Sun’s Out, Numbed Out
Solstice State of Mind: Challenging the Myth of the Summer Reset
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.Or does it explode?
— Langston Hughes, “Harlem” (1951).
Originally published in Montage of a Dream Deferred.
In education, summer is often framed as a finish line, spoken of as a kind of soft landing and seasonal balm that will smooth the edges of everything we have endured across the year. Somewhere in the collective narrative, it has become a promise — that if we can just make it to the end of June, everything frayed will be mended, every ache will be eased, and we will emerge into July lighter, brighter, and somehow renewed. This idea is so deeply woven into how we think about the rhythm of the school year that we rarely pause to question it. We wait for summer like a rescue, holding our breath until we are allowed to exhale.
And yet, for many educators, leaders, and staff in schools, the arrival of summer does not always match the myth; instead of relief, some of us feel disorientation; instead of rest, there is a kind of quiet numbness, or a lingering fatigue that no amount of sunshine can quite erase. We enter these long days not with the feeling of arrival but with the weight of all that remains unprocessed. The pace may shift, the meetings may slow, but the impact of the year is not undone simply by turning the page on the calendar.
Across time and place, the solstice has held a variety of meanings. For some, it marks the height of light and celebration. For others, it is a sacred turning point: the moment when the earth reaches its furthest tilt and begins to shift once more toward balance. It is a time that holds both fullness and change, a threshold rather than an ending. In this way, it offers us a different way to think about summer in schools, not as a reward or an escape, but as a space to reckon with what has been and to gently begin the work of reorientation.
This post is an offering for those who find themselves arriving at this season with more questions than clarity, with tired hearts and full minds, with a strange mix of gratitude and grief. It is for anyone who feels the tension between needing rest and not knowing exactly how to access it. It is for those who feel pressure to "use the time wisely" and those who are just trying to remember how to feel anything at all. Whether you are an educator, a school leader, or someone working in the spaces that hold our students together — your exhaustion makes sense, your tenderness is valid, and your presence is enough.
What follows are reflections and field notes from the edge for those navigating the long light of summer while carrying the complexity of the year behind them.
You do not need to reset.
You do not need to perform recovery.
You are allowed to simply be.
Sunshine of Your Love: Sun-Kissed on the Outside, Soul-Chafed on the Inside
If you know me, you know that summer and I have an understanding and are on really good terms. We nod at each other like old friends who have been through some things but still meet at golden hour with cold drinks and better stories. Give me the heat, the sunny days, the bush, the big lakes, a paddle in hand, and a sky that won’t quit and I’m in my element. Everywhere I go, I hear Roy Ayers. The melanin starts glowing and the heart stays soft — we are bronzed and blessed, my friends. Summer invites me to the cookout, hands me the aux cord, and asks where I got my sunglasses. We are bosom friends and kindred spirits, vibing at golden hour like we have known each other lifetimes.
I’m not the type to retreat into air conditioning or complain about the heat — I am the heat, baby. We don’t sweat, we shimmer.
A bloodline stretching from Nineveh to Northern Ontario, from Ur to Upsala, from Sumer to the Sleeping Giant.
What can I say? Half of my bloodline comes from Mesopotamia, straight outta Sumer, and the other half was built to thrive in the bush with a fishing rod and a perfectly packed cooler, dreaming up all the delicious ways to smoke or fry a fresh walleye; let’s be real, walleyes…Plural. After all, those of us from the Levant have a reputation for miraculously feeding the masses fish after calling in a miracle or two and I learned plenty of tricks from the grandpas on the hidden lakes hours in the bush past Shebandowan (and have my grandfather’s tackle box filled with incredible magical Franken-hooks he crafted himself that work like a charm and have never failed me — all the ol’ dudes gather ‘round and admire the contents of this tackle box when I bust it out the same way they pop the hood and admire the engine of a vintage car that’s got legs, let me tell ya). Nowadays, I refuse to simply teach a man to fish; I’ll do what I can to utilize grandpa wisdom and a little Levantine miracle bait, feed the whole block and still manage to serve fish (in every sense of the word — if you know, you know) after the last catch is cooked.
