Summer’s Passing: Emerson’s Reflections and Hanshan’s Blossoms

July 31, 2020

Today’s reflections remind us of summer’s twin truths—its abundance and its brevity.

In July’s full bloom, it may seem endless: the long days, the lush trees, the song of cicadas vibrating through the heat. Yet even as we delight in it, we sense its impermanence. Summer, like life itself, glows brightest when we remember that it cannot stay.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, with his usual serenity and insight, draws an eloquent parallel between our fear of death and our reluctance to let go of summer.

To him, both are natural stages of being, softened by the richness they bring:

Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have had our day.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet

Emerson transforms what so often troubles us—the fleetingness of joy—into a kind of wisdom.

When the season has given its fullness—the fruit, the warmth, the sunlit excess—then its passing feels less a loss than a rightful rest. Nature does not fear its cycles, and neither should we.

Across centuries and continents, the Chinese poet Hanshan—a hermit-sage of the Tang Dynasty—offers a similar reflection, though in his characteristic tone of humble clarity. While Emerson sees fulfillment in endings, Hanshan observes the fragility of beauty itself in a single moment:

You have seen the blossoms among the leaves;
tell me, how long will they stay?
Today they tremble before the hand that picks them;
tomorrow they await someone's garden broom.
— Hanshan, Chinese Tang Dynasty

Hanshan’s question hangs like a whispered truth in a quiet garden.

The blossoms are here and already gone; beauty and transience are one and the same. His calm acceptance of this reality reminds us that even the briefest life has meaning simply through being lived—through being seen and felt before it fades.

Together, Emerson and Hanshan bring us a harmony of understanding.

Emerson invites us to gather life’s ripeness without regret; Hanshan teaches us to bow gently to impermanence.

Between them lies the full philosophy of summer: that the flower’s fall is not tragedy but completion.

And so we, too, can welcome both the bloom and the fading sun, grateful for the warmth while it lasts and at peace when the evening comes.