Walk with SMB: The Dog Days of Summer
Episode Summary: What happens when learning more about something doesn’t explain away the wonder, but deepens it?
In this Walk with SMB episode, Susan follows her curiosity from the surprising origin of the “dog days of summer” to coneflowers, a bald eagle in an unexpected place, and a close encounter with a dragonfly. Along the way, she explores how looking closely—and asking one more question—can change what we see and deepen our connection with the living world.
SHOW NOTES
What do the dog days of summer have to do with a star? What does a coneflower have to do with echinacea? And what might a bald eagle flying over a busy city or a dragonfly resting in the grass reveal when we pause long enough to really look?
In this Walk with SMB episode, Susan follows a handful of questions sparked by things she’s noticed and learned this summer. The familiar phrase “dog days of summer” turns out to carry an ancient connection to Sirius, the Dog Star. A coneflower and echinacea reveal themselves as different ways of knowing the same plant. An unexpected bald eagle challenges assumptions about where nature belongs. And a close encounter with a female darner dragonfly becomes an opportunity to marvel at something as seemingly ordinary—and astonishing—as a pair of wings.
Together, these observations lead to a larger question about curiosity, knowledge, and wonder. We often think explanation removes mystery: once we know how something works or what it’s called, perhaps it becomes less remarkable. But what if the opposite is true?
Looking closely can reveal how much more there is to notice. Learning one thing can lead to another question. And sometimes understanding a little more about the living world doesn’t diminish wonder at all—it deepens it.
During these dog days of summer, what are you curious about right now? What might become visible if you looked at something familiar a little more closely?
Key Themes
Curiosity as a way of deepening connection
How knowledge can expand rather than diminish wonder
The stories and categories that shape what we see
Challenging assumptions about where nature belongs
Looking closely at the familiar
Nature as an invitation to keep asking questions
Key Takeaways
Learning the story behind something familiar can change how we experience it.
The names and categories we give things can shape what we notice—and what connections we miss.
Nature isn’t only somewhere we go; it is present within the places where we live our everyday lives.
Close observation can turn something we already “know” into something astonishing again.
An answer doesn’t necessarily end curiosity. Sometimes it opens the door to better questions.
“Maybe wonder isn’t dependent on not knowing. Maybe knowing and looking closely can deepen wonder. I know it can deepen connection.”
Reflection Prompt
What familiar part of the world around you might become more interesting if you looked a little closer or asked one more question?
Prefer to read? The full transcript is below.
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Walk with SMB: The Dog Days of Summer
The Dog Days of Summer
Susan:
Welcome to ROOTED. I’m Susan Morgan Bailey.
This is a Walk with SMB episode, a shorter solo episode where I head outside with a question, an observation, or sometimes just something I’m curious about and see where it takes us.
Walk with me.
The other day I learned something that I never knew the background on.
Right now in the Northern Hemisphere, we are in the dog days of summer. That’s what it’s been called for apparently centuries.
I always thought that it was about the dog days because, you know, it’s so hot out, the dogs are panting. I don’t know. I’ve heard that phrase my whole life and didn’t know what it meant until I saw something that explained it.
It has nothing to do with dogs lying around sweating in the heat.
It actually has to do with a star.
Sirius, which is spelled S-I-R-I-U-S, is the brightest star in the night sky. It is known as the Dog Star because it’s part of the constellation Canis Major, or the Greater Dog.
Ancient Greeks, and later Romans, associated Sirius with the hottest part of summer. It was positioned in the sky where it shined more brightly, and they even believed that its heat combined with the heat of the sun.
Hence, the dog days of summer.
It was fun to learn that background story because suddenly the ordinary phrase that I’ve heard now has the night sky behind it.
Thousands of years of people looking up at that same star, watching the seasons, trying to understand what was happening around them back then.
It really blows my mind when I think about how little they knew and the stories that they made up and the language that they made up to explain the way things worked and why they were.
