Just a few months ago, at the spring equinox, I stood at the foot of my terraced garden framing a photo of its verdant perfection, an ideal balance of pinks and spring greens, basking in just the right proportion of sunshine and rain. But that perfection was ephemeral, like the equinox itself—a brief moment when day and night, light and dark, hover in perfect balance on the fulcrum of time. Now, as the summer solstice approaches, Nature is showing her true face, and it has nothing to do with balance. How do I know? Because my garden, my private sanctuary, beneficiary of my fond care and attention, is trying to bury me alive.

In the Northern Hemisphere, the summer solstice occurs every year between June 20 and 21, marking the point when the sun climbs to its apex in the northern sky, giving us the most daylight of any day in the year. In the weeks leading up to the solstice, the sun rises higher and higher each day, until it seems to hover unmoving above us. Hence the word “solstice,” a combination of Latin words meaning “sun” and “to stand still.” For those of us who inhale sunlight like oxygen, it’s a precarious and bittersweet time, much like that breathless moment on a roller coaster when you’ve climbed to the top of the first peak and anticipate the coming plunge into the abyss. For light worshippers, the view from the summer solstice to Yule looks like a slow-motion descent into darkness and cold.

This cardinal turning point of the solar calendar has traditionally been a celebration of the earth and the natural world. In ancient times feasting, dancing, and bonfires honored the sun as sustainer of all that grows. In ancient Britain, Druids celebrated the solstice as the wedding of heaven and earth. Traces of this custom persist in the notion that June weddings are fortuitous. The full moon in June was known as the Honey Moon, for June was the time to harvest honey and ferment it into mead, or honey wine. Mead was traditionally served to newlyweds for luck, and from thence came the “honeymoon.”

Having lost its pristine springtime balance, my garden, like the sun, has reached its own pinnacle, not of height but of fecundity, for when it comes to propagation, Nature has no truck with balance or moderation. The procreative urges of trees and weeds, in particular, make professional reproducers like Bob and Michelle Duggar (of TLC’s “Nineteen Kids and Counting”) seem like models of restraint. I live in a forest of poplars, maples, elms, hemlocks, and oaks, and heaven knows I don’t begrudge them a natural instinct to reproduce, having indulged that instinct myself. But really? Must they indulge on such a profligate scale? Have they no sense of proportion?

For this is the season of a million little trees. From my perspective, anyway, it seems like at least that many trees are trying to take root on my property, the vast majority of them germinated from the double samaras produced by a single maple tree. These little “helicopters” flutter down like golden rain and attempt to take root in every square inch of dirt and grass, including the tiny interstices of my gravel driveway. These days when I get home from work, I don’t even have to move from behind the steering wheel to do a bit of gardening. I just lean out the open car door and pluck up a score or two of little maple trees, and another fifty or so on my way to the mailbox, muttering under my breath, “A million little trees. Oh happy day, I’ve got a million little effing trees.” That’s not even counting all the poplar sprouts with their cute little heart-shaped leaves, or the baby hemlocks pushing through the soil like miniature bottle brushes. My rational mind knows that most of these youngsters would die off naturally if left to fend for themselves in the summer heat, but my irrational fear of seeing my property furred over with a forest of seedlings keeps me plucking as fast as I can.

In the back yard, the bamboo is having its own peak experience—and it isn’t even my bamboo! My neighbors over the back fence have a stand of twenty-foot-tall bamboo stalks whose ambition is to colonize my ivy bank, under which their roots extend in malignant tendrils. Late April through June is the season for bamboo propagation. One evening there’s nothing to see out my bedroom window but English ivy, and by morning the bank is host to ten or fifteen gray, papery stalks as thick as my wrist that will grow another eight inches by the time I get home from work. You can almost hear them munching through the soil. Years ago I bought an axe for bamboo-hacking season. Twice a week until late June, when this rapacious invader finally gives up the game, I’m up to my shins in ivy, bending back moist young bamboo stalks and whacking them off at the root. It’s an astonishingly effective form of anger management.

I could describe the ivy that storms my house from all sides in June, or paint a picture of the abundant life forms flourishing in my bathroom, but I think you get the idea. The sun’s ascent in the June sky is raising all of Nature to a crescendo of fertility, a frenzy of fecundity. All of which puts me in mind of peak experiences of the human kind (which do not, in every circumstance, have to do with propagation).           

In the 1960s, American psychologist and philosopher Abraham Maslow coined the term “peak experience” to describe a quasi-mystical, heightened intensity of awareness, happiness, well-being, creativity, or spiritual communion. A peak experience can fill you with awe, inner peace, joy, or a sense of the truth or essence of all things. The senses become acutely focused, while doubts and anxieties fall away. Athletes and artists describe this feeling as being “in the zone,” when distractions vanish, the goal is clear, and the work emerges in effortless perfection. But such experiences aren’t only for the lucky or gifted. They can come to anyone at the most unexpected times. At the risk of seeming like a fairy-tale ogre, I will confess that my first peak experience came at a time when my infant son was fighting for his life.

