Most calendars give us four seasons. Chinese medicine names a fifth. Late summer is its own short season, the pause between the outward blaze of summer and the drawing-in of autumn. It belongs to the Earth element, and its organs are the Spleen and Stomach, the center of the body that takes in food, thought, and experience and turns them into something you can use.

Earth is the pivot. Everything turns around it. When your center is steady, you feel grounded, nourished, able to hold your own weight. When it is not, you feel the opposite: heavy, foggy, spread thin, unable to settle. Late summer on the Gulf Coast makes this vivid. The air itself is thick and slow, and the body often mirrors it.