I’m basically what happens when Mesopotamia takes a detour through Kakabeka Falls and picks up a rod, a rhythm, and a righteous tan (and yes, eating a Persian doughnut while being part Persian is peak Thunder Bay energy).
My idea of networking is swapping sauna stories and bait tips at the fire pit and the only P.D. I’m committed to in July is perfecting my marshmallow roast technique. The aesthetic isn’t so much hashtag-wild-woman as it is “fish guts, firewood, and feral with good snacks.” If summer were a sport, I’d be in pre-season training before the May long weekend, with an out-of-office message that says:
“Somewhere between dock and dusk.”
Canoe in the front, existential peace in the back — it’s my version of a summer mullet.
As you can probably tell, this vibe goes beyond enjoying summer. I’m not sure enjoy is enough of a descriptor for how I feel about the season that is filled with days that make you say “I could live like this” — and nights that make you say it twice. The days where you remember you have skin and the nights where you remember you have soul. I step into the solstice season like it is a homecoming, just another melanated sunshine goddess grabbing her scepter and claiming her throne (if the scepter were a big stick stoking a gorgeous fire and the throne was a towel on the beach in front of a beautiful lake).
If I directed a film of how I roll during the summer months, it would be called Dazed and Bemused.
I catch feelings for summer every single time.
Give me ninety degrees, give me sticky nights and smoky campfires, give me saunas and lake dips and staying up so late the stars change shape — that’s my love language. This skin never burns — it bronzes. My favourite perfume is when my hair smells like lake water and cedar. My mornings are for deck coffee and deep breaths, while my evenings are for talking long after the fire dies out.
This is not seasonal affective disorder.
This is seasonal affection disorder.
I am, and always have been, absolutely smitten with summer.
It isn’t only about the beautiful weather or how the sound of rain was missed during the winter; it is the way summer slows things down enough for joy to catch up. It is the way the days stretch wide open and the way the light softens our edges, not just literally, but emotionally. There is something about walking barefoot, about plunging into cold water after a long sweat, about the simple pleasure of being outside and unhurried, that reminds me what it feels like to be a human animal and being again.
And yet, even with all of that — even with the laughter and the stillness and the light that lingers until nearly midnight — there is a quiet truth I have learned to hold at the same time.
The joy is real, but so is the fatigue that does not lift right away. So is the sense that, even in the most beautiful season, we don’t always land in ourselves as quickly as we hoped we would. It isn’t that summer disappoints, it’s that we are still carrying the weight of what it followed. The school year doesn’t disappear because we stopped setting our alarms: the meetings, the holding, the heaviness of a hundred daily negotiations do not simply dissolve when the calendar flips to July only to stand in line tending to all the business we pushed to the back of the to-do list. I’m pretty sure that the confines of bureaucracy in all its societal and systemic forms is my villain origin story and when summertime approaches, I can hear my inner child say:
“I came here to chew bubblegum and ignore unrealistic expectations…
…and I’m all out of bubblegum.”
So much of the way we talk about summer in education treats it like a cure-all, as if sunshine and silence are enough to reverse ten months of overextension. We are told, implicitly or explicitly, that rest will arrive on its own, that the season will do the work for us. Real rest does not operate on the same schedule as a school bell or a school board: it takes time, it takes practice, and often it begins with the hard truth that we are not quite as okay as we thought we would be once the year ended.
There is also, for many of us, the layered pressure of “using the time wisely,” not just to relax but to recover efficiently, to prep for next year, to organize, to improve, to return in the fall somehow sharper, clearer, and more inspired than when we left. Even our rest is expected to be productive. In that tension, some of us end up performing rest — ticking off summer checklists, completing courses, reorganizing closets, posturing and posting — while our bodies are still waiting for permission to slow down.
We feel guilty for not feeling better yet.
Guilty for not bouncing back quickly enough.
Guilty, even, for needing rest at all.
The truth is (of many truths out there, as we say here on RootED), the season doesn’t ask us to earn it (and we do not need to earn our fatigue in order to deserve our rest!). Summer holds space for all of it: the joy, the numbness, the laughter, the weight. We must try to remember that we can be sun-kissed and soul-chafed, we can feel grateful for the break and still feel like we are slowly returning to ourselves and one another, we can love every minute of the light and still need more time to soften into it. None of that is contradiction, it is only what it means to be human in systems and societies that rarely give us space to feel as much as we do.
