An Ontological Disruption in the Guise of Weather: Or, a Treatise on Summer’s Assault on the Self
“You are not weather. You are liturgy misfiled under meteorology.”
Summer properly understood (and I mean properly, as in minus sunscreen commercials and patio furniture ads featuring ethnically diverse smiling people holding rosé), resists definition in the empirical sense.¹ She does not descend; she infiltrates. She arrives not through equinox or solstice but via some unsanctioned backdoor in the soul. There’s a moment, not calendrical but carnal, when you realize you’ve stopped wearing socks. That’s the doorway. You’ve stepped through.
She refuses the etiquette of arrival. There is no knock, no meteorological RSVP. There is only the unmistakable sensation of heat beginning to talk back. ²
Misfiled Under “Season”
Calling Summer a season constitutes a kind of cosmic understatement. She is not a segment on The Weather Channel. She is a full-body exegesis. She burns sermons into your shoulders and expects you to interpret the peeling skin. She traffics in sensation, not data.
She stretches your skin toward the sun and watches, expressionless, as your nervous system tries to remember pleasure without the mediation of screens or narrative. ³
Your epidermis, previously tasked only with keeping the rest of you from leaking, becomes the front line of revelation. Grass blades brush ankles like whispered dare-me's. Peaches become theological. Bees circle you like distracted deities.
You remember the animal of yourself.
A Brief Yet Essential Rant Against Moderation
Summer does not do “portion control.” She operates exclusively in excess. She is not “aesthetic.” She is aesthetics fever dream after three espressos and a bottle of mezcal. She does not sip. She slurps. She guzzles. She bites into life and lets the juice run down her elbow and dares you to judge her.
Desire, under her stewardship, grows muscular and shameless. It swaggers. It wears linen. It asks for seconds and does not apologize.
Summer doesn’t seduce like a Victorian novel; she seduces like a bass line. ⁴ And if you’re lucky, she brings your body along for the ride.
On the Immediate Need for Embodiment
Under Summer’s jurisdiction, the body stops being a moral project and starts being a playground. Shoulders stop behaving like regrets. Hips recall their ancestral function as joy conductors. The jaw, unhinged from performative alertness, slackens into grin.
Cicadas, those kamikaze troubadours of dusk, do not sing so much as evangelize. Rivers begin to make demands. Fruit gets bossy. Tomatoes forget their place.
The air thickens, yes, but not with malaise—it thickens with invitation.
You are not required to answer in words. A nap will suffice. ⁵
A Failure to Show Up (And the Lesson Therein)
There was a year, I refer to it now as my season of idiocy, when I attempted to ignore her. I stayed indoors. I wore navy. I refused watermelon. I hid behind air conditioning like a draft dodger.
She waited. ⁶ Barefoot, probably holding wildflowers in one hand and a melting Popsicle in the other. She didn’t beg. She never does.
But when I finally stepped out, sweat-stained and sun-blind, she kissed me hard enough to knock loose three months of stored sadness. I tasted citrus. I heard birdsongs I could not source. My spine aligned.
That summer, I remembered that the body can host joy without first submitting a request.
In Praise of Complication
People who call her indulgent mistake complexity for carelessness. She’s not chaos. She’s chiaroscuro. She is sweetness with a wasp in it. ⁷
Summer doesn’t fix you. She reveals. She lays your nervous system bare and waits. There’s wisdom in the hum of bees and the stickiness of mango skin on a wrist. Her curriculum includes paradox, and she teaches by immersion.
She asks, with enviable calm, that you stop editing yourself.
Evidence of Her Continued Mischief
I have seen her in loud laughter. In forgiveness that tastes like salt and plum skin. In hips that sway without regard for spectatorship. ⁸
She appears wherever appetite outpaces etiquette. Wherever joy refuses its leash. Wherever someone dares to want with their whole chest.
She is Gaia without the polite disclaimers. She is divinity without demure. She is the riotous opposite of scarcity.
And you, lucky mammal, get to be here for it.
Final Benediction (or the Best Kind of Gospel)
She offers no bullet points, no inspirational quotes in cursive font. She offers juice. And heat. And the chance to laugh until the structure of your face changes.
Her instructions are sweat based. Her theology involves naps, dripping popsicles, and ungodly amounts of sunscreen. Her rituals smell like charcoal, basil, chlorine, and risk.
She does not belong to your planner. She belongs to the people who dare to feel before asking if it’s okay.
Summer, my liturgy, my fevered yes. Stay. Or maybe let me stay—with myself, with the sun, with the ancient music in my chest that gets louder every June.
“Let the joy be loud. Let the body be praised. Let the sun see you unhidden.”
She didn’t come to coddle. She came to consecrate.
How do you put out so much amazing writing every day? It’s pretty prolific!
So much yes!