Things I know about summer.

tracing the shape of summer, through this year's eyes.

Jun 27, 2026

Hello, I’m Lyndsay, I am so glad you have found your way here…

Welcome to Story & Thread. — a home for writing, gathering, and storytelling through meaningful PR. This is a cosy, welcoming place to come home to yourself, to tend to your creativity, and to notice the quiet power of beauty and wonder as the seasons turn.

All subscribers will receive regular thoughtful posts about creativity, mothering, home and garden, woven through with the rhythm of the seasons. You are invited to become a member of The Beauty Thread. — a creative community for seasonal gatherings, co-working spaces, and a home for finding your voice and shaping your story, including the Find Your Story guide and the Your Story Starts Here workshop (coming autumn 2026).

"It was June, and the world smelled of roses.

The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside."

—Maud Hart Lovelace.

Dearest reader…

How are you doing in this heat? London has been sweltering this week — the kind of potency that slows everything down whether you planned it or not. Despite its challenges, there is something about a heatwave that gives us permission to do less, to be still, and to remove the non-essential. It’s been intense and relaxed in equal measure…!

This easing of routine and hint of the undone feels apt just after the solstice, a point in the year that asks us to pause. This year, I have found the solstice to be a useful marker to reflect on everything that has happened since the depths of winter, and to think about how I want to integrate it all into the next phase, as the sun begins its return.

As part of this pause, I have also been reflecting on my experience of summer as a whole — sitting with its recurring patterns and motifs, and what it means to return to the same season with new eyes each year. I hope you can find a shaded corner and a cold drink to settle in for a while…

The shape of summer, through a different lens.

Each year, summer arrives differently and takes on its own shape, and yet I find myself retracing the same paths, noticing the same patterns and motifs returning like familiar threads woven through the linen fabric of the season. Many of the same ideas, feelings, and realisations arise — only with more layers of understanding each time I come back to them.

Sometimes summer begins early, like last year, with sunshine stretching out from early spring days. Some years there is a lot of back and forth, and sometimes it doesn’t feel like it gets going at all. This year, the beginning of summer carried the contrast of intense heat interspersed with sharp, cooler downpours which were sometimes tricky to navigate — yet the interchangeable rain and shine left a profusion of colour and blooms in its wake.

Despite all the potential and possibility that summer carries, there is something that also conjures a deep nostalgia in me — the strongest feelings of familiarity and longing. Perhaps it is the yearly rhythm of sports days, school fairs, and long ice cream afternoons in the park? Or maybe it is the summers I have imagined unfolding ahead of me — the unhurried mornings, undone beds, the days allowed to fill themselves without agenda or rush… the sort of summer it could be, if I make space for it all.

Perhaps more than attempting to pin down memories and visions, summer is an unmistakable feeling that is interwoven into the moments of each summer day — on waking already bathed in light; within the softer morning air in a garden still shaded and fresh with dew; when getting dressed for simplicity and ease above anything else; as I watch golden hour glaze the bricks of the neighbouring houses and the scent of al fresco dinners and barbecues drift over the fence; and when I finally fall asleep with the windows open.

I have written about summer many times over the years, and when I look back at what I have written, I notice that the same ideas return, the same patterns and motifs, the light and shadows — albeit with a subtly altered lens. So I am gathering them all here, in one place, like a wildflower patch of things I know — the threads that run through each summer, however it unfolds…

Summer is about the light.

There is a luminescence suffused in summer days that finds us everywhere — even under heavy rainclouds, in the shade, and even at the end of a day. Despite feeling more appreciation for the light as it lengthens, I also find myself skirting the edges of it more as each year passes. I find comfort in the cooler corners of the day now, seeking out the shade where I once sought full sun.

I recently learned from The Almanac: A Seasonal Guide to 2026 by Lia Leendertz, that everywhere in the British Isles north of the southernmost tip of Cornwall will not reach full darkness at all this month because the sun doesn’t dip low enough below the horizon for true night to fall. Instead we experience an ombre of twilight, the darkest being ‘astronomical twilight’, until the sun dips low enough again that no sunlight is present, which will not happen again until August.

I find that it is often in the shade that I notice the season’s magic most clearly. It is in the space and silhouettes around summer happenings and in the fading remnants of the day that we absorb the feeling that will become that familiar ache for summers past.

Summer is not about peaking.

We marked the summer solstice earlier this week — every year it creeps up, and with it a realisation that we are halfway through the year. Yet to me, the summer solstice is not a midpoint or a pinnacle — it is a portal, a deepening and a pause when the sun stands still before beginning its slow, almost imperceptible descent.

Rather than a crescendo, the solstice is an invitation for integration. It is a time to turn inward even in the brightest season, to reflect on what has grown, what we have learned, and what we need more (or less) of in the next phase. It takes us from the outward, yang energy of expansion, and invites us towards a reorientation — a redirecting of the light.

