The End of Summer

Dear Crew,

Today I sat in the sun at Gärtnerplatz and cried.

Before me, the flowers in all their glory. A blue sky. Warmth on my skin. Actually, a perfect summer day.

And yet I thought: This summer hardly felt like summer to me.

At the beginning of the year, I had a vision of what it would be like. Lighthearted. Joyful. Festivals. Dancing. Being outdoors. Long evenings. Few obligations. Living life to the fullest.

And then it got hot. Really hot, in fact. But somehow, my inner summer just couldn't keep up.

I kept needing peace and quiet and a place to retreat to. Things were stirring that I didn’t yet have the words to describe. And while it was the height of summer outside, I found myself thinking about my origins, my ancestors, death, old stories, and places that had existed long before I was born. Not exactly what I had imagined a carefree summer would be like.

Today I realized that this makes me sad.

Sometimes it's enough to admit: I was looking forward to something. And then things turned out differently, and that's disappointing. Even if what happened instead was really wonderful. Because it was.

As I sat there, it struck me how many things had happened that summer that I could never have planned.

An idea suddenly turned into a music video. I ended up in Bern. Then in Helsinki. In Tallinn. In a small town in Estonia where part of my family is from. People showed up. Stories unfolded. Ideas took shape. None of this was on my calendar at the beginning of the year.

Perhaps the real shift this summer was to let go of form and allow life to surprise me.

I had confused lightness with a certain way of being. With long summer evenings and that feeling that nothing particularly difficult was being asked of me at that moment.

But maybe "lightness" can mean something else as well. Maybe it also means that life doesn't have to follow my exact vision for something good to come of it. That I can have a plan and then let it go. That something completely different can grow out of an idea.

That doesn't mean I want to sugarcoat the summer I'd dreamed of. I still would have liked to have had it—the carefree one, the one that would have felt like sunshine even on the inside. At the same time, I can learn to love what came of it instead.

Over the past few days, I've started pulling my fall clothes out of the basement. And after a whole summer in my soft Birkenstocks, I suddenly want to wear my cowboy boots again. You walk differently in them. More firmly.

Maybe a new season is beginning for me with this feeling: I want to wear different shoes again.

It seems my inner seasons don't always match the ones outside my window. While it was summer outside, inside me it was sometimes already November. And maybe, somewhere inside me, it will still be summer even when the leaves are already falling outside.

And that's exactly why I was able to say goodbye today—to this hot summer that felt so little like summer, and to everything that didn't happen .

I was sitting in the sun. I looked at the flowers and cried. And eventually, it was okay.

Now fall can come. I can already sense it faintly.

Harvest time.

There are already some wonderful events scheduled.

And it’s a return to more structure, while still leaving plenty of room for surprises. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned this summer, it’s that the best things in life often begin where the planned structure ends.

With love and sand-colored cowboy boots,
Jeannette