What matters most, perhaps, is not how well we rest, or how much we get done while we are off, but how honestly we meet ourselves in this season. The heat, the stillness, the wide skies remind us what is possible.
Rest may not come easily, but it comes.
And when it does, it doesn’t need to be perfect.
It just needs to be enough.
House of the Rising Sun: Field Notes from the Edge of Burnout
There comes a moment in every summer — sometimes early, sometimes not until the last golden stretch of August — when the quiet finally settles in. The noise of the year fades just enough to hear yourself again and, in that space, something stirs.
Maybe it’s relief.
Maybe it’s grief.
Maybe it’s nothing more than the slow realization that you’ve been holding your breath for longer than you thought.
The truth is, most of us don’t arrive at summer ready to rest.
We arrive needing to unlearn the pace we were required to keep.
Rest is not a single act; it is a series of returns. For many educators, it goes beyond “slowing down”; instead, it is about learning how to feel again, how to trust the quiet, how to soften without losing strength, how to move through a season without turning it into another form of output. It can be hard to know what rest looks like when so much of our work has trained us to feel valuable only when we are producing, responding, showing up, or making things better and, as the momentum of the year winds down, we may find ourselves struggling to stop without collapsing.
This next section is not a checklist or a challenge or a guide to “doing” rest “right.” It is a set of small reflections, gentle provocations, and seasonal invitations — a loose constellation for anyone navigating the beautiful, complicated terrain of summer after survival.
Whether you are on your first walk of the break, relaxing by a beautiful river and feeling your body tingling with the sensation of relaxation, in the middle of a camping trip that feels miles away from the office, or lying in bed wondering why you’re still so tired, these field notes are for you.
They are written from the edge but not the edge of collapse; rather, they are written from the edge of return, of remembering, of asking (softly): What would it look like to let yourself come back a little differently this time?
Early Summer: The Unwinding
There’s a strange kind of momentum that follows the final day of school: a lingering hum in the nervous system that does not go immediately quiet just because the calendar says it is time to stop. Even without the meetings, the deadlines, the routines, many of us wake up in those first summer mornings with the same urgency pulsing under our skin. Our minds keep spinning, still tethered to the year’s demands, still scanning for what we have missed or left unfinished. There is a deep fatigue, yes, but it’s often tangled with restlessness and a sense that we should be doing something, even now.
This is the beginning of summer’s recalibration, though it rarely feels gentle. It can be disorienting to shift so suddenly from structure to stillness, from managing every minute to not knowing what day it is. The first stretch of summer doesn’t always feel relaxing; sometimes, it feels more like withdrawal — not because the work wasn’t worth it, but because the weight of what we carried doesn’t lift just because the clock ran out.
Unwinding takes time. Contrary to the stories we are often told, it doesn’t begin with joy; it begins with release.
With slowing down before we even remember how to rest.
With letting the body lead and trusting that the mind will follow, eventually.
With making space for the question: What does it mean to stop without needing to start again right away?
Reflective Questions
As we begin the slow process of release, consider the following questions to tune into where you are at presently and recognize where you are in your own body, mind, and spirit:
What have I been carrying — emotionally, mentally, physically — that I haven’t had time to set down?
What patterns of urgency or over-responsibility are still lingering in my body, even though the year is done?
What would it look like to stop without the pressure to pivot into something new?
These questions aren’t meant to be solved. Let them sit beside you — on the porch, in your journal, in the quiet spaces of your day — not as tasks, but as companions. You do not need to have an answer; you only need to notice what surfaces when the noise begins to fade.
Practices for Early Summer
Do less on purpose. Let go of productivity as a measure of worth, especially in the first week, choosing stillness where you would normally default to planning. Rest without trying to optimize it.
Let your body lead. Sleep longer than you think you should, eat slowly, walk without tracking the distance, and nap without guilt. Your body knows how to come down — but only if it is allowed to.
