forward to the fall season with the hope that the current or future variants of Covid can be kept to a minimum so that we can continue to welcome people to the Inn.