Esoteric Summer Sickness
and the soup that saved my ass
Dear reader,
Pull up your seat at The Kitchen Table. This is not the dispatch I imagined coming through after the first proper week of summer. I had pictured something more… luminous? Instead, summer arrived, and promptly sent me to bed.
It all started subtly. My period dropped, I was tired, but I chalked it up to the normal depletion that comes at the end of a cycle. Then there was a bit of travel, a gathering to attend, house sitting, caretaking, moving between spaces, and keeping up with responsibilities, all while trying to step into the outward facing energy of the season.
By the time the solstice came and went, my body began to pull me inward. I thought I was creatively tapped. I had no energy or motivation. No desire to write, or post, or think strategically. Even the things I normally love felt like too much.
Then I finally admitted to myself: I wasn’t uninspired, I was coming down with a cold. Which in hindsight, makes perfect sense.
The summer solstice is the longest day, and the outermost point where we enter a season of vitality, expression, and expansion. Simultaneously we move into Cancer season: the season of the shell, the home, the mother, the inner waters, the private room…the body’s deeper needs.
I’ve started to think of being sick as a kind of portal of its own. Not one I would willingly choose, obviously, but a portal nonetheless!
When you are sick, everything stops, and you are brought down to the most basic forms of devotion: nourishment and rest. Sickness strips away the illusion that we are in charge of anything, and in that stripping, I’ve found that there can be an awakening.
I’ve been reading Jack Kornfield’s After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, which feels comically aligned with this exact moment. The central thesis of the book is that awakening is not only found in the transcendent, but how we meet the ordinary, and the inconvenient. There is a humility in being sick that feels spiritually useful. You can’t think your way around it, you have to meet what’s there.
My dreams in particular were carrying tons of information. Dreams get so vivid when we’re sick, and what came through was wild. Instead of doing my usual morning practice, I woke up and wrote down what I remembered. Old people, old patterns and fears around being seen, chosen, desired, rejected. My dreams were showing me another angle of everything I’ve been working through in waking life, but through symbols and feelings instead of thoughts.
I think that illness must loosen the grip of the conscious mind because you are too tired to manage the narrative, and so these little truths can slip through. Perhaps this is where the ‘real’ awakening happens — becoming more honest instead of chasing elevation and efforting. In that way, being sick is not so much an interruption, and more a remembering of the fact that healing is often deeply unglamorous.
I wanted summer to begin with a bang, but instead I was illuminated to the fact that sometimes the portal into a new season is not the wide open door of bright light, but the inward contraction that follows.
X
Madelyne
Summer Sick Day Soup
Below, for paid subscribers, I’m sharing the soup that saved my ass and kept me fed over the course of my cold. The perfect solution for when you’re depleted, and in need of something warm, salty, protein rich, and easy to eat.
