‘Joie de vivre’ as we celebrate Midsummer

Country Living with Francis Farragher

Here and there when the guilt of ‘nearly missing’ Mass at the weekend feels like an errant stone falling on my big toe, I make the trip to Athenry on a Sunday evening where a bit of catch-up is completed on all things spiritual.

A few weeks back, Fr. Benny McHale – who always likes to spin a few yarns to hold our attention – told the tale of the woman he gave the lift to on a cracking summer’s morning . . . one of those days that would even make a grouch smile.

When he greeted her with the words: “Isn’t it one lovely day” she immediately shattered his positivity with that inspirational line of negativity, so common with Irish weather pessimists: “Oh stop Father, we’ll pay for this yet.”

Well Midsummer’s Day has barely passed us by and I must have endured 43 moans about: “It’ll be all downhill from here on. We won’t feel now until the Races and then the kids will be back to school.”

There are colleagues of mine who moan about the despair of growing old even though they’re the picture of good health – the ‘big trick’ in all of this as I have discovered [maybe rather slowly] is just to take one day at a time, try to enjoy it to the fullest, get a bit of exercise, a good night’s sleep and then start all over again the following morning.

The longest day of the year might have passed – this year here in Galway it was last Monday, June 20, when the sun rose at 5.08am and set at 10.08 coming tantalisingly close, without making it, to giving us a potential 17 hours of sunlight.

In terms of that enormous window of summer light, most of us will notice very little difference from the first days of June right through to the end of July, so there really is no point in wishing our lives away and worrying about the shorter days at a time when Midsummer is at its peak and the season of light still has a long way to run.

There’s a lovely French phrase – Joie de vivre – that translates into the joy of living and summer time is surely the season when the biggest effort of all should be made to embrace that philosophy.

In pagan times, mid-summer was celebrated with some gusto by all and sundry with bonfires, wild parties, singing, dancing and carousing, and even when the Christians took over the feast, they also eventually went the way of enjoying this time of year.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.