The Invitation We Can’t Always Answer

Song of Solomon 2:8-13

The voice of my beloved!

Look, he comes,

Leaping upon the mountains,

bounding over the hills.

My beloved is like a gazelle

or a young stag.

Look, there he stands,

behind our wall,

Gazing in at the windows,

looking through the lattice.

My beloved speaks and says to me:

“Arise, my love, my fair one,

and come away;

for now the winter is past,

the rain is over and gone.

The flowers appear on the earth

the time of singing has come,

And the voice of the turtledove

is heard in our land.

The fig tree puts forth its figs,

and the vines are in blossom;

they give forth fragrance.

Arise my love, my fair one,

and come away.

In Song of Solomon 2:8-13, the woman hears her beloved before she sees them, bounding over mountains, leaping over hills, calling her out into the world. The beloved’s words are why this passage has long been read as a spring song: winter is past, the flowers are appearing, the fig tree is putting out its figs, the vines are in blossom. Arise, they say. Come away.

It's a joyful text. An urgent one. Come outside, it says. Come see what the world is doing.

I agree with that title for this passage, as this song speaks most clearly of spring. Though in Texas, spring arrives late and is hard to pin down before we're already deep into the first heat wave. By the time our vines are actually in blossom, we're often only a few weeks from the kind of heat that makes "arise, come away" feel less like an invitation and more like a threat.

I read an article earlier this week about summertime seasonal depression, a pattern I've come to know well, and have talked with my therapist about for years. Seasonal depression has traditionally been associated with winter: short days, little sunlight, weeks spent indoors avoiding the cold. But the same mechanism runs in reverse for a lot of us in the South or anywhere it’s unreasonably hot. As Texas heat gets more extreme, more people are choosing, or simply needing, to stay inside for large parts of the day. A couple of summers ago, during a stretch of brutal heat, I noticed it in myself for the first time. Even the pool stopped being an escape. By early afternoon it had gone lukewarm, more like a bath than any kind of relief.

I've found this version of seasonal depression both easier and harder to hold than other depressive episodes I've experienced. Easier, in a way, because I know exactly what's causing it; it's not a mystery, it's the heat index. And I know it will lift when the weather turns. Harder, because that same certainty makes it easy to minimize. If it's temporary and explainable, some part of me argues, it shouldn't be allowed to affect me this much. But naming a cause doesn't shrink a feeling. It just gives you somewhere to stand while you're in it.

This is what I keep circling back to in the Song of Solomon text: the beloved calls the woman outside into a world that is, at that exact moment, blooming and alive. It's a beautiful invitation. It's also one that assumes she's able to simply get up and go. Scripture doesn't linger on what it costs her to answer, or what it might mean if, for reasons entirely outside her control, she couldn't.

So if you've found yourself low on the brightest, sunshiniest days this summer, if the invitation to "come away" has felt more like pressure than joy, you are not alone. And I don't think it makes you any less capable of encountering the growth, gratitude, and new beginnings that summer can hold. It might just mean your version of "arise" looks different this season: a shaded porch instead of a hike, an early morning instead of high noon, a small new hobby picked up indoors instead of a grand outdoor one. The fig tree still puts out its figs whether or not you're standing under it to see it happen. The invitation holds. You're allowed to answer it on your own terms, and in your own time.