Dog Days

THE UPSIDE OF DOWN WEATHER!

Hot, sultry summer weather; also, a period of stagnation. For example, It’s hard to get much work done during the dog days, or Every winter there’s a week or two of dog days when sales drop dramatically. The term alludes to the period between early July and early September, when Sirius, the so-called Dog Star, rises and sets with the sun. The ancient Romans called this phenomenon dies caniculares, which was translated as “dog days” in the first half of the 1500s.

“I don’t want to do anything!” Recognize that feeling? Is it a sign of the times? Could it be the weather? Maybe it’s a combination of everything! The temperature just hit 98 degrees, but the ‘feels like’ temperature is 104! Are you kidding me? Non-stop rain and gloom for two months, and suddenly, we’ve entered the tropics, and not in a good way. 

If the public discourse hasn’t been enough to make you cry uncle, maybe the economy is the convincer. Egg prices at 11 dollars a dozen at Whole Foods. That’s not breakfast, that’s a crisis. The kind that makes you stare at your grocery cart like it’s betraying you. The kind that makes you nostalgic for…last year? A better version of broke.

And somewhere in all that absurdity—heat, prices, pressure—your nervous system starts whispering, “I can’t.” Not in a dramatic way. More like a sigh that’s been holding its breath too long.

But listen. Maybe that sigh is sacred. All is not lost! There might be some actual benefit to those sweat rings. Just maybe, this time can be restorative. Not every season in nature is ‘productive’. These are the fallow times. The field that must lie bare to be restored before it can bloom again. In that quiet, seemingly inactive time, the potential for flourishing is being built. It is an essential time. Without it, we would have another ‘great dust bowl’, a time in the thirties when we drove the ground to keep producing, no matter the season. We gutted the land for five long years, creating untold hardship. All by pushing when we weren’t meant to push.

Because these days? They’re not meant for sprinting. They’re not meant for summits. It’s the in-between. The space where life stops asking you to grow and starts asking you to rest. Let the fields lie bare. Let the body go soft. Let the ambition dissolve into stillness.

That’s not failure. That’s wisdom.

The dog days aren’t here to punish you. They’re here to recalibrate you. Like the land after harvest, like a heart after heartbreak—they invite you to be empty, on purpose. They say: stop producing. Start listening. They say: feel everything you’ve been outrunning.

So go ahead. Wilt a little. Stretch out on the floor and stare at the ceiling fan. Cancel something. Laugh at the price of blueberries. Let the heat slow you down enough to hear yourself think. Something quiet and magical is growing within.

This isn’t laziness. It’s a seasonal intelligence. It’s your body remembering how to live in rhythm with the world instead of against it.

So when you feel the funk, don’t fight it. Meet it. Gently. Say, “Of course I don’t want to do anything right now. It’s 104 degrees and my soul is sunburned.” Sometimes doing nothing is the greatest ‘something’ that we can do.

And then breathe. Because that honesty? That is the first breeze.