Unravelling and beginning.

a summer letter on July, creativity, the garden and the thunder moon.

Jul 29, 2026

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

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"To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."

—Emily Dickinson.

Dearest reader…

How has your week or so been? We are fully immersed in the school holidays here, when the days are long and full, and yet blur together in a haze of lovely summer things.

We have spent the past week or so in and around home with trips to the woods, the park, a favourite local café serving the best babyccino according to my daughter, and a play spot from earlier days that we don’t get to so often now they are at school (oh, and work and writing here squeezed in around it all!). It’s been low key and full on in equal measure, when there is barely an inch of space amongst it all, and it feels both like one hundred years since we were at school ten days ago, and at the same time like time is slipping through my fingers.

A walk around my small London garden first thing before my children are dressed, with a cup of tea in hand, inspired this post. The garden in July seems to be the place where everything is unravelling, but some things are just beginning… it feels very reminiscent of where I am at, and perhaps you are too…?

The fullness of the summer holidays.

September had always felt like a beginning to me, with decades of starting a new educational year in September, and the first day of school often coinciding with my birthday, there has always been a fond and familiar freshness to the month. However, last September I did not feel ready to begin again, and I certainly didn’t feel refreshed. After a wild and wonderful summer with my children, with both of them off for the whole six plus weeks, I felt exhausted, and in need of a quiet, secluded retreat where I could be alone, with nothing asked of me for an extended period of time…one day!

I felt at once hugely grateful for the flexibility my work affords me to spend this time with my children, but there was a tinge of resentment that I hadn’t felt able to carve out alone-time to fill my own cup, or spend dedicated time on my creative work (two things that are most often interchangeable). Nothing that I had planned to launch in autumn was ready, and although I had softened to the fact that things would take longer, it was frustrating to put my thoughts, ideas and plans on hold for the best part of a season.

Here we are a year on, at the end of July — an in-between month, inhabiting a lull between the growth seasons and the first harvest on 1st August. In recent days and weeks, I have noticed the garden unravelling with growth, exuberance and some tiredness, some things are fading, whilst others are just beginning. It seems to mirror the way I have been feeling this month as we raced towards the end of term — the feeling of unravelling (on many levels!), of the need to reach an end point and closure on the past year of school and my son’s last year of nursery at the school before starting Reception, and yet holding the unknown of the weeks ahead, and the beginnings beyond…

July, in many ways, is a month of lasts (as well as firsts), it comes with tenderness, tiredness, chaos, grief, relief, longing, pride, and bewilderment at where the last year has gone. It is exhausting in its waves of emotion, it holds both an intensity, and an emptiness without the usual routines (I have already heard the words “I’m so bored” many times, which I am taking as a good thing that my children have some space to think and feel). The summer holidays stretch out ahead — long summer days, full of possibility but also overwhelm at the juggle of everyone’s needs, and remembering my own. Perhaps rather than being about endings or beginnings, July is the middle of everything, the messy and the magic, a time that holds the unmistakable alchemy of being in the thick of it all.

July’s invitation.

July marks a shift into the second part of the year. It inhabits a brief but luscious pause between the growth seasons — we have moved all the way from the dark stillness of winter, through the unfurling energy of spring, and into the expansive light of early summer. After the summer solstice, and the slow return of the sun, the invitation shifts from growth to integration, and from expansion to gathering in. The second half of the year asks us not to do more, but to grow into and layer onto what we have already done; to integrate what is working, and let go of what is not.

As we approach the first harvest, called Lammas or Lughnasadh in the Celtic Wheel of the Year on 1st August, it is the ideal time to look back on the first part of the year; not in order to set new goals but to notice the texture of our days so far, of what has felt good and what might need to shift.

These past months to me have felt like a gradual transition from dreaming and imagining, to the earthy work of laying foundations and leaving footprints on a path, with the steady building of a community gathering moon by moon, hosting the first Your Story Starts Here storytelling and PR workshop, and starting work on my new website. But more than each of these things individually, everything feels a lot clearer.

Just like the shifts in the living world, seasons change continually, where often the beginning is imperceptible and blurs with the season that comes before it (see winterspring!). The moon too, keeps on turning with incremental changes taking place between the new and full moons. A culmination of the smallest shifts begin to whisper that we are in a whole new phase.

Starting in the middle.

It feels like a comfort to me, that the months ahead are not a blank slate but instead a continuation. This summer, I am giving myself permission to tend to myself and my creativity when quiet moments arise, but also to let things go when the time, or my energy does not allow. I am reminding myself to seize and create the space when things are calm around me and I am craving seeing the outline of myself a little clearer, as I do when I sit down to write. I am reminding myself that I can begin again any time, in the middle of week, season, and year, in the mess and the chaos, in the fullness and the ordinariness, because chances are that it will be some time before the ideal moment arrives…

And at the same time, knowing that the lull and a slower pace is a part of the continuous spiral of growth outwards and the gathering inwards. That it is a courageous and resilient act to pick up where you left off time and time again, to find the thread wherever it was lost in the midst of everything else. That as we are constantly changing and evolving, like the world beyond our windows, that it is never too late.

Filling my creative cup, thanks to Bluey.

A Year of Moons | July | thunder, hay and blessing.

Full moon: Wednesday 29th July 2026.

The thunder moon is rising and reaching fullness tonight, and it feels like the right time to bring in something that is a continuation of everything seasonal and cyclical, with each moon carrying a fascinating, storied name (or a few) that is a compass pointing us to where we are, and what the month is asking of us.

The electric and intense thunder moon rises tonight, during the ‘dog days’ (from the beginning of July to mid-August), a phrase that dates back to ancient times when it was believed that Sirius, the Dog Star rose alongside the sun, combining their heat to bring high temperatures and drought… it certainly rings true this year with the news of widespread wild fires in the UK and Europe. The sun and moon in July hold a tension together; the aliveness and the unravelling, the intensity and the release, much like I felt at the end of the school year.

July’s moon has several names originating from different cultures over thousands of years — the thunder moon in relation to dramatic summer storms; the hay moon for the beginning of the gathering and provision; and the blessing moon for the gratitude for all that has grown. The energy of July’s moon is not soft, sweet or still but alive, abundant and vibrant.

*What feels most alive to you right now?

*What are you gathering to take with you into the months ahead?

*What blessing(s) have been bestowed from the growth seasons?

Thank you for reading my July-shaped thoughts, I would love to hear if any of my musings resonate with you and if you are feeling a sense of unravelling or beginning, or both, in any areas of your life…

With much full July moon love,