Last Sips of Summer Nectar

Golds and yellows bless us everywhere. Goldenrod, golden sunflowers, golden grasses, gold(en) finches, golden sunsets. I gather these treasures like a squirrel preparing for winter, placing gold’s warmth, enduring love, and youthful hope in my body’s memory for darker days.

We are in the later stages of the Earth element season and the beginning of everything falling down. We are no longer flowers blossoming towards the sky, we are no longer in the floaty realms of peak summer but instead we are really feeling our feet on the earth. This is an element of substance, form, and feeling into the solid weight of our beingness. Themes arise related to the harvest, gathering, and digestion, all the while we are drawn deeper into our flesh, our embodiment, our dark soil centers. 

The spirit question of the Earth element asks: out of all the thousands of ways to seek mediocre nourishment, what genuinely enriches your life? We are taught to be overly fixated on external sources of nutriment, taking and extracting, without focusing on a soul nutrition that fills our true inner needs. What truly nourishes you and deeply, thoroughly enriches your life?

I’ve always loved that in East Asian medicine, late summer is its own special season. And for good reason. It's a complex time. Somehow the energies of the earth are persistently, devotedly generous, while they are also beginning to move through various states of decline.  It could be argued that it is one of the most challenging transitions of the entire seasonal wheel. We are in the borderlands. Late summer colds surprise us. A subtle nostalgia and early fall depression may set in. A bittersweet awareness of things coming to an end seems to rise with the low-light dawns and the dried plant-bodies in the garden.

This is why I am joining forces with my friend, Dr. Andy Grayson of Create Change Labs to offer a special class for this time of year. It’s called 

Fortify: A Fall Reset to Build Immunity and Resilience

A program designed to help you fortify your immune system in deep, integral ways so you can feel strong, grounded, and resilient through the autumn and into the rest of the year.

 This program is for you if…

•  You feel the seasonal shift and know that this can sometimes be a tough time of year for you.
  
  

•  You tend to get colds, feel run down, or deal with lingering congestion in the fall.
  
  

•  You want to support your lungs and breath — physically, emotionally, and energetically.
  
  

•  You crave a pause — a moment of seasonal reset to care for your body, mind, and spirit.
  
  

•  You want to feel more resilient from the inside out!

Dr. Andy and I taught an in-person course in the spring and we are excited to collaborate again this fall, this time with an online offering. Sign up or learn more here!

What sinks you back to your body? The Earth Element- Spleen Energy time of late summer asks us to better understand the sneaky ways we overthink, overworry, overanalyze which is like a constant, subtle suck of energy from our systems. Instead of leading with our overworked minds, what brings you back to the substance of your body, even in the simplest of ways? 

Perhaps some last bare-foot earth walks before it gets too cold...

Weighed blankets, compressions or gently squeezing the muscles of your arms and legs...

Hug-swaying or rocking...

I’ll leave you with this seasonally suited poem from Mary Oliver. I love the way she describes the heaviness of her body sinking into the “dark skirts” of the earth.

I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.

From:  Sleeping In The Forest Copyright ©:  Mary Oliver

May you feel nourished by the last sips of summer nectar! 

In peace,

Kendra

Excerpt from the Seasonal Love Letter: Earth Element style, '25

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