thewitchlingshelf | Entries tagged with seasonal

There’s a corner of the room where the light always falls just so.

Late afternoon sunlight, warm as honey, slips across the pages of whatever book I’ve left open - spilling into the folds of the blanket, catching on the rim of my teacup, resting in golden pools on the floorboards. This is where I sit lately, in the hush of early evening, as the world grows soft around the edges.

The reading chair is old and comforting, with a cushion that sags just enough to remember me. A pressed flower journal waits on the side table, its pages slightly curled from last week’s rain. There’s a rosemary sachet tucked under the armrest. A small ritual in itself - to breathe it in before I begin. Courage in the scent of green things.

Just beside me sits the seasonal altar. I didn’t mean to build one; it simply gathered over time. A beeswax candle, half-burned. A bowl of rose hips and salt. A tiny jar of moonwater, glitter clinging to the sides like distant stars. Things I’ve touched and tended. Things that ground me when my thoughts begin to unravel.

I light the candle before I read. Not always for intention, but for presence. For the way the flame quiets my hands and reminds me: you are here. You are held.

Books have been slower this month. I read them in pieces, in breaths. A paragraph at a time between sips of tea. Sometimes I stop and just look at the light, or the flame, or the faint outline of dried petals in the journal beside me. Sometimes the reading is not the story, but the act of sitting still with it.

This corner - this altar, this pause - is holding me. And I am learning to let it.

✨ Ritual Notes:

Candle scent: wildflower honey and old parchment.
Today’s page marker: a pressed sweet pea, lilac-blue and translucent.
Tea in my cup: oatstraw and chamomile, with a drop of lavender syrup.

May your quiet spaces find you, and may they be enough.

Current Mood: mellow

"Some flavours belong to sunlight. Some are spells best served cold."

There are tastes that mean summer—like memory you can hold on your tongue. Not just food, but feeling. Sun-warmed moments, sticky fingers, and the quiet enchantment of eating something seasonal, simple, and sacred.

🌞 My Favourite Summer-Associated Foods

🍓 Strawberries and cream
An absolute ritual. Eaten on a picnic blanket, with grass marks on your knees and the sound of bees nearby. There's something soft and decadent about them—like the sweetness of June itself.

🌿 Cucumber sandwiches with lemony butter
Soothing, crisp, almost old-fashioned. They feel like they belong to afternoon teas in secret gardens, or to books with hidden keyholes and lost time.

🍅 Heirloom tomatoes with fresh basil
Still warm from the sun, sliced and salted. The taste of slow-growing things, of gardens tended by hand and heart.

🍋 Lemon sorbet
A sharp kiss on a hot day. Clean, bright, a little flirty. Eaten barefoot on the back step, with sunlight spilling everywhere.

🍑 Peaches so ripe they almost fall apart
Sticky and golden, best eaten over the sink or with a napkin tucked under your chin. They taste like secrets you meant to keep but whispered anyway.

🌸 Elderflower cordials and iced herbal teas
Infusions of garden and spellwork—lavender, mint, rosehip. Chilled in glass bottles, sipped with a sigh under a willow tree.

Food is memory. And summer food—light, fragrant, messy, and magical—reminds me to slow down, savour, and taste the season fully.

What tastes like summer to you?

📖 Title: The Lighthouse Witches

✍️ Author: C.J. Cooke

🔮 First Impressions:
The book opens with fog and folklore, instantly unsettling in that delicious way where you’re not quite sure if you’re reading a ghost story, a time slip, or a whispered curse. It pulled me in like a tide—slow and strange and deeply magnetic.

✨ Mood:
Driftwood altars, storm-swept cliffs, witch-marks on stone, secrets steeped in brine

🍵 Tea Pairing:
Seaweed green tea with a drop of honey—earthy, saline, and just a little uncanny

🕯️ Spell Notes:
"We are the daughters of the storm, and we remember."

📚 Progress:
🖤 Started: 02 July 2025
🖤 Finished: 06 July 2025
🖤 Pages turned by candlelight: with salt on my skin and something ancient at my back

💭 Reflections:
This is a novel built on layers: present-day mystery, 17th-century witch trials, missing girls, and the way trauma echoes through bloodlines. The atmospheric writing absolutely shines—Cooke has a gift for making you feel the landscape, the chill, the ache of something just out of reach.

The shifting timelines and points of view are ambitious and mostly well-handled, though I occasionally found myself needing to pause and orient. The heart of the novel—mothers, daughters, and the legacy of belief—beats strong beneath the folklore and fear.

