Pausing at summer's midpoint

Monday morning saunas & almond croissants for lunch

View from Mam Tor, Derbyshire

August 1. High summer. The midpoint of this hot, dry summer.

A day when our ancestors celebrated Lammas, which in Old English means ‘loaf-mass’, and is when the year’s first harvested grain was made into bread and brought to the church to be blessed. It was a time of feasts, of giving thanks to the earth for its crops.

It’s one of the eight heartbeats of the year: the two solstices and two equinoxes mark the astronomical start of each season. Lammas and its fellow ‘cross-quarter’ festivals of Imbolc, Beltane and Samhain mark a season’s midpoint.

Each, with their accompanying rituals and celebrations - at Beltane, on May 1, for example, there were bonfires, flower-gathering in the woods and dancing – would have given our ancestors an opportunity to pause from their regular routines.

As a twenty-first-century city dweller, I don’t do much in the way of observance. I might remember to meditate on the winter solstice, and set some intentions for the year to come. And I always take my son trick-or-treating at Halloween, but easily forget – as we scrabble for sweets on Primrose Hill doorsteps – that its origins lie in Samhain, a time when the veil between the physical world and the realm of spirits was believed to be at its thinnest.

But I do clock these beats: with relief at Imbolc, knowing we’re finally halfway through winter. And with some sadness at Lammas, knowing we’re already halfway through my beloved summer, and entering the year’s final stretch of days where daylight outweighs darkness.

This year, by chance I got to properly pause at Lammas and the days straddling it. First, in Derbyshire, staying in a seventeenth-century thatched cottage, where I’d get up before my husband and son and sit alone on the dewy grass with a mug of tea, listening to the birds singing and the apples gently thudding from the tree. We picnicked by the river and walked through the Peaks to the prehistoric hill fort at Mam Tor. I barely cooked. Early evening found me on the lawn, not at the stove, reading this excellent novel, a glass of wine beside me.

Back in London, home alone for 72 entire hours, I sat in Marylebone’s beautiful Paddington Street Gardens with a friend, chatting and drinking coffee under the shade of a plane tree. I continued to barely cook – which, while I love, also gets somewhat tedious doing on repeat day after day – and ate almond croissants from the farmer’s market for lunch. I spent my first ever Monday morning at the sauna, slipping in and out of the cold plunge - especially delicious on a thirty-degree day. Then ate toasted coconut bread at one of my favourite breakfast spots.

I loved how these days took me away from my usual routines and my to-do list. So much of my life – and yours too, perhaps? – is spent emptying the dishwasher, working, doing the Ocado order, replacing the broken lightbulb, fixing my laptop, renewing the TV license.

And life is, I find, racing past. Scarily so. This year, for the first time, I’m even finding the school summer holidays are flying by a touch too fast. Something I never imagined happening.

Pausing from life’s rushing rhythm slows down time. We need to create these interruptions for ourselves. No one else will hand them to us; and there will always be more we could be cracking on with.

Of course, getting a swathe of days like I had recently is a rare luxury. But we can create pause points in smaller increments: daily, weekly, monthly - at whatever beat makes sense to us.

I try and do one thing a week just for me. Lifting weights, for example, which I get up early a few times a week for, doesn’t count. While I kind of enjoy it, it isn’t exactly unadulterated pleasure in the way sitting in a café – even for ten minutes – savouring a flat white and people-watching is. Or taking a walk in Regent’s Park with a friend. Occasionally I do something bigger – like an exhibition or a movie: last month I watched The Invite in an almost-empty cinema at 2pm, which felt like the ultimate indulgence. And made me so happy.

Carving out these pockets and pouring something joyful into them helps remind me what a privilege it is to be human and be part of this world. Of course, it’s a world also filled with challenges and heartache. Which is all the more reason to connect with its lightness, wonder and beauty whenever we can.

‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’ wrote Mary Oliver in her famous poem, The Summer Day.

For years, I thought those two final - and most often-quoted - lines were about what you were going to do with your life. Purpose with a capital P. But I’ve now read it enough times to realise I was wrong. In the preceding lines, she wrote:

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

‘To be idle and blessed.’ What a beautiful invitation. I hope you are finding ways to do so this summer. I’d love to know how. Please tell me in the comments – or by email! It’s always a pleasure to hear from you.

Love,

Annabel

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