Yesterday was perfect Maine summer . . . dry, warm, breezy, and bright, cooling into a sitting-around-the-campfire evening and deep open-window sleep. I spent the day puttering among small household tasks, and then we invited our neighbor over for wood-grilled flank steak, garlic bread, and a salad. This was our first time entertaining at our new outside table, and it was so fun to hang out in the yard as evening rolled in, moving between table and fire, sharing the desserts she'd brought from our neighborhood baker (who just won best pastry chef at the James Beard Awards. I tell you, the quality of the food in Maine is ridiculous; there are so many great chefs and bakers).

Today, after a few hours of pleasant dawdling at home, T and I are going to ride the mailboat out into Casco Bay. He has no interest in Father's Day, so we always ignore it. Our day will just be a day together . . . watching people and birds and sky and water, and hoping for porpoises.

On a walk the other day, a poet friend was telling me about a writer (if I remember correctly he was also a Jesuit priest) whom she’d met recently at a residency. Like her, he was working on a book, so they talked a lot. His focus was exploring the concept of living from a place of abundance versus living from a place of scarcity—not as regards money or possessions but as a worldview . . . whether we see life as an overflow, as a messy, conflicting stew of influences, puzzlements, curiosities, or as an ascetic narrowing, in which we shave away alternative visions.

I’ve pondered this idea often since our conversation. It’s an interesting metaphor for states of mind, at the very least. As my friend described it, the notion is also a way to consider why some people struggle to allow themselves to admit joy. In the words of another friend: there are the people who say, "What a beautiful day!" and there are those who say, "We'll pay for this nice weather." There are the people who cannot stop perseverating about the news. And there are the people who forget to look at the headlines.

Abundance, says my poet friend, is what she felt when she spread a hundred uncollected poems out in her writing studio and groaned, What a mess! And then suddenly was really happy.