Summer at its fullest does not need to be the loudest, but instead it is a time of being our most awake and alive — a deepening into wholeness, becoming more of ourselves. Summer is not a peak to perform, but a fullness to inhabit.

The garden is a guide, not a backdrop.

This is the fourth summer in our garden and each season teaches me something new. I now know that a summer garden is not in constant bloom. It is an undulating entity, pacing itself in a well-rehearsed sequence — early summer flowers reach their peak before going over, allowing others to come to the fore.

The dreamy foxgloves have all but faded now, whilst the roses bloom on and the cosmos are opening their perfect celestial faces to the sun. I am realising that the gentle tending and noticing is important, but so is leaving the garden to its own devices, especially in the wildness of summer.

There is a lull.

From midsummer until the first harvest at the beginning of August, there is a luscious lull — a time between growth and harvest that is both fallow and full. Fallow in the sense that there is no need for productivity or urgency; full in the sense that everything is reaching its deepest expression. August holds both and asks us simply to rest inside it.

On the cusp of August there is an unmistakable shift — the sun hangs a little lower in the sky, the morning air feels different on our skin, petals begin to fade at the edges and take on a patina like antique brass. In August, we approach a threshold, moving from the exuberance of growth to the ripeness of gathering. It is, as Tove Jansson wrote, “the border between summer and autumn; the most beautiful month I know.”

August is not an ending but a time to linger in its golden days.

Late summer is a homecoming.

I was born in early September, and there is something about the particular quality of the light in late August that feels more like home to me than anywhere else in the year. The heavenly dahlias, the swaying pink Japanese anemones, and the luminous asters, just as the hydrangeas become tinged with time and the lavender begins to fade.

I have only learnt in recent years that late summer is its own distinct season, recognised by Traditional Chinese Medicine, which anchors it in the earth element: abundance, stability, nourishment, the harvest gathering in. Late summer is a soft, hazy, liminal space that asks for nothing more than a slow and gentle return.

Looking to the summer moons.

This summer, for the first time, I have names for thoughts I had been returning to without knowing what to call them.

I have been mapping a full year of moons and their folk names, conjured by centuries of human observation, from Native American and Anglo-Saxon and Celtic traditions, from medieval Europe and ancient agricultural communities who watched the sky with the kind of attention and connection that many of us have lost.

Each moon carries a name that is also a map and a compass: showing where we are in the year, what the land is doing, and what the season is asking of us…

The rose moon. The thunder moon. The grain moon. The harvest moon.

The rose moon arrives early next week, at midsummer — soft and fierce, open and boundaried, the brightest expression of the light and the deepest shade in the same flower.

The thunder moon rises in July, electric and intense, during the time of the ‘dog days’, a phrase that reaches back to ancient Greece and Rome. It is the sultry, undone stretch of high summer when Sirius the Dog Star rises with the sun, and the heat often becomes languid and feverish (I think we have already felt aa hint of this!), when things loosen and unravel at the edges. The thunder moon and the dog days hold that tension together — the aliveness and the dissolution, the electricity and the release.

The grain moon in August carries the first harvest — the gathering in of what has grown, the beginning of the end of summer’s outward expression. And the harvest moon in September, also called the singing moon, is rooted in the songs, ceremonies and celebrations that have accompanied the autumn equinox and the harvest festivals.

Whilst the names are ancient, they transcend time and tell their own stories — passing down the knowledge and wisdom of those who stayed close to the land and the seasons. It feels important this year to anchor even more deeply to the earth’s rhythm and to pass it on, to create a place where the act of noticing and tending is named, held, and shared.

Noticing and tending. Photograph by Alice Rose.

What is being illuminated.

Summer is a season of illumination and has a way of revealing things. Under this summer light, what I see most clearly is community.

My own entry into motherhood happened during the pandemic — a time when the ordinary anchors of new motherhood were not available to me. What held me were small, luminous circles of connection: online new mother and baby courses, daily meditation gatherings, postnatal yoga and creative nourishment with women I had never met in person but who became a quiet lifeline in those early, tender weeks and months.

It taught me that a group of women gathered with intention, even through a screen, even across oceans, can be an anchor and source of comfort. That co-regulation — the settling that happens when we are genuinely witnessed by others is not a luxury, it is a need. Just like in those early shelters, constructed around hearths that served practical purposes, to provide warmth, light, cooking, and protection, were also a place to gather and tell stories.

And so community now underpins everything... A Softer Space — gatherings at my home, under each moon’s particular medicine, as the year turns; Gather & Tend. — coming together online to tend to our creative work in the company of others; the new Your Story Starts Here workshop — small groups of women finding their way into their own stories together and learning how to share them. There is more to come — more ways to gather around storytelling and be witnessed in the work of shaping and sharing our voices.

What is noticing, if not together?