Before there was a mountain, or a manor, or a lake with light in its depths, there was just a feeling. Three feelings, really, tangled together so tightly I couldn't have told you where one ended and the next began. Grief. A longing for home. And underneath both of those, stubborn and glowing, the kind of wonder you only carry as a child, before the world convinces you to set it down.

For a long time, I thought hyperfocus was something to apologize for. I'd surface from six hours inside a screenplay and realize I hadn't eaten, hadn't texted anyone back, hadn't noticed the sun move across the sky. I'd disappear into a project and look up to find the whole afternoon gone, along with the load of laundry I swore I'd start "in just a minute." I'd sit down to paint one small thing on a black canvas and stand up four hours later with acrylic on my hands and no memory of choosing to stay that long. I used to think that meant something was wrong with how my brain worked. Now I know it means something is right.

A particular kind of tired shows up in late August. Not the loud, obvious kind... The quiet kind. The kind that creeps in after weeks of heat and looser schedules and days that blurred into each other in the good way and the hard way both. If you're neurodivergent, you probably know this tired intimately. It's the feeling of standing at the edge of autumn with your structure somewhere behind you, wondering how you're supposed to find your way back to rhythm without it feeling like punishment.

A particular kind of vulnerability comes with sitting behind a table full of your own books. Not the vulnerability of writing them… that happens alone, in the quiet, where no one is watching, and you can rewrite a sentence eleven times before anyone knows it existed in any other form. I mean the other kind. The kind that shows up the moment you're sitting in a folding chair, in front of strangers, next to a stack of you — your imagination, your late nights, your whole unguarded heart, bound and printed and priced at ten or twenty dollars a copy.

There is a particular kind of magic that happens when you put a room full of writers together. Not the polished, performance kind of magic. The real kind. The kind where someone says something from the front of the room, and it lands in your chest like it was aimed directly at you. Where you end up in a conversation with a stranger during the break and walk away with a new friend, a new perspective, or a sentence that changes the way you think about your work. Where you leave the building at the end of the day, somehow both exhausted and more alive than you were when you walked in. That is a writers conference. And if you have never been to one or if you have been on the fence about going, I want to make the case for why you should.

Midsummer herbs are not the herbs of warming and stoking. They are the herbs of cooling, clarifying, and opening. They are here to help your nervous system remember how to be soft. To help your creative mind release its grip on the spinning and find the still point underneath. To help your body feel like somewhere worth being, even in the heat. Here are the herbs I return to each July for clarity, for calm, and for the kind of creative fire that burns steady and long rather than hot and frantic.

Expansion feels like anxiety glitter in my veins. That's the most honest way I can describe it. This particular season of my creative life — summer 2026, the theme I chose for June, the one I keep returning to — feels electric and unsettling and warm all at once. Like Felix Felicis running through your bloodstream if you've read Harry Potter. Like liquid luck. Like something that could spill if you move too fast, but glows if you hold it steady. It doesn't always feel comfortable. But it feels right.

The light of June arrives golden and unhurried, spilling through every window like it has nowhere better to be. It lingers past dinner, long after the dishes are done and the day has softened into evening. And if you sit still long enough in that light… really sit in it — something inside you shifts. That's Litha speaking.

You might know it as Midsummer, or simply the Summer Solstice. It goes by many names across many traditions, and all of them are pointing at the same threshold: the longest day of the year, the moment the sun reaches its peak, and the quiet turning that follows. From here, the days grow shorter by increments.

Something shifts when you climb high enough… the air, the light, the way time moves. Magic lives at elevation. I don't mean that metaphorically — or not only metaphorically. I mean it in the way the air feels different up here. The way sound travels. The way light moves through a ponderosa pine at seven in the morning and makes you stop whatever you were doing and just... breathe. I've lived in the White Mountains of Arizona long enough now that the place has gotten into my bones. And every summer, I'm reminded all over again: this landscape isn't just where I live. It's where I create. It's in the soil of everything I make.

There's something nobody really warns you about when you pour everything you have into something. Not the exhaustion… you expect that. Not the relief… you've been dreaming of it. It's the strange, hollow, in-between feeling that arrives after the last thing is done and the world keeps spinning like it doesn't know what just happened. The emotional hangover.