The Duality of Summer: 

Remember when you'd go back to school every fall and your teacher would ask, "So, what did you do this summer?" Cue the montage of highlight-reel answers — beach trips, camp, maybe a sunburn or broken bone you're still proud of.

Here's my honest answer this year: I felt everything. Connection and exhaustion. Wonder and frustration. Joy and disappointment — sometimes all in the same afternoon. This blog has been floating around in my head for months, because it's really about something bigger than my summer. It's about duality — how two opposite things can be true, and present, at the exact same time.

I got the clearest picture of that on July 4th, floating on my paddleboard on the lake across from my neighborhood. On one side of the sky: big, gray, ominous storm clouds. On the other: blue sky, white fluffy clouds, sun blaring through like nothing was wrong. I sat there for a solid 30 minutes (staying close enough to shore, because I'm a Coloradan and I know better than to test lightning) just watching to see which one would win.

Neither did. They just... coexisted. Eventually it settled into a lovely partly sunny day. And I couldn't stop thinking about how that was exactly what I'd been feeling — excited for the holiday, melancholy about how the day was unfolding. Opposites, existing in tandem, the way they always have.

This summer handed me two front-row seats to that same truth, through two organizations doing work I deeply believe in.

In June, my husband and I hosted two emerging adults — freshly graduated 18-year-olds — through American Exchange Project, which creates immersive experiences designed to build real connection between Americans from wildly different backgrounds. I spent seven days as program support (and designated van driver) with 25 eighteen-year-olds exploring our home turf in Colorado: camping in Rocky Mountain National Park, white water rafting, hiking, doing yoga with goats (yes, really), touring the state capitol, and swapping potluck dishes representing a dozen different states. We got launched out of a raft together. Some froze in tents together. They hit up the local Walmart together. And somewhere in all of that, I watched young people brave enough to leave their comfort zones meet people utterly unlike themselves — and choose curiosity over fear, every time.

The second organization was Project: Camp, which builds free, trauma-informed camps for kids affected by disaster. I served as an on-call director in Spokane, WA, helping run a camp for kids displaced by wildfires. Every single kid we cared for had been touched by those fires — directly or indirectly. One dad thanked us for holding space for his three sons, admitting he wasn't sure his middle son would ever fully trust him again — he'd promised the fire wouldn't jump the river. It did. Those boys spent their days with other kids carrying the same fear, the same disruption, the same disbelief — and somehow, still finding room to play. We forget how much healing happens in the simple stuff: a place to build something, a game to sit down and play, an adult who gives you their full attention and doesn't look away.

Two very different summers-within-my-summer. Same thread: people finding belonging in the middle of hard things.

And then, because duality apparently wasn't done with me yet, we closed out the season visiting our two adult kids — wake surfing, hitting a state fair, biking one downtown and walking another, riding a carousel, playing pool, spotting Alaskan wildlife from a boat, hiking near a glacier, going to a concert, sharing a room like it was 2001 again, and baking way too many chocolate chip cookies. Pure, uncomplicated joy. No storm clouds required.

So — good and bad, easy and hard, sunshine and storm. They don't take turns. They show up together, and somehow we're still standing at the end of it, occasionally with cookie dough on our hands.

What about you? What duality did your summer hold — and what did you learn from letting both things be true at once?