Reclaim the unstructured hour. Spend one hour a day without a device, a to-do list, or a destination. Let the hour unfold on its own terms: read something slow, watch the sky change, do absolutely nothing and see what arrives in the quiet.
Let silence be safe again. If you are used to noise, presence may feel uncomfortable. Begin with small moments of pause without the goal of “achieving” calm, but to remind your system that nothing urgent is happening anymore.
This part of summer isn’t the exhale yet — it is the noticing and the moment when your shoulders begin to drop as you locate where you are in the space between busy and being. If you are not feeling rested yet, you are not behind.
You are only just beginning.
Mid-Summer: The Softening
Somewhere in the slow middle of summer, the rhythm finally begins to change. It is not always dramatic; more often, it’s a gradual quieting, a subtle shift in how the days land where we may find ourselves breathing differently, noticing the way light spills across the room in the late afternoon, drinking our coffee all the way to the bottom without needing to reheat it. There is no singular moment when rest begins, but in this part of the season, the edges start to blur. The pace that once clung begins to let go like fascia peeling away from the inside of the body.
It is here, in the soft belly of summer, that we often begin to feel things we didn’t have time for earlier. Sometimes joy arrives unannounced, uncomplicated, surprising in its simplicity as a good laugh or moment of stillness that actually feels like peace; however, just as often, other feelings surface too. Grief that was deferred. Anger that was swallowed. Fatigue that finally becomes undeniable now that there is room to notice it. The absence of pressure can sometimes make space for what we have postponed.
This is not failure. This is presence.
This is the part of summer where rest becomes less about stopping and more about returning — not to productivity, but to yourself.
The self beneath the roles, beneath the planning, beneath the performance of being “okay.” This return is not always graceful: sometimes it looks like crying on a hike for no apparent reason, sometimes it looks like saying no to a social event you would have once said yes to, sometimes it looks like standing barefoot in your kitchen wondering why you are suddenly sad when the world outside is so bright.
These moments are also rest. Rest is not the absence of emotion; rather, it is the space where we are finally safe enough to feel it and, in that safety, we begin to soften.
Not collapse.
Soften.
We begin to trust that our worth is not tied to our usefulness. We begin to believe, little by little, that rest is not a detour from the work; it is the part we often skip until our bodies leave us no choice.
Reflective Questions
Let these questions walk beside you: on slow mornings, during solo drives, while floating in the lake. Let them stretch out, unanswered, without needing to become anything more than a reminder that your inner world matters, too.
What have I started to feel now that I couldn’t access earlier in the year?
What does spaciousness reveal to me that busyness used to cover up?
How am I treating myself in moments of stillness — with kindness, with pressure, with avoidance?
There’s no need to answer everything at once. Allow for soft openings for noticing what is shifting inside of you and allow them to linger without urgency. This part of summer is not for provoking action, but making space. Whatever is surfacing at this moment is what finally has the room to be heard.
Practices for Mid-Summer
Name what is surfacing. Keep a quiet log of what emotions, memories, or longings are coming up — not to analyze them, but to honour them.
Find one un-monetized joy. Do something purely because it delights you, not because it serves a future version of you or fits into your goals. Just because it makes your spirit feel light.
Reclaim your body’s rhythms. Notice when you are actually tired or actually hungry. Eat when you’re hungry. Sleep when you’re tired. Trust that your body knows what it needs — even if you forgot how to listen.
Loosen the grip on “readiness.” Let yourself be in process and remember that you don’t need to be recharged yet or have a five-year plan. You don’t need to be “getting there.” Here is fine.
Mid-summer is not a productivity zone; it is a tenderness zone.
Let yourself stretch out into it. Let the silence hold you. Let the light touch the parts of you you’ve been too busy to love.
There is nowhere else to be but the present moment, trust it. As adrienne maree brown says, “less prep, more presence.”
Late Summer: The Re-Entry
There’s a particular kind of silence that settles over late August. The sun still lingers, but the light starts to change. The days are warm, but there’s a softness at the edges, a slight shift in the air that signals the turning. For educators, this is the moment when the stillness begins to hum again: emails trickle in, group chats reignite, calendars reappear with colour-coded promises. The re-entry begins long before the first day back. And often, it brings with it a quiet tension: How do we return without rushing? How do we begin again without erasing the rest we have only just begun to understand?
