Gather the light while it is generous.
At twenty-four minutes past nine on Sunday morning, here in Portugal, the year tips over its brightest point. The summer solstice. The sun climbs as high as it will climb all year, holds there for a breath, and the longest day of the whole twelve months opens out around us. You do not have to do anything to take part. You are already in it. The light is already on your face.
I love this morning more than almost any other in the calendar.
In my garden, the lavender has come into its own. It always does around midsummer, opening into long purple spires that hum with bees from first light until the day finally lets go. This is the week I will cut it and hang it in bunches to dry, the way gardeners have for centuries, because lavender is one of those generous plants that holds onto summer. Gathered now, at the very height of its scent, it keeps the warmth of these long days folded inside it and gives it back months later, in the short dark afternoons of winter, when a single handful can fill a whole room with June.
That, to me, is the whole invitation of the solstice. Gather the light while it is generous.
My garden has always been my solace. It was never clearer than in the spring of 2020, when the world stopped and so much fell quiet and uncertain.
The garden did not stop.
The seeds did not check the news.
The earth went on doing exactly what earth does, warming, rising, greening, asking only that I come outside and put my hands in it. Feeling the soil under bare feet, the simple animal fact of standing on the ground, was the truest tonic I knew. It still is. When everything above our heads feels loud and heavy, the ground beneath is steady, and it is always willing to hold us.
The world has not run short of turmoil since. Some mornings the news can make your heart sink before your feet have even touched the floor. And yet, at 9.24 on Sunday morning, the solstice will arrive precisely on time. There is something deeply steadying in that. The light keeps coming back. We can borrow that steadiness. We can let it remind us that we, too, are part of something that turns and returns and heals.
Because here is the upbeat truth at the heart of midsummer. The seasons are not only happening to the world out there. They are happening in you. You have your own light, your own high summers and quiet winters, your own times for growing and gathering and resting. And the solstice, the year at its fullest, is a beautiful moment to turn that attention gently inward and ask a simple question. How am I, really, across all of me? Body and feeling, energy and rhythm. Where am I flourishing, and where could I do with a little more light?
That question is the whole of how I work now. I have gathered seven ways of tending a person, herbs, flower essences, scent, crystals, colour and sound, energy, and the timing of the seasons themselves, into a single path built entirely around you. I call it 7Layers. It begins exactly where the solstice begins: not with what is wrong, but with what is already growing, and how to give it more light.
So mark the morning. Step outside, even for a minute. Feel the ground come up to meet you. Turn your face toward the sun. And if you feel the pull to begin tending your own seven layers while the light is this generous, there is a short and gentle assessment on this site to show you where to start. Three minutes, a few kind questions, nothing stored, nothing owed.
Happy solstice everyone. Gather the light.
Bo x
Lavandula angustifolia Lavender / True Lavender
Anxiety, low mood and stress, nervous exhaustion and burnout, restlessness and insomnia, tension headaches and migraine. Stress related digestive complaints including bloating, wind, nausea and colic. Applied topically for burns, sunburn, minor cuts and wounds, eczema, acne, bruises, muscular aches, and insect bites and stings. Inhaled or steamed for coughs, colds and chest infections.
- Tea (infusion) 1 to 2 grams of dried flowers (2 to 4 grams if fresh) in a covered cup of just-boiled water, steeped for 10 to 15 minutes. Keep it covered to hold in the aromatic oils. Strain and drink up to three times daily, or in the evening to ease into sleep.
- Tincture Dried flowers: 1:5 ratio, 40 to 50% alcohol. Dose: 1 to 4 ml, up to three times daily. Fresh flowers: 1:2 ratio.
- Infused oil Fill a jar with dried flowers, cover with olive or sweet almond oil, and leave in gentle warmth for two to four weeks before straining. Massage into aching muscles, work into the temples for tension headaches, or use as a base for balms.
- Bath and sleep sachet Tie a handful of dried flowers in muslin under running water for a calming bath, or fill a small fabric bag to tuck beneath the pillow. Both soothe the nervous system and settle restless sleep.
- Essential oil 5 to 10 drops in 5 ml of a base oil for massage, or a few drops in a bowl of hot water for steam inhalation. Do not take the essential oil internally.
