Dear Readers and Writers,
Summer nears. My 234th edition of The Old Farmer’s Almanac informs me that the first day of summer in the Northern Hemisphere occurs on June 21, 2026, at 1:24 A.M. Pacific time. This event marks the longest day and shortest night of the year, signaling the astronomical beginning of the summer season.
Our bodies (and our dream bodies) are generally our most intimate experiences of Nature. We’ll attune and rest there then free write and share.
Inasmuch as we are cells in the body of our species, the more empty of trauma and unhelpful conditioning, and the more physically strong and refined, and the more full of unobstructed love and light and life each our bodies can be, each cell can be..the better, always and especially at this beginning time of the Great Turning.
Our bodies are biological and energetic expressions of Source, seamlessly interwoven with the All on all levels of Life, material and subtle and on formless levels. It’s all the Sacred.
This is most intimate.
Consider the body of the planet, its 4 elements Earth Water Fire and Air— 5 including Space or Ether— and those 4 same elements in the microcosm of your body, from feet and legs (Earth) to kidneys and bladder area (Water) to digestive organs (Fire) to chest and lungs (Air)—including a fifth element, the substratum of primordial Awareness. Loving Presence.
Right now, the Fire element comes forward as the summer sun heats Turtle Island and up on through the rest of the Northern Hemisphere.
Whew! The heat is on.
If and when you write, you might want to write from your body about the fiery heat and the beauties of summer. Your body remembers summers.
Ready for some readin’? This is a longer than usual letter. I want to feature some special poems-as-possible-prompts for pondering. A preponderance of the following poems are also intimate, largely sexual in content, frank honorings of the sacred procreative energy that brought us all here.
You might tenderly hug yourself or gently tap yourself all over and say or whisper “I AM HERE” just to embody your being a touch further before diving into to a few of my favorite of the 9 sections of a great poem about the body, by the great American bard of the body, Walt Whitman:
I Sing the Body Electric
1
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?
3
I knew a man, a common farmer, the father of five sons,
And in them the fathers of sons, and in them the fathers of sons.
This man was of wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person,
The shape of his head, the pale yellow and white of his hair and beard, the immeasurable meaning of his black eyes, the richness and breadth of his manners,
These I used to go and visit him to see, he was wise also,
He was six feet tall, he was over eighty years old, his sons were massive, clean, bearded, tan-faced, handsome,
They and his daughters loved him, all who saw him loved him,
They did not love him by allowance, they loved him with personal love,
He drank water only, the blood show’d like scarlet through the clear-brown skin of his face,
He was a frequent gunner and fisher, he sail’d his boat himself, he had a fine one presented to him by a ship-joiner, he had fowling-pieces presented to him by men that loved him,
When he went with his five sons and many grand-sons to hunt or fish, you would pick him out as the most beautiful and vigorous of the gang,
You would wish long and long to be with him, you would wish to sit by him in the boat that you and he might touch each other.
5
This is the female form,
A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot,
It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,
I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor, all falls aside but myself and it,
Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what was expected of heaven or fear’d of hell, are now consumed,
Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response likewise ungovernable,
Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all diffused, mine too diffused,
Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching,
Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice,
Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn,
Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’d day.
This the nucleus—after the child is born of woman, man is born of woman,
This the bath of birth, this the merge of small and large, and the outlet again.
Be not ashamed women, your privilege encloses the rest, and is the exit of the rest,
You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.
The female contains all qualities and tempers them,
She is in her place and moves with perfect balance,
She is all things duly veil’d, she is both passive and active,
She is to conceive daughters as well as sons, and sons as well as daughters.
As I see my soul reflected in Nature,
As I see through a mist, One with inexpressible completeness, sanity, beauty,
See the bent head and arms folded over the breast, the Female I see.
That 5th section is beautiful and absolutely pioneering work, albeit perhaps idealized. What do you think of it?
In 1975, I began to experience a deeper connection with the energetic sensitivity and soul wisdom of my body. This may have been catalyzed by a series of 10 Rolfings (very deep body work) and the sacrament of my marriage to Leslie Berman Oelsner. in late April that year.
