Summer Loving
If the question is summer loving, the answer is yes, please.
By Jaclyn Elizabeth Rose
The notion of summer loving may illicit a throwback to an era of unbridled expression, experimentation, and passionate displays, but summer and love are timeless companions through all eras. Some more memorable than others.
Elementally speaking, summer and love both share an affinity to fire. The fire element rules summer, the same element that rules the heart. Which is why we often associate summer with the season of love.
Across cultures, we unequivocally associate the heart with love. All organs have high and low emotional correlations, but no other organ is referenced so unanimously. Take the spleen, which is responsible for clarity of spirit, or worry and overthinking in its low form. We don’t ask, how is your spleen today? Nor do we celebrate a holiday, sending cards and chocolates, shaped like a spleen. But the heart, everyone agrees, is where love belongs.
Perhaps this is because the heart is such a dynamic organ, constantly pumping, circulating, and expressing. At only 6 weeks in utero, a heartbeat appears, and a woman is already bonded to this tiny promise. When someone’s heart stops, it causes heartbreak for their living relations. We pledge our hearts to one another and listen deeply for its guidance.
What does fire have to do with all of this? Fire takes its shape in summer in the warmth and light of our sun, which reaches its zenith on the summer solstice. This life-giving, radiating warmth finds its expressions in the body and mind in qualities such as luminosity, joy, passion, intelligence, ambition, chemistry, and transformation. As our planet tilts closer to the sun in summer, we experience all of these qualities more dynamically.
With the longer days, summer naturally denotes a time of more activity. Many of us travel more or spend more time socializing. The warmth welcomes us outside, moving our bodies, mingling, adventuring, and exploring. We fill ourselves with light in the summer, just as a squirrel fills its cache with nuts in the autumn. For those of us who live outside the equator, this influx of light is an essential component of hormonal regulation and emotional well-being through the rest of the year.
Fire needs a continual source of fuel for its expression, just as the seeds and intentions we planted in spring need steady input as time goes on. Come summer, many of us find ourselves busy with work, projects, gardens, or social lives, stoking passion projects and the many ongoing expressions of life.
But with all this buzz of summer activity comes the risk of over-exposure. Just as a golden glow can turn to a painful sunburn, fire has the capacity not only to transform, but also to destroy. We see this summer after summer in prevailing wildfires that spread uncontrollably under the right set of conditions.
This can show up as the glow-up that obliterates the relationship rather than revitalizing it. As the exhaustion after non-restorative travel. The burnout at the job you originally felt passionate about, but couldn’t put down. Or trying to be everything for everyone, and losing track of oneself.
In all its glory, fire needs careful tending if we want to harness its transformative qualities.
Water is the elemental counterbalance to fire, and for many of us, summer and water go hand in hand. Whether swimming or simply being beside a body of water, we naturally gravitate to the cooling, hydrating properties of water that we so desperately need in summer heat. Likewise, many of the juicy fruits and vegetables that grow in the summer months are brimming with hydrating, nutrient-rich waters, helping us stay cool and balanced from the inside out.
Aside from this natural pair, fire is also balanced to an extent with earth and grounding. Just as a shovel of dirt can put out a spark, staying grounded prevents us from spreading ourselves too thin or burning ourselves out.
Grounding takes many forms, and may be as simple as a few moments of contemplative breathing daily, ritualizing the sunrise and sunset, relaxing on the earth regularly, preparing a nourishing meal from the garden without rushing, taking a floral bath, preparing a cooling herbal tonic, journaling, listening to calming music, walking a pet, or whatever form inspires a return to oneself. The form itself is not important, but rather, how it makes one feel.
Weaving these quiet rituals into our days creates a natural balance to the outward expressions of the season. Summer is designed to activate the heart, and that is a beautiful thing- in moderation. A spark of joy is different than the mania after too many espressos. Summer asks us to lean into our joy, to go toward what lights us up, to take the risk, and give expression to what we are passionate about.
Joy is our natural kindling, a slow release of neurochemicals that feeds our loving expressions. It is a precious resource. One we must protect with care and attentiveness.
While discipline and consistency are often what we associate with fire’s transformative process, the transformations that last, the ones that yield the sweetest fruit, aren’t those that arrive by will. Rather, they arise from the essence of devotion. From that original spark of love inside our very own chests.
Cheers to the slow burn.
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