Summertime Sadness
And ways to enjoy it still.
We all know the song and we all know the feeling. The very unique flavour of the summertime blues. Your friends post Instagram stories from beautiful locations, lounging, limbs stretched, offering their bodies to the warmth of the Sun, freshness of lakes and the sea. They dance, they kiss, they have sex. They wear beautiful dresses, drink beautiful drinks and live beautiful lives. Maybe there are weddings, graduation parties and large communion tables. Only you, it seems, have nothing. The summer becomes long and lonely and you look towards October for when life will return.
The external light and vibrancy polarises against the heavy stagnation and darkness that we carry within. It is the infinite dance between Sun and Saturn, the luminosity and the dark. Their polarities most observable at the most polarised seasons: winter & summer. In winter, the outer world is dark, Saturnine, and so the light shines within during our holidays and gatherings; in summer, the outer world is bright, and the internal darkness and passivity increases. This passivity manifests in the positive associations with summer as well: the lounging, the slowness, the basking in the Sun, like reptiles by the bodies of water, on the rocks with warm sun above. But if there is any melancholy, sorrow, loneliness, these will become very visible to us too. The Sun shines upon our sorrow, grief, betrayed hopes, tender dreams and desires. Perhaps shame from all of it being the way it is. From being left behind.