My son (whom I will call Quinn) had a cold on his first birthday in late July, a bad case of sniffles that evolved first into bronchitis and then to mild pneumonia. He went through one course of antibiotics, and then another and another, each one ramping up the antibacterial firepower. Quinn would seem to get better during each course of treatment, but then would become sicker than before. All the antibiotics did was kill off the weaker bugs, leaving an invincible master race of bacteria to breed and attack my son’s weakened body with renewed vigor. Throughout late summer and fall I took Quinn to the pediatrician at least twice a month, and took days and weeks off work to care for him.

As the Holidays approached, Quinn developed a new symptom—his neck froze. His little chin was locked in an upward tilt, and he couldn’t move his head from side to side. On the doctor’s orders, his father and I rushed him to a hospital emergency department where we had to stand outside in the hallway listening helplessly as strangers bent our baby double and punctured his lumbar spine with a long needle. Thankfully, Quinn didn’t have meningitis, but nobody could tell us why he was so sick.

The crisis came a few days after Christmas when Quinn’s frantic nanny called both his father and me at work, crying, “Quinn is really sick. You need to come get him right now!” We picked him up and rushed home, where his distress became frighteningly clear. As I stripped off his clothes, his steamy little body lolled in my arms. When I took his temperature I felt woozy as the numbers went higher than I thought possible, finally stopping at 105.7 degrees. His dad plunged him into a bath of cool water while I got a bottle of cold juice for Quinn and tried to calm my voice enough to make sense to the doctor, whom I caught on the phone just as he was leaving for the day. He told us to take Quinn immediately to the ER at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC, where he would call ahead and make arrangements for his admission. As we raced to the hospital, I sat in the backseat of the car, talking soothingly to my son while he drifted in and out of consciousness. My mind was seized with panic, unable to comprehend that this beautiful boy, for whom I had waited so long and whose very existence had persuaded me that I was not outside the bounds of God’s favor, could be taken from me before I barely knew him.

Quinn spent four days between Christmas and New Year in a quarantined room at Children’s, isolated from everyone but his parents because of his unidentified infection, and attached to an IV tube delivering a constant barrage of antibiotics to an army of unnamed microbes. His room had a single bed next to the crib, where his father and I took alternating shifts. At the hospital I fed Quinn, rocked him, read to him, changed him, soothed him, interrogated doctors, and castigated nurses who woke him every two hours throughout the night to check his vital signs. When I went home I slept for a few hours, then repacked a bag full of supplies for the baby and food and drink for me and headed back to the hospital.

By now you must be wondering how any decent mother who did not suffer from Münchausen syndrome by proxy could salvage a peak experience from such a nightmare. But here’s the thing. For the four days my baby lay in feverish isolation, I felt a clarity of purpose unmatched at any time before or since. For four days my mind held a single thought; I had just one agenda; the universe consisted of one thing only. The high-wire juggling act familiar to every working mother simply ceased to exist. The monkey cavorting on my mental jungle gym retreated to a silent corner. My nerves stopped buzzing with their usual adrenaline-fueled anxiety. In fact, I was preternaturally calm as I went about the only business at hand, the single purpose that had reserved every space in my world—restoring my son to wholeness. For four days I burned like a candle that never flickered, an experience both intense and liberating. It was like standing on the pinnacle of a mountain, everything inconsequential having fallen away, revealing the essential in its starkest aspect.

Naturally, I wouldn’t wish for a repeat of this sort of peak experience, and I’ve even questioned whether it had any long-lasting effect on my life. Did I learn anything that changed me as a person or a mother? I must have. But to question the usefulness of a peak experience would be missing the point, like gazing on Niagara Falls and calculating how many cups of tea you could make from it. According to Maslow, the value of a peak experience is intrinsic. It “does not make four apples visible where there were only three before, nor do the apples change into bananas. No! It is more a shift in attention, in the organization of perception, in noticing or realizing, that occurs.”

Still, in the years following that peak experience I’ve often yearned to replicate that sense of calm in the midst of chaos, holding as an ideal the image of a candle flame impervious to the wind. But unlike Nature, with its predictable cycles of death and rebirth, solstice and equinox, our peak experiences follow no schedule or agenda. We cannot plan them, repeat them, or will them to occur. We can only strive to be fully awake to all the ordinary moments and their potential for wisdom and rapture, like the dry seeds that hold the promise of a million little trees.