I live this poem often in the evenings when I sit in my garden after dinner and read, listen to music or just marvel at the “inventions of summer.”
Right now, I’m reading another walking book “A Time of Gifts.” It’s the first of a trilogy by Patrick Leigh Fermor, who walked in 1933 at the age of 18 from Hook of Holland to Constantinople. It is transporting.
Tonight I was taken to the lost “kingdom” of Bohemia and in my mind, I went back to the early ‘60s when I frequented a coffeehouse in Toronto called The Bohemian Embassy. It was all Chianti bottles and candles with folk songs sung by real people. It was also a place where you dreamed of romantic adventures to magical places far from home.
After university I spent several years living a Bohemian life in Europe. I came back to Canada to live the antithesis. I have no regrets. However, the ghosts of that eccentric lifestyle still haunt me.
Maybe this is why I plant a garden and walk Caminos. I need to escape to a mystical world of ancient wonders – a world full of rich tapestries, old roses, lost rivers, dark mountains, soft music and eternal summer.
The roses are from my garden. They are the remnants of a forgotten world. I nurture them, as I nurture my dreams and they fill my life with a Bohemian richness, as does poetry. In a way I live Mary Oliver’s poem everyday in summer, when the roses are in bloom.