Here’s are 2 accounts from the summer of 1975 that touch on that enhanced connection, which vitalized me. I share them in the present tense because they happened with such immediacy:
Guidance for the Summer Solstice
After our wedding in April, 1975, Leslie and I begin a period of travel. We’ve
stayed for two weeks at the Findhorn Community in Scotland, and soon plan to
leave. I sit down in the Sanctuary there to request inner guidance about the next
step in our journey. My breathing gradually softens and deepens and I hear the “still small voice” within say that we could go to the holy island of Lindisfarne (located off the east coast of northern England) for Summer Solstice.
This is the first time I’ve consciously sought guidance and received it clearly from
that inner voice which speaks directly from my body, from the center of my chest. The messages I receive always respect my free will to decide on a course of action, with the infrequent exception of times when my inner voice alerts me about a course of action which would be downright dangerous or foolish for me to pursue.
We travel south from Findhorn to Lindisfarne. After visiting the remains of the
monastery established by St. Aidan there around 635 A.D., we get happily high
on mead at a nearby pub then go nap in our bed and breakfast room. I fall
asleep and wake as dusk darkens the island. Mist swims a spit of beach receding
down the pounding line of surf heard through our nearby window. I’m pulled
outside into the gloaming and head straight toward the beach. A group of seven
figures emerges from the mist, walking directly toward me. They’re wearing
monk’s robes with hooded cowls.
There’s an inevitability about the scene. I feel a sense of rightness in my body that whatever this is, it’s an important part of what I came here for.
I meet the hooded group, who are flesh and blood contemporary persons, not
phantom monks from the pre-medieval abbey on the island. They barely speak,
but one tells me they’ve come from Edinburgh to meditate here at Summer
Solstice. I’m instantly accepted into their extraordinary aura of silence and
shared purpose. We walk to an ancient graveyard within hearing of the swaying
tidal roar, and sit among the graves to meditate in a stillness that soon eclipses
everything, even as night falls and completely obliterates us, merging our
meditating bodies, the leaning gravestones, the windswept sky and my down-shifting mind into one single sable field of pure black presence.
After a timeless interval, I rise and wordlessly depart. The group remains, a
midnight diamond set in the heart of silence. I make my way back to my young
wife resting in our bed and breakfast room on Lindisfarne.
Vibratory Night Near Sparta
1975, Greece: Leslie and I rent a car and drive from Athens to the Peloponnesian
Peninsula. We stop in a remote mountainous region above the ancient site of the
city of Sparta. There’s a bright full sweep of stars. We get out of the car to rest
and relieve ourselves. The entire earth is vibrating at a low but quite audible
frequency.
There are no visible towers or power stations, no human habitations, no artificial
lights, no other traffic on the highway. The hum deepens; the earth itself seems
super-sentient. The vibration comes up through the soles of our feet and legs
direct from the soil, which feels to us as if suffused with a dense, magnetic
energy. It’s like we’ve stepped into another dimension, a more highly resonant
realm.
Now the energy continues to lift and the bass buzz becomes more audible. As
this happens our own bodies take on a more charged, bioelectronic quality.
Silence deepens in our minds like a reservoir fills with water after heavy rain. We
stay until it feels like time to go, then drive off into the night, our bodies full of
sparkling darkness, like the star-fields floating overhead.
Those were numinous, mysterious experiences. They got my attention, alright, but… are were they really any more mysterious than every physical sensation we’ve ever had? From the amazing fact that we’re embodied here at all? From the exquisite, unbelievably complex, integrated functioning of our bodies at any moment of our lives?
What comes to your bodymind when you invite recollections of your own experiences of physical awareness, whether pleasurable or painful, energetically subtle or heightened… or apparently quotidian?
Sharon Olds (1942- ) is one of our most soulful living poets of the body and sexuality. Here she celebrates…
True Love
In the middle of the night, when we get up
after making love, we look at each other in
complete friendship, we know so fully
what the other has been doing. Bound to each other
like mountaineers coming down from a mountain,
bound with the tie of the delivery-room,
we wander down the hall to the bathroom, I can
hardly walk, I hobble through the granular
shadowless air, I know where you are
with my eyes closed, we are bound to each other
with huge invisible threads, our sexes
muted, exhausted, crushed, the whole
body a sex—surely this
is the most blessed time of my life,
our children asleep in their beds, each fate
like a vein of abiding mineral
not discovered yet. I sit
on the toilet in the night, you are somewhere in the room,
I open the window and snow has fallen in a
steep drift, against the pane, I
look up, into it,
a wall of cold crystals, silent
and glistening, I quietly call to you
and you come and hold my hand and I say
I cannot see beyond it. I cannot see beyond it.
