An Ode to Summer
There is a point, most years, somewhere around midsummer, when I feel something in me loosen. The list quietens and the urge to be endlessly useful softens into something gentler: a wish to simply notice what is already here.
Summer has never been my most industrious season. I used to feel a little guilty about that, as though slowing down was a failure of discipline rather than a form of it. I have come to see it differently. These months are not empty ones, they are the ones where I step out of my head and back into my body, out of planning and back into presence. I let the ideas that arrive in winter, sharp and demanding, rest for a while. I let new ones arrive quietly instead, the way seeds do: unhurried, and mostly out of sight.
Most mornings this summer have started in the garden. There is something honest about kneeling in soil that has no interest in your deadlines. The cavolo nero needed thinning. The peas, which climbed a teepee of foraged branches with more enthusiasm than I expected, have finally gone over, their leaves dusted with mildew, their season quietly complete. Cosmos and zinnias have taken their place in my attention, along with calendula, beetroot, and a volunteer patch of goosefoot I decided to keep rather than pull, because it asked so little and gave so much green. None of it is tidy, all of it is alive.
Gardening has taught me more about creative rhythm than almost anything else. You cannot rush a seed into growing, and you cannot argue with a plant that has decided its season is over. You can only prepare the ground, plant with intention, and trust the parts of the process that happen out of view. I think my creative practice works the same way, though it took me a long time to let it. For years I measured a good working day by how much I had produced. Slowness felt like something to apologise for, especially running a business on my own, where every quiet hour or season can feel like a risk. But a garden does not reward urgency, and neither, I have realised, does good creative thinking - both need space before they need effort.
The working days are shorter through summer. I keep to mornings where I can, log off earlier, and give the afternoons to the coast rather than the screen. I still work and there have been some genuinely lovely projects moving through the studio these past few months, ones I am proud of and glad to be trusted with, but less of them, which was my intent. Less output, more attention. Fewer hours, but better ones.
The sea has been doing its own quiet work on me. There is a particular kind of clarity that comes from salt water, from swimming out past the point where you can still hear anything from the shore. Snorkelling along the rocks, feeling the rhythm of the waves move you, watching light move through water in a way it never does on land, I am reminded that noticing is its own discipline, and one I rarely practise indoors. It asks nothing of me except attention. I come out of the water with fewer thoughts and better ones, which is, I think, the entire point.
I used to think rest and ambition were opposites, that choosing one meant abandoning the other. What I have learned, slowly and mostly through gardening, swimming, and paying closer attention to my own energy than I once did, is that they are not opposites at all. They are stages of the same process. Summer is not where my ideas end. It is where they are sown.
By the time the light starts to change and the evenings draw in, something in me shifts again, and I feel the pull back toward focus, toward long hours at the desk, toward the kind of momentum that only seems to arrive once the seeds planted in the warmer months have had time to sit quietly in the dark. The ideas that felt loose and half formed in July tend to arrive again in October with real shape to them, ready to be worked. I do not think that is a coincidence. I think it is the reason I let summer be what it is, rather than forcing it into a version of productivity it was never built for.
So this is my small ode to the season: to shorter working days, to soil under fingernails and salt on skin, to the projects that still get made even when the pace has changed, and to the quiet, unglamorous work of letting something take root before you ask it to grow. It is not a season of doing nothing. It is a season of doing differently, of trusting that stillness and ambition can sit in the same body without cancelling each other out.
Autumn will bring its own kind of industry soon enough, and I will welcome it, the way I welcome most years the return of longer desk hours and sharper focus. But for now, I am letting summer do what it does best, which is simply to nourish, and to plant.
Thank you for reading,