This part of summer is full of contradiction: we may feel the first flickers of excitement — the pull toward purpose, the joy of planning, the wondering about the faces we will greet again soon. This sense of readiness, however, is often accompanied by a shadow and the awareness of how easily the rhythm of the year can overtake us if we are not careful. The boundaries that felt so clear in July can begin to blur and the intentions we set can quietly slip beneath old patterns. The calendar may be blank now, but the pull toward overcommitment is already at the door.
The truth is, returning to the work doesn’t have to mean abandoning the lessons of rest. It is possible to carry forward what we have reclaimed — but only if we name it and grow from it, not in spite of it. Re-entry is not simply logistical; it is emotional, relational, and spiritual. Like any threshold, it asks us to cross intentionally, to decide what comes with us, and to release what no longer fits.
To believe that we are allowed to return differently.
Practices for Late Summer
Choose your non-negotiables. Before the rush returns, write down the two or three things you don’t want to lose to the speed of the year. Guard them like a boundary, not a bonus.
Resist the urge to over-prepare. You don’t need to have every bulletin board perfect or every document colour-coded to be a good educator. Trust that your presence, not your polish, is what makes the difference.
Make space for quiet goodbyes. Say farewell to the summer not as a loss, but as a ritual. Go for one last lake dip. Watch the sunrise. Cook something slowly. Let the season close gently.
Return relationally, not just professionally. Before you dive back into planning, reach out to a colleague whose presence makes the work lighter. Enter the year in relationship, not in isolation.
Late summer is not just about getting ready. It is about returning in a way that honours how far you have come. You do not have to be fully rested, perfectly organized, or wildly inspired to begin again.
You only have to be honest about what you need and brave enough to carry it with you.
A Moment for the Ones Who Cannot Step Away
Before we close, it is important to name that not everyone enters the summer with the same kind of permission: some carry the weight of multiple jobs; some work through July and August without a pause, holding the school community together behind the scenes; some are caring for children, elders, or chosen family; some are processing grief that does not take breaks; some are navigating systems that expect resilience without ever offering reprieve.
This reflection holds space for you, too: for the support staff, the hourly workers, the ones who answer the phone when everyone else is away; for those who are racialized, marginalized, and navigating spaces that never fully let them rest; for those who are still managing harm, even in the season of supposed ease.
Your labour may not always be visible in agendas or year-end reviews, but it is foundational.
You hold the centre, even when the structure shifts.
This summer may not have offered you rest in the ways you needed but perhaps there was a moment — a deep breath by an open window, a laugh you didn’t expect, a text that reminded you someone sees you — let that be sacred, too. This is not a story of who got time off and who didn’t; it is a story of how we carry one another through.
And if no one has said it yet: thank you.
You deserved more.
And you still do.
Here’s to turning up the heat in a good way and tending to our fires together.
The forecast called for resistance with a 100% chance of heat.
Land Back, climate justice, and some sun-kissed sass for the settler state — because liberation looks good on us.
If you’re gonna fight the power, you might as well do it sun-kissed, smirking, and in the process of delivering a massive symbolic snake pierced by arrows.
Summer protest energy: 30°C, no chill, and just enough sass to make the system sweat it.
As a dear friend and Elder said that day:
“Why is everyone so scared of what’s going to happen today? If you’re going to fight the power, you got to have a little bit of fun where you can find it, otherwise what are we fighting for?”
“Everybody say…WATCHLIST!”
That was the cue for the photo, right before we all burst out laughing — although I couldn’t hold it in, as you can tell.
Whenever I see this picture, I feel so much joy.
Even as the world burns, we find each other — and that changes everything. For land back, love, and legacy.
P.S.: Shout-out to the snake for making sure the vibes stayed ungovernable and to Winona LaDuke who we had the gift of learning from that week — no words can summarize how profound her words, wisdom, and integrity have impacted my life. I love this picture of her rocking her shades like the auntie you call when things get real.
