Open Slowly
The spirit of summer enters your veins and supplies itself to you. You needn’t do anything, and you needn’t feel summery to have summer become you.
When summer arrives before you're ready to bloom with it: open slowly. Summer has a way of entering the body and sustaining itself, naturally—much like photosynthesis. It happens on its own.
In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, she tells us of the Potawatomi language and how rocks are animate, as are mountains, water, fire and places. What we call things of the natural world are not things, but beings. I think of summer in this way. Externally, the Earth's tilt is making it lighter, longer. Warm air and green landscapes are quieting the nervous system. Sweat is releasing toxins. On a subtle level, summer might be felt in a particular song; in gradually wearing less at home; through the sound of a fan in the middle of the night, turning and turning. So unfurl into the world gently, knowing summer can take things from there.
Summer’s subtle entrances this year for me:
The scent traveling up the staircase of my childhood home
Laughing
Walking through a greenhouse
Rain curling my hair
“Talk Down” by Dijon
Orange Gelée
A portrait of a peony I made last spring while navigating the death of my mother