There are moments where the horror flickers too close, and others where it feels more speculative than supernatural—but that tension is part of the book’s haunting charm. A gothic lighthouse tale with teeth, tenderness, and a strange sort of hope in its bones.

Not flawless, but deeply compelling. It left salt in the corners of my heart.

"Somewhere, a moth is in love with a candle, and I understand her completely."

Summer arrives like a poem read aloud in a warm room—soft, golden-edged, a little too bright in places, and full of feelings. It’s the season of long glances and longer evenings. Of something almost happening.

💗 What I Love About Summer

🍓 Fruit warm from the sun.
Not washed, not perfect. Just plucked from a punnet or hedge, eaten on the walk home with juice on my hands. Strawberries taste like childhood. Blackberries taste like secrets.

📖 Reading outside until the pages glow.
When the wind turns them for me. When I have to anchor the book with a teacup. When the world hushes, and it's just me, the story, and the sky.

🕯️ Late-night candlelight and quiet music.
There’s something romantic about sitting alone with a candle at 10pm, writing into a journal as though it’s a love letter to the world. The air hums with stillness and possibility.

🌙 Midnight walks when everything is lavender.
That dusky not-quite-dark, not-quite-light. The sound of crickets or foxes. The scent of honeysuckle climbing someone else’s garden gate. Magic lives here.

💌 Letters written on soft paper.
Tucked into books. Left on doorsteps. Folded with care. There’s something about summer that makes me want to say too much, and mean all of it.

Summer is fleeting, but maybe that’s the point. Maybe the romance lives in the way it doesn’t last—the melt of ice cream, the blush of the evening sky, the goodbye at the end of the garden party.

Still, I fall for it every year.

What do you love most about summer? What sets your heart aglow?

"A journal is a lantern. What you write inside it glows."

The year turned quietly, didn’t it? We lit our candles, wrote our spells, and somehow, here we are—July. The second half of 2025 unfurling like a letter we forgot we wrote to ourselves. And now, it’s time to answer it.

✨ Goals for July (and beyond)

This month, I want to light my days with rituals, reading, and rest. Not grand revolutions, but small, steady embers. Here’s what I’m calling in:

🌿 Return to rhythm.
A gentle morning stretch. Journaling before the noise begins. Reading by lamplight instead of phone-glow. Not perfection—just presence.

📚 Finish a handful of books from my summer TBR stack. (No pressure, just pleasure. I’ll follow the story that speaks loudest.)

🔮 Create something each week.
A pressed flower page. A poem. A quiet spell scribbled in the margins. Art as a kind of breathing.

🕯️ Reflect at midpoint.
I’ll carve out one afternoon to revisit my intentions from earlier in the year. What’s shifted? What still calls to me?

💌 Write more letters— to friends, to my future self, to the day itself. Let the words be lanterns, too.

📖 A Second-Half Spell

If the first half of the year was all seed and soil, let the second half be bloom and balm. I want softness without stagnancy. Stillness without silence. Magic stitched into the everyday.

And you? What’s lighting you up this month? What are you planting for the rest of the year?

Let’s leave the door ajar for possibility.

A candle lit.
A book opened.
A spell softly spoken.

I’ve been thinking about the quiet magic of routine — the hush that falls when you prepare to read something beloved, or the way a flame flickers just so when you're alone with a story. It’s not a big ritual. Just a soft one.

This little quote has been lingering with me lately — like the echo of a page turning. I think it belongs on parchment, with pressed lavender nearby.

The light feels different after the solstice.

The longest day has passed, but the light still lingers — golden and thick as honey where it falls through the lace curtains. My reading nook, just beside the window, has shifted slightly since the solstice. The books have grown softer in tone, the teacups linger longer, and everything smells faintly of lavender and old pages.

On the nightstand:

A worn copy of The Night Circus, spine creased with affection
A pressed petal journal, tucked beneath a small stack of tea-stained letters
A bottle labeled moonlight (really: glitter, rosemary, and memory)
A beeswax candle, burnt low — I light it before reading anything sacred

I’ve draped a light scarf over the lamp to dim the glow — just enough to blur the edges of the room and let the stories speak louder. There’s rosemary in the window, for courage. A single moth-wing charm tucked into my current bookmark.

This is the season for slow enchantments. For books that whisper in silver. For reading with bare feet against cool floorboards while the sun dips low and the shadows stretch like ribbon.

If you visited, I’d make you lavender and vanilla tea, and let you choose a book from the shelf — any book that glows when you touch it.

I think this is my favourite way to mark the turning — quietly, with books and candles, with light that lasts just a little longer than it did yesterday

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