This Sunday passed, I heard the voice of the summer. I listened to the crickets (or perhaps one cricket?) outside my window. There was a pause in the day. The neighborhood was quiet as if the children were all collectively taking one deep breath. I had taken a break from my yard work. In the stillness of a sunny, warm afternoon, more August-like than September, I listened with clarity and precision to the voice of the cricket, echoing the vibration of the last days of summer. Should I interject a sad tone to the song? That would be my emotional coloring, not necessarily the cricket's. The sound was a statement of resonance, nothing more and nothing less - the entirety of the message found in each single note or vibration: Beauty, warmth, comfort, fullness - a ripe, sweet quality - all my senses mixed together - how summer feels and tastes. Was it clear to me, in that moment, that I have a limited number of summers on this earth? (Not necessarily.) That this summer has passed, before I even acknowledged it? Appreciated it? Gave thanks and a blessing for it? (More likely.) Somehow in that emotional limitation, I also felt an eternal quality to the song, and in that moment time stopped entirely. I stepped off the physical reality of a spinning earth, revolving around the sun, the tiniest fragment imaginable in a huge milky spiral, constantly moving and changing, this moment gone, never to return. . .a whole life of passed by opportunities? In that one moment I accepted the cricket's song as proof enough that I had existed somewhere in time and space, but I was also beyond time and space. Somehow that moment was enough.