And here is a very different poem by Olds, describing a most precipitous event that happened on…
Summer Solstice, New York City
By the end of the longest day of the year he could not stand it,
he went up the iron stairs through the roof of the building
and over the soft, tarry surface
to the edge, put one leg over the complex green tin cornice
and said if they came a step closer that was it.
Then the huge machinery of the earth began to work for his life,
the cops came in their suits blue-grey as the sky on a cloudy evening,
and one put on a bullet-proof vest, a
black shell around his own life,
life of his children’s father, in case
the man was armed, and one, slung with a
rope like the sign of his bounden duty,
came up out of a hole in the top of the neighboring building
like the gold hole they say is in the top of the head,
and began to lurk toward the man who wanted to die.
The tallest cop approached him directly,
softly, slowly, talking to him, talking, talking,
while the man’s leg hung over the lip of the next world
and the crowd gathered in the street, silent, and the
hairy net with its implacable grid was
unfolded near the curb and spread out and
stretched as the sheet is prepared to receive a birth.
Then they all came a little closer
where he squatted next to his death, his shirt
glowing its milky glow like something
growing in a dish at night in the dark in a lab and then
everything stopped
as his body jerked and he
stepped down from the parapet and went toward them
and they closed on him, I thought they were going to
beat him up, as a mother whose child has been
lost will scream at the child when its found, they
took him by the arms and held him up and
leaned him against the wall of the chimney and the
tall cop lit a cigarette
in his own mouth, and gave it to him, and
then they all lit cigarettes, and the
red, glowing ends burned like the
tiny campfires we lit at night
back at the beginning of the world.
So vivid…Whew…I give a sigh of relief as I imaginatively feel their bodies.
Kenneth Rexroth was an incredible poet of Nature, the body and sexuality. Here is a clarified vision of summer and summer love:
When We With Sappho
“. . . about the cool water
the wind sounds through sprays
of apple, and from the quivering leaves
slumber pours down . . .” (Sappho)
We lie here in the bee filled, ruinous
Orchard of a decayed New England farm,
Summer in our hair, and the smell
Of summer in our twined bodies,
Summer in our mouths, and summer
In the luminous, fragmentary words
Of this dead Greek woman.
Stop reading. Lean back. Give me your mouth.
Your grace is as beautiful as sleep.
You move against me like a wave
That moves in sleep.
Your body spreads across my brain
Like a bird filled summer;
Not like a body, not like a separate thing,
But like a nimbus that hovers
Over every other thing in all the world.
Lean back. You are beautiful,
As beautiful as the folding
Of your hands in sleep.
We have grown old in the afternoon.
Here in our orchard we are as old
As she is now, wherever dissipate
In that distant sea her gleaming dust
Flashes in the wave crest
Or stains the murex shell.
All about us the old farm subsides
Into the honey bearing chaos of high summer.
In those far islands the temples
Have fallen away, and the marble
Is the color of wild honey.
There is nothing left of the gardens
That were once about them, of the fat
Turf marked with cloven hooves.
Only the sea grass struggles
Over the crumbled stone,
Over the splintered steps,
Only the blue and yellow
Of the sea, and the cliffs
Red in the distance across the bay.
Lean back.
Her memory has passed to our lips now.
Our kisses fall through summer’s chaos
In our own breasts and thighs.
Gold colossal domes of cumulus cloud
Lift over the undulant, sibilant forest.
The air presses against the earth.
Thunder breaks over the mountains.
Far off, over the Adirondacks,
Lightning quivers, almost invisible
In the bright sky, violet against
The grey, deep shadows of the bellied clouds.
The sweet virile hair of thunder storms
Brushes over the swelling horizon.
Take off your shoes and stockings.
I will kiss your sweet legs and feet
As they lie half buried in the tangle
Of rank scented midsummer flowers.
Take off your clothes. I will press
Your summer honeyed flesh into the hot
Soil, into the crushed, acrid herbage
Of midsummer. Let your body sink
Like honey through the hot
Granular fingers of summer.
Rest. Wait. We have enough for a while.
Kiss me with your mouth
Wet and ragged, your mouth that tastes
Of my own flesh. Read to me again
The twisting music of that language
That is of all others, itself a work of art.
