THE UPSIDE OF DOWN WEATHER!
Hot, sultry summer weather; also, a period of stagnation. For example, It’s hard to get much work done during the dog days, or Every winter there’s a week or two of dog days when sales drop dramatically. The term alludes to the period between early July and early September, when Sirius, the so-called Dog Star, rises and sets with the sun. The ancient Romans called this phenomenon dies caniculares, which was translated as “dog days” in the first half of the 1500s.
“I don’t want to do anything!” Recognize that feeling? Is it a sign of the times? Could it be the weather? Maybe it’s a combination of everything! The temperature just hit 98 degrees, but the ‘feels like’ temperature is 104! Are you kidding me? Non-stop rain and gloom for two months, and suddenly, we’ve entered the tropics, and not in a good way.
If the public discourse hasn’t been enough to make you cry uncle, maybe the economy is the convincer. Egg prices at 11 dollars a dozen at Whole Foods. That’s not breakfast, that’s a crisis. The kind that makes you stare at your grocery cart like it’s betraying you. The kind that makes you nostalgic for…last year? A better version of broke.
And somewhere in all that absurdity—heat, prices, pressure—your nervous system starts whispering, “I can’t.” Not in a dramatic way. More like a sigh that’s been holding its breath too long.
But listen. Maybe that sigh is sacred. All is not lost! There might be some actual benefit to those sweat rings. Just maybe, this time can be restorative. Not every season in nature is ‘productive’. These are the fallow times. The field that must lie bare to be restored before it can bloom again. In that quiet, seemingly inactive time, the potential for flourishing is being built. It is an essential time. Without it, we would have another ‘great dust bowl’, a time in the thirties when we drove the ground to keep producing, no matter the season. We gutted the land for five long years, creating untold hardship. All by pushing when we weren’t meant to push.
