Growing Our Glow

It’s easy to forget, but we start with Fire. Not just the animated merging of sperm and egg, but the Fire that governs the persistent beating of our fleshy hearts which begins just a brief 22 days after conception. These sparked-wonders of our hearts have something to teach us about constancy and commitment, continuing to beat without rest until the moment of our deaths. 

The Fire Element of summer urges us toward a deeper intimacy with the world. Bare shoulders, dripping honeycombs, shoeless feet on dirt, raspberry stained chins, everything seems to want to expand and accelerate in a grand display of kinetic eroticism. 

It is all so brief, this summer peak, this stretch of wild open-heartedness. As I watch the garden phlox bloom and die, the irises bloom and die, the peonies bloom and die, I am once again reminded of just how fleeting it all is. How fast it all feels. We are tasked to hold summer’s beauty, not with a desperate, white-knuckled clutching but with a tender reverence and presence. 

What a challenge it is to go slower these days, with the dry winds of chaos and crazy-making whipping all around us. Summer season/ Fire Element/ Heart energy can be by its very nature, agitating and over-stimulating. I know I’ve been waking earlier than I wish I would. Summer is all about expansion and sometimes it is just too much. Our nervous systems want/need to live in both the expansion and the contraction; they need the flow of moving into retreat in order to re-engage. 

For the last year, I have been deep in the study of somatic therapy and slowly I have been incorporating these studies in my acupuncture practice. If you have missed reading the blog recently, you might check out:

Patterns of Hypervigilance and the Use of East Asian Medicine

The Body as Compass: Where Somatics Meet Traditional East Asian Medicine

Five Signs You Are Living in a High-Alert State (and May Not Realize It)

Somatic Geographies (writings on the intermingling between the land body and our human bodies)

When our nervous systems feel settled, our hearts feel capable and available to being in relational intimacy with everything around us. 

May the warm breezes of the long nights invite you to dawdle outside, staying long enough to watch the cloud patterns change, staying long enough to witness every smudge of color in the sunset, staying long enough to watch the nimble bats catch every last pesky mosquito.

May you go slower. 

Big hugs,

Kendra

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

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