Heat Season, A Revisit

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In heat season, I learn the language of daylight, sweat, sunlight, rain. How to cool the house; how to smell and sense the clouds that may pour and note an atmosphere that grows thick and swells with afternoon rain. How to watch water, or light, as it shines on patches of grass and living; how to hear to the language of body and feel what cell, heartbeat, pores have to say.

I misjudge. I leave my house and for a run at the same time a cloud readies itself then releases a thick wall of rain, and by the end of the first mile, my clothes hang, drenched and heavy. An hour later the sun returns, and by noon the sun pours in, bright and hot against the windows, slanted up toward clarity of another blue sky.

What was drenched is dry after an hour in direct light. Be careful in the heat, we say. Words pour into each other; you drink glass after glass of breath, time, and water. Speak words as if water and your sentences move fluidly; words wave forward and remind and refresh, or catalyze reverence for your own body or someone else, and a sound spoken becomes one to replenish, as syllables impart invocations of care.

I used to think careful meant an atmosphere of trepidation: a tiptoe forward, a held breath, the taste of hesitation. Careful is a hand held, an arm stretched before traffic, or a cup of caution. I thought of careful to mean a vein of inaction; a flaw, or a foil to confidence. But careful is a cup filled—the depth of the basin of ocean, quarry, lake—and can be felt, seen, created in as many facets as light as refracts from drops of water. Care, embodied, lives as the strong container of mind and body poured into with drop after drop after drop of activity chosen with intention that gives water to the ground of understanding. Words with careful activity can replenish, whether chosen slowly and thoughtfully, or spoken internally; whether shared, held, contained, or spilled with ink on a page.

A balance of air pressure, heat, heart, timing, and the coolness of water is the lesson I hear from the season. Summer is a height, a peak, a point of intensity—a season immersed in the need for water, an atmosphere wherein we wrestle with sweat and learn to speak the rising, passing language of this swelling heat. Sweat is an expression of a body or a signaling, of the body finding balance, a dialogue between skin, water, atmosphere, and heat, returning down to homeostatic state. Lightning draws an electric line between the sky and ground, replenishing the landscape with nitrogen as rain quenches the thirst of plants and soil seeking water. Storms rip across the city; embodying balance is knowing what to water, when to heat, and how much. Knowing when to lead ourselves into sunlight, or down to the still, cool of water.

In the heat, I feel the salt of sweat and watch bodies of knowledge and light become their own wellsprings of water. I cannot write on the swell of the season or the nature of being well without acknowledging those who are dying, literally, for water. The capacity for the balance between love and suffering is what Thich Nhat Hahn illuminates in Interbeing: “We need to know how to water the good, positive seeds within us so we can bear the more distressing things.” I do write as a reminder to the ways words and activity, like sweat, salt, or water, can be a direction out from a knot or internal storm to a place of balance. To move beyond is to expand out like sweat, sun, cloud, or lungs, past a stuck point, then out, again, into daylight or inward, expanding into insight. To release toxins through pen and pores is to pour nourishment into your body and mind through the channel of time, and embody the vessel of containers, and bring forth new strength to hold ourselves and each other.

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For a time I felt that strength meant as much as you could carry or only what one could muscle or how much could be forced through by way of exertion. But I learn to live softer and stronger, still. Sweat rises from pores then drops to the ground as do tears or waves and rain, and water shows strength repeated in softening and continuing. We let go of sweat and thinking; worry lessens the grip of thought and moves through pores, and knowing what to water and when means sometimes you take yourself to the edge of the water, or into the rain, and then let go, and trust the ground of breath and life, feeling strength in yourself supported by living, all skin and cells in the sun pouring in. We come to balance: the place where water and sun in sky meet.

What is strength, and how to be like sun, ground, breath, water? I ask this into haze, days, cloud cover, an internal dialogue inquiring into sky. A nearby tree offers shade and solace from midday as reply.

This piece was first published July 2025. To read through the full archive, consider upgrading to paid.

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Reading Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Jung and “Living Like Weasels” by Annie Dillard. Finding rhythm on a run, and in chopping lettuce, with herbed yogurt lemon vinaigrettes for salads. I’m in the process of working on a new collection of journals for Odette Press—a hint of this process for you, above.