Open while it lasts — a summer guide to energy, expression, and the art of beginning

The garden that keeps time

I have a small shrub called Rose of Sharon in the garden. In spring it grows small, pointed leaves in bright green. Then in July, the most beautiful pink flowers appear and they stay until the first days of autumn. When I see that blossom, I know summer has truly arrived.

The summer days in Switzerland are often quietly beautiful. A breeze coming from the lake, or from somewhere further, wakes me up on a lazy afternoon. Only on the few days each year when the temperature reaches 33 to 35 degrees Celsius do I find myself sweating through my clothes from simply sitting at home. On those days the heat changes everything. The appetite shifts. The head and legs feel heavier than usual. Even a short walk feels like moving against an invisible resistance. The heart beats faster with the smallest effort. Something in the thinking slows too.

I used to think this was the weakness of middle age. I have since learned it is something older and more purposeful than that.

Heaven, earth, and the body as one

The ancient Chinese understood human beings as small but essential participants in a vast natural order. We live within nature, and nature lives within something larger still. The human body carries energy that interacts constantly with the energy field of its surroundings. Your skin is dry when you wake on a winter morning. Your body feels heavier on a humid day. This is not coincidence. It is connection — the living responsiveness between the body and the changing environment. The human body and nature are inseparable. What the season does, the body feels. What the body resists, the season amplifies.

When we move in harmony with that order and stay tuned to the orchestra, we are well. When we resist it, tension accumulates in the body. Left unaddressed, that tension becomes illness. This is the practical logic of preventive medicine, practiced for thousands of years.

The pivot — opening and closing (開闔)

Summer is the season when nature is at its most abundant and most alive. Plants are flowering and fruiting. The air is full of birdsong. Nature plays like an orchestra in full voice. It holds the most energy of the year, and it must open the pivot to let that energy move outward. To follow nature, the energy in your body needs to go outward too.

By contrast, winter is the season of rest. The trees are bare. Animals enter their winter sleep. The last note of the music fades into silence. As nature grows quiet, the body needs to preserve its energy, drawing inward for consolidation and restoration.

This rhythm of “opening and closing” is the governing principle of the seasons, and of the body within them. Summer opens. Winter closes. And the body, if you let it, follows faithfully.

You are meant to radiate in summer, to let energy rise just as heat rises from the earth. You are meant to sweat. The pores are meant to open. The heat is meant to move through you and out. This is the body's most efficient mechanism for releasing heat and clearing accumulated toxins. When you seal yourself inside air-conditioned rooms and avoid perspiring, the heat settles in the body until it becomes something harder to ignore.

But the “opening and closing” does not stop at the skin. The energy moves outward from you not only when your body sweats, but also when you think and express yourself. Do you have a side project that has been waiting too long? Ideas you have not yet written down? A conversation you have been afraid to start? A language you have planned to learn but not yet begun? Summer is the best season for inspiration and self-development, not because the conditions are ideal, but because the pivot is open. Use it before it closes.

Three summer practices

Go outdoors and sweat. Morning or evening, when the sun is gentler — walk, swim, jog. Let the body do what summer is asking of it.

Use rose hydrolat as a toner or face mist to keep the skin fresh through the heat. The scent of rose nourishes the Heart and settles an overstimulated mind. One or two sprays takes thirty seconds and changes the quality of the afternoon.

Write down one thing you have been postponing and one small step you can take this week. Not a plan but a beginning. Use the pivot while it opens.

Before the flowers fall

The Rose of Sharon blooms for a single day. Each flower opens in the morning, holds itself fully open through the afternoon, and falls to the ground by evening. It is the “opening and closing” made visible — the rhythm of energy moving through its complete cycle, without resistance and without regret.

When I notice that the new flowers have stopped appearing and the days are growing shorter, I know the pivot is closing and summer is approaching its end. I always feel that the season has passed too quickly. I have stopped lamenting the heat. Instead I try to use it as an invitation to sweat, to do what I am passionate about, to review my year and catch up on what I set out to do.

Summer does not last. But what we do with it stays in the body long after the Rose of Sharon has finished blooming.