Read again those isolate, poignant words
Saved by ancient grammarians
To illustrate the conjugations
And declensions of the more ancient dead.
Lean back in the curve of my body,
Press your bruised shoulders against
The damp hair of my body.
Kiss me again. Think, sweet linguist,
In this world the ablative is impossible.
No other one will help us here.
We must help ourselves to each other.
The wind walks slowly away from the storm;
Veers on the wooded crests; sounds
In the valleys. Here we are isolate,
One with the other; and beyond
This orchard lies isolation,
The isolation of all the world.
Never let anything intrude
On the isolation of this day,
These words, isolate on dead tongues,
This orchard, hidden from fact and history,
These shadows, blended in the summer light,
Together isolate beyond the world’s reciprocity.
Do not talk any more. Do not speak.
Do not break silence until
We are weary of each other.
Let our fingers run like steel
Carving the contours of our bodies’ gold.
Do not speak. My face sinks
In the clotted summer of your hair.
The sound of the bees stops.
Stillness falls like a cloud.
Be still. Let your body fall away
Into the awe filled silence
Of the fulfilled summer —
Back, back, infinitely away —
Our lips weak, faint with stillness.
See. The sun has fallen away.
Now there are amber
Long lights on the shattered
Boles of the ancient apple trees.
Our bodies move to each other
As bodies move in sleep;
At once filled and exhausted,
As the summer moves to autumn,
As we, with Sappho, move towards death.
My eyelids sink toward sleep in the hot
Autumn of your uncoiled hair.
Your body moves in my arms
On the verge of sleep;
And it is as though I held
In my arms the bird filled
Evening sky of summer.
I can’t resist sharing a little more of Rexroth’s gorgeous work, from the first section of his long poem…
The Signature of All Things
My head and shoulders, and my book
In the cool shade, and my body
Stretched bathing in the sun, I lie
Reading beside the waterfall —
Boehme’s “Signature of all Things.”
Through the deep July day the leaves
Of the laurel, all the colors
Of gold, spin down through the moving
Deep laurel shade all day. They float
On the mirrored sky and forest
For a while, and then, still slowly
Spinning, sink through the crystal deep
Of the pool to its leaf gold floor.
The saint saw the world as streaming
In the electrolysis of love.
I put him by and gaze through shade
Folded into shade of slender
Laurel trunks and leaves filled with sun.
The wren broods in her moss domed nest.
A newt struggles with a white moth
Drowning in the pool. The hawks scream,
Playing together on the ceiling
Of heaven. The long hours go by.
I think of those who have loved me,
Of all the mountains I have climbed,
Of all the seas I have swum in.
The evil of the world sinks.
My own sin and trouble fall away
Like Christian’s bundle, and I watch
My forty summers fall like falling
Leaves and falling water held
Eternally in summer air.
Sin (originating from Greek tragedy, it means “missing the mark,”) and personal troubles and the evils of the world aside, how beautiful can be, may be our slow contemplations of Nature, our bodies at rest, our minds drifting in peaceful revery all in the light of summer.
Remember.
Here’s a poem I wrote about an experience of incarnation and compassion:
Shiver of Light…
jolts the summer star-points.
I shake a little around my spinal axis.
Without a body to get old in,
could I love those sparrows?
Without our ribbed existence here
no tender hearts in cages.
Once there was no shiver,
just UNCARVED BLOCK.
Once there was no tremor,
nor shimmer.
Once there were no ears
and so no songs, nor silence.
But tonite,
I stand by the sparrows.
Summer! Hot hot hot. But cooler nights and early mornings. I treasure those mornings and the changing colors of the clouds at dawn. This recent poem of mine celebrates their beauty as the living world awakens:
summer dawn clouds overlapping
cool now | cloud over cloud | mind over mind
overlapping | in dawn light | suffusing blue
dawn arrives | birds aloud | song over song
slipping between | silences | gleaning joy
earth and sky | as night retires | drenched land wakes
colors morph | dawn heart glows | cloud reefs drift
our bodies safe | no triggers here | no explosions
quiet reigns | cloud curds curl | a single fly
explains existence | singing | abuzz alive
sweep the porch | with wind | allowed to be
we remain | unbound | flying free
night recedes | into black limbs | as light lifts
birds abound | love songs heard | beyond our pains
sun is up | anciently new | in the greenwood
May this summer bring light, love and renewal to you.
Please touch the Earth with love,
Geoff