And it got me thinking about other things that I’ve been curious about, or maybe expanded my thinking around, lately.
When One Question Leads to Another
It’s not unusual for me to notice something, wonder about it, do a little bit of research or look closer. And then, of course, that leads to more questions and digging deeper. Sometimes the thing itself becomes even more interesting to me.
A few things came up for me as I was reflecting for this episode—some of those revelations that I’ve had, or others have had, about nature and connections maybe we weren’t aware of, or things we weren’t aware of.
For instance, a few years ago I took some pictures of a variety of coneflowers that I had cut from my garden: purple and yellow and orange and white. It was a lovely bouquet.
They’re very common in gardens this time of the year.
Coneflowers—not cornflowers—coneflowers.
And they’re also known as echinacea.
Well, echinacea is a thing that people see in the supplement aisle, and they associate it with fighting off a cold or illness. But many people don’t realize that coneflower is echinacea. Echinacea is the genus that includes the plants we commonly call coneflowers.
And I love that they sort of have two different lives, right?
The flowers in the garden and the supplement in the store.
Many people could go through life not realizing they were from the same substance. And I find that fascinating.
The same living thing, but depending on the context, we can know it as two different things—one in the garden, one in the medicine cabinet.
Which makes me wonder about the stories and categories we put around things.
How does what we call something, or what we think it’s for, shape what we see when we look at it?
There’s a part of human nature here, too. It can be hard for us to consider the possibility that things might be different than they look because our natural human instinct is to organize things.
It’s a safety mechanism that comes from way, way back when we needed to organize in our heads which animals were going to try to eat us and which animals were not.
So, when we think about that, it makes sense that we see something, we make up a story and a meaning of it, we put it in our head, we store it there for later in case we need it, and we move on.
Again, the question that I sit with is: How does what we call something, or what we think it’s for, shape what we see when we look at it?
Or, how do the stories we’ve told shape what we see when we look at it?
A Bald Eagle Where I Didn’t Expect One
The other day I was driving on a four-lane divided highway by my house—a big road—and there was a massive bird flying north, following the track of the road.
I knew it wasn’t a vulture, which are fairly common around here. As it got closer, I realized it was a bald eagle.
And this wasn’t a remote wilderness moment.
I was in an urban area. There was a bald eagle flying overhead.
As I was able to turn and look and see where it was going, it went a little north and made a left and headed toward our local zoo. So I thought, well, maybe it lives at the zoo. I don’t know.
But I was excited.
I haven’t seen a bald eagle yet this year, and at the same time it caught me off guard.
Then I started wondering about my own reaction. Like, why am I surprised? Sort of like, how could that be possible that a bald eagle could be here?
It is our national bird, and they have made a comeback. But why?
It was amazing just to think about how constricted my perspective of where the bald eagle belongs is.
I’ve only ever seen them in northern Michigan and more rural areas and more forested areas. So, of course, this is pushing me to think about my assumptions and my beliefs around how nature works in a new and different way.
We tend, of course, to talk about nature as somewhere we go—the woods, the lake, a national park.
Well, of course, I’ve talked a lot about on this podcast that we live in nature. Nature is surrounding us everywhere. So it can easily be living in a neighborhood or near a neighborhood.
And while it was awesome to see it, I found myself wishing that seeing something like that in the middle of the city didn’t feel quite so unusual.
I imagine there are some folks listening to this who might have eagles that do city living much more commonly. So this might not be unusual for you, but it was certainly inspiring and fun and exciting for me to think about the possibility.
Sitting With a Dragonfly
A couple weeks ago, I was headed out to my morning sit spot early in the morning. The grass was still wet, dew on the grass, and I noticed something tucked into the grass.
I paused to look at it, and it was a big dragonfly tucked down into the grass.
A female darner dragonfly.
