Moonflowers - July

This month, beneath July’s full moon, I began a new small ritual. Each full moon, I am going to gather a handful of what is blooming. A few petals, a few leaves. I’ll dry them carefully on my windowsill throughout the waning moon and then tuck them into a glass jar. As the months turn, that jar will become a record of the seasons unfolding, a way to keep a little of that night moon magic close at hand.

This July evening was impossibly abundant. The garden was spilling over with colour, the air still holding the day’s warmth even as darkness gathered at the edges. At ten o’clock, I slipped outside with bare feet, feeling the soft, cooling lawn under my soles. I couldn’t see the moon, she was low beyond the horizon, though I’d watched her bright face the night before. Still, she felt close by.

It was one of those balmy nights when the heat of the day begins to release, and the whole garden seems to sigh. I took my time gathering petals: calendula, rose, nasturtium, marigold, patchwork fragments of high summer. The scent of watered soil and crushed leaves drifting up in the darkness, and I felt as if the plants themselves were breathing easier, finally content in the cool.

When my little bowl was full, I lay down in the grass for a moment, watching the sky darken. The coolness of the ground seeped through me, grounding every restless thought. I imagined all the lives hidden around me, bats dusk diving, moths finding nectar, hedgehogs nosing through the borders, the baby frogs in the pond, roots quietly pushing deeper into the earth seeking water, and with every atom of my being I sent love….love for the trees, the insects, the birds, the secret creatures of the night, I sent love up into the sky and down into the dark soil, because I will never stop being astonished by how beautiful this earth is. The persistent magic that lives in every leaf.

May this jar of moonflowers remind me, that the seasons are forever circling back, and that there is always more wonder waiting to be gathered.