Abiding: The Philosophy of The Dude
The Dudette abides!
Last summer, a friend asked me to send a photo of what I was doing in that exact moment — fondly remembering past adventures while they were stuck in the city heat. I snapped this at the cabin, with a very big book and a very strong brew. Those monasteries really know how to craft one! Ora et labora, indeed, padre!
Moments like this? They were made for Otis.
There is a strange kind of wisdom tucked inside the terrycloth folds of a bathrobe, clutching a White Russian, floating across the chaos of a collapsing plot-line with an unmatched calm. The Dude, in all his unlikely resonance, has become more than a cinematic oddity — he’s an archetype, a mirror, a soft invitation to consider what it means to move through a frantic world without letting it fracture our inner quiet.
“Strikes and gutters, ups and downs…”
To truly abide is not to opt out, but to opt in differently.
It is not laziness, but liberation from the myth that our worth is tethered to our output. It is not indifference, but discernment: the kind that senses when urgency is false, when reaction is performative, when stillness is not stagnation but sovereignty. The Dude is not all-knowing — he is not even particularly wise in the so-called “traditional” sense — but in his offbeat steadiness, he offers a rare and gentle clarity, along with a reminder that presence is not always productive and that being grounded doesn’t always mean being in control. Worry less, bowl more, and let the rug of life tie the room together. The universe provides…eventually.
For those of us in education, the idea of abiding can feel foreign. Our work is steeped in motion: in planning and pivoting, anticipating and repairing, holding and releasing. We are taught to respond, to adjust, to absorb. When summer comes, it is handed to us like a reset button and a brief, shining promise of reprieve that we are somehow expected to maximize and cherish and use wisely, all while we are still crawling out from under the weight of what the year required.
What if we approached summer not as a project to complete or a performance to perfect, but as an invitation to abide?
To abide is to stay with ourselves long enough to soften. To stop measuring worth in productivity and to recognize that we are allowed to be both undone and okay at the same time. It is letting the sun warm us without making it a metaphor for transformation (like this entire post is doing). It is watching a body of water and refusing to narrate it into meaning. It is napping without guilt. Laughing without strategy. Wandering without mapping it onto a lesson plan. Abiding is what happens when we allow our presence to be enough — when we release the grip of becoming and remember what it feels like to simply be.
This is not a passive act. In a culture of hustle and heat, to abide is to resist the pull toward performance. It is an act of quiet rebellion, especially for those of us whose work has always been entangled with proving, with producing, with holding up the sky for everyone else. Abiding is not apathy. It is choosing to remain soft in a world that rewards abrasion. It is choosing peace over polish. It is choosing care, not just for others, but for the self who has so often been left behind in the name of service.
And so, in this season of heat and high sun, perhaps we take a note from The Dude — not to become him (although a girl can try!), but to remember that even in the midst of chaos, even when the plot is tangled and the expectations endless, even when the nihilists and the ferrets are interrupting your peaceful bathtub repose, we can still choose ease. We can still float and hold fast to what matters and let the rest slide by, not because it is unimportant, but because we are not here to fracture ourselves for everything that demands our energy.
We are here to teach. To love. To witness.
And sometimes, to rest without apology.
Maybe that’s what abiding really is: a return. Not to what was, but to what has always waited inside us — the self who remembers joy without agenda, rest without remorse, and presence without proving.
So this summer, may we resist the noise and return to our breath. May we wander without worry, nap without guilt, float without purpose, pour a couple White Russians out while listening to Pavement like a bunch of Summer Babes living out of our 70’s campers on the way to the next chapter, and rest not to prepare but because we deserve to.
May we find, in the midst of it all, a reason to abide.
Here’s to greeting September not with the myth of having fixed ourselves, but with the truth of having returned to ourselves.
The sun’s out.
The soul’s tender.
And the Dude — well, he still abides.
Maybe we can too.
Yeah? Well, you know, that’s just like, uh, your opinion, man,
Ms. K
Lane to Liberation: The Teachings of the Duddha
From the sacred scrolls of slackerdom, rolled and lit, we leave you with this timeless koan from the Dude himself…
“Life goes on, man.”