They’re called darners because their tails look like a giant darning needle—which I don’t know what a darning needle is because I haven’t used one. I’ve just used a regular needle. But I know a darning needle was used to do repairs of clothing.
So look it up if you want.
She was settled there, and I was worried that if the lawn got mowed later that day in the park, she would be murdered.
So I picked her up and moved her.
I brought her over to my sit spot, and she just sat on my leg for like half an hour.
I couldn’t stop observing her.
I mean, if you have not seen a dragonfly close up, they are something to behold.
She let me take lots of pictures of her, too, which helps because I didn’t have magnifying glasses on, just regular readers.
But just the way the body is designed and structured—and then the eyes are giant and they can see in all directions—they’re just incredibly light.
And then there were the wings.
The wings of a darner are like glass.
They are incredible. They look like glass. They’re shiny. They’re smooth. There are many panes. It’s like a clear stained-glass pattern.
And I just kept looking at them.
Then I took one of the pictures and blew it up because I was so curious: How are the wings attached to the body? And how is it that the wings can move and fly?
Getting a closer-up look, it was like the wings were almost sewn into the body.
My brain sort of broke a little bit as I looked at it because it’s just an incredible demonstration of nature doing the thing that it does—creating a mechanism in a tiny little creature that allows it to fly very fast and nimbly. Fly fast enough to go and eat other dragonflies and try to escape from birds that might want to eat it.
I just got pulled into these impossibly thin, transparent wings that could lift a living creature off the ground.
I mean, how many of you listening wished you could fly? At some point in your life, you thought that would be cool.
And so just observing this didn’t make it less extraordinary by any means.
It really made it more extraordinary because it drew me into wonder.
To wonder about the mechanics of it and how the wings work. How does something so delicate have enough ability and force to lift the body and move in the way that they do?
Just spending time in that space—which is what the sit spot is all about, spending time in nature observing—left me wondering about so many things and deepened my wonder.
When Knowing Deepens Wonder
As I reflect on all of these things—the Dog Star, the coneflower, the eagle, the dragonfly—they’re not extraordinary because I suddenly noticed that nature exists.
They’re extraordinary because there’s always more to notice.
There’s more to wonder about.
There’s more to learn.
And sometimes learning the answer doesn’t end the wondering.
It makes the thing more interesting.
It opens up curiosity about what else I might be missing. It makes me wonder more about stars, more about plants, more about animals.
It just cracks me open.
Knowing why they call them the dog days makes the phrase more magical because it has more depth and meaning than just being about a dog that’s tired because it’s hot.
Now there’s a star in it.
Knowing a coneflower is echinacea doesn’t reduce it to a botanical fact. It makes me wonder about the different ways humans have come to know that same plant, and what other plants are sources for things we consume regularly but maybe don’t realize it.
Knowing something about how dragonfly wings work certainly doesn’t make those wings less astonishing.
They’re still wings.
They still fly.
Maybe wonder isn’t dependent on not knowing.
Maybe knowing and looking closely can deepen wonder.
I know it can deepen connection.
What Else Can I See?
So that’s what I’m thinking about during the remainder of these dog days of summer here in the Northern Hemisphere.
There’s so much happening around us all the time. And every once in a while, one little question opens a door into a much bigger world.
So maybe the question I’m carrying this week is simply:
What am I curious about right now?
Or, what else can I see?
I think about this practice that I’ve heard of where people are going out and walking their block—or a distance of about a block in their neighborhood—as if they’re walking through a museum.
Noticing.
Noticing what’s growing on the ground. Noticing how things shine and sparkle. Noticing how things have changed and evolved over time.
Seeing what new things they can see, like finding Where’s Waldo in a painting.
So I hope this episode is an invitation to curiosity for you, and to seeking maybe new ways of seeing things or new perspectives on things.
Or not being afraid to ask why something is called what it is, or how.
And digging for that connection by asking questions and seeking to expand your connection through that curiosity.
Thank you for spending time with me today.
