chasing the infinite summer

each year I wish away the winter, as if I have the power to change the seasons..

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Living in the south can be disorienting. Weather patterns and seasons so often correlate to the cycles of our lives. Since I was a little girl, I learned to recognize exactly what was to come by the turning of each season. There is a steadiness in it.

My birthday was met by the first day of school in the fall, as the weather began with a chill in the mornings waiting at the bus stop. The tall corn fields mark when harvest arrives and my small two-stop light town lines venders on the sidewalks of Main Street for harvest festival. Halloween sometimes invited the first snow fall, if it was going to be a cold year, and by the end of November you were preparing to wake up 20 minutes early in order to warm up the car in the driveway before going anywhere. Spring is the longest to wait for, with snow falls tricking you in-between, the wet and muddy ground giving way to new life and new bud. As the sun keeps us company longer, you know summer is near. The last few weeks of school mean nothing, no one can focus, the schedule fills with half days and you unpack your shorts and tank tops and scrounge coins to buy an ice cream from the place in town after school. Your friends ride their bikes between houses and you jump from the bridge on the road into the river, not caring if it’s safe enough to jump. Your shoes stick to the hot pavement as you run between houses, building fires in the woods of friends, desperate for anything to keep your attention long enough. There is an energy there like no other. Summer meant access to my best days, a version of myself that is no longer burdened by responsibility or the brutal cold— but invited to play along. Summer equated to freedom. Who are we to not endlessly chase it?

In the Carolina’s, there is less consistency of the seasons I grew up with, and much more summer. The heat lingers past Thanksgiving, with walks on the beach for Christmas Day. It can leave you feeling as though time is unmoving, never passing— luring you to stay just a little longer.

I chose this disorientation, willingly, purposefully, to chase the high of the endless summer. I don’t think I was aware of my reasonings at the time. I moved here with the intention of keeping it around.

In our yoga practice, Kelly Jean often talks of the importance of the seasonal body.

How the down and in are necessary for ridding and shedding and the promoting of eventual new growth. I grew to love yin yoga because it forced me into everything I could never do: sit still and process. Yin poses invite you to explore the sitting with, the releasing of, the discomfort in… with nothing to do but be. This practice is the direct opposite of the infinite summer— of the high that comes when pushing your body a million miles a minute in a 95-degree room. It takes patience. And sometimes, it really just sucks.

I hold pigeon pose with the blanket supporting my hip and tuck my head so those practicing on either side of me won’t witness the tears stream down my face. At first, five minutes feels like hell. Years later, sometimes it still does. But it’s the pause I need. For three whole years, I did this practice 6-7 days a week, in community. Sitting still, remembering how to breathe, learning how to sit with it. I walk out of the studio into the 90-degree heat, and find my summer elsewhere.

COVID took this away from many of us, as my beloved safe space closed and was replaced by another thriving business, one I’m sure that is filled with less sitting with and more producing. My own sitting with muscle has nearly diminished.

It’s never a good practice to be constantly in-chase of.

In the months that followed leaving upstate New York last year, a fog had slowly rolled in, reminding me I cannot outrun everything.

The disconnect I felt in my body shrouded all the good things, no matter how fast I kept moving. I was naive to think I had made it through the longest winter season in my life, after healing from the ending of my seven year relationship years ago. As if there would be a way to avoid another turn in temperature, no matter how many times I packed my bags to head back into the southern humidity.

I never believe it though, or recognize the pattern in my own life. I strive for the eternal summer; chasing the high I felt as a kid when school was out, when our bedtime hour seemed endless and you played in the field long after the sun went down. No summer has felt the same since. No Summer is ever long enough, because I need more time to see if the magic will ever return. My birthday rolls around into the colors of October, where I am reminded of my triggers and have to face heartbreak for the next hundredth time even though I promised I was done… kicking and screaming that I did not swim in the ocean one last time before the water chilled and I am tired of the sun going down at 5 and I am tired of letting myself down. For so long, I have fought to keep my life away from this season, one where I am asked to slow down, to feel the hurt, to have to sit still and remember how to do the work. I do not like this season. I cannot handle the anticipatory grief. I like sunscreen. I like living in a world where there are Junes and Julys and Augusts. And bobbing in the waves at midnight to escape the heat that sticks to your skin. I hate the snow, the way it piles up on my car outside and I have to trudge out each morning, fingers freezing as I scrape it all away, long before the warmth of the sun joins me.

It is tiring. I cannot romanticize it. I found myself again, being thrown into the blizzard with no shoes or socks, as if it weren't my fault for being unprepared. Each time I have to make the decision to walk away, to break my own heart, or someone else’s… it reminds me of the too-long new york winters, where I feel like I am being punished for trying to find a little sense of warmth. My pursuit of the infinite summer might kill me, if I don’t start looking ahead to know what is ultimately coming.

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