08.2025

august

August. With her pink skies and settling earth.

August with her hot nights.

August, who feels like twinkling lights and lapping waves and careless spills on the tablecloth. Like long walks to nowhere. Like letting the room get dark around you so you don’t disturb the stillness.

As if the whole thing can be scared off like an unsuspecting deer.

July feels static in its overhead light—the midafternoon sun that doesn’t seem to let up. The hum of cicadas, once the thrilling harbinger of a full summer on the horizon, now mimicking the white noise of a municipal building you can’t seem to get out of. Heat for days; humidity for more. Canceled plans and evenings spent indulging in air conditioning. Consciously choosing to take it all for granted—just for a night or two, I swear—because it feels like there’s so much to go around. There’s so much summer left to be had.

But August enters gently, slipping through the small but vulnerable cracks, and something shifts. You realize it won’t last forever. You realize the thing you wanted relief from is the very thing you wanted the most. And suddenly, everything feels alive again.

August has both an urgency and a stillness that I’ve yet to find the words for. Thrumming with…..something, but hanging in the hesitation of finding out what. There’s a willingness to let things be and unfold as they’re meant to, but an equal eagerness to witness it all firsthand. An intuitive pull Toward, despite the uncertainty pittering in your chest.

The prologue of Tuck Everlasting says it better than I ever could:

“The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.”

Natalie Babbitt

It’s been a year of Who’s to Say. A year of waxing poetic monthly about the way it feels to live alongside everything. Paying attention and writing it down. Letting things be and witnessing it firsthand. Living first, and observing How second. After all, the whole idea is that it’s far more interesting to let things become than to force them to fit. “What will it become? Who’s to say.” I don’t think we could have picked a better time to start if we tried. We looked out from the top of the ferris wheel and knew what we had to do to make the descent count.

August marks the twelfth monthly newsletter I’ve written. I spent 2021 writing about each month, and found—very similarly to now—that simply observing the world as it passes is more than enough. It doesn’t have to be more than it is. Taking note of what it feels like, what’s in season or in bloom, what’s happening or what isn’t. Taking time to notice and turn toward beauty is sort of the whole point. Or at least it is for me.

I’m looking forward to another year of observations (and how they change and how they stay the same and how we do too). I have changes to the format on the horizon, we’ve got new editions lined up, and even more that will unfold as it’s meant to. But for now, I just want to end on a quick note of gratitude from where I sit, once again, at the top of the ferris wheel. Thankful for an exciting descent, a meaningful climb, and for the cyclical nature of it all, that allows me to do it over and over again.

Keep an eye out this week for an exciting Who’s to Say Anniversary surprise, and in the meantime, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.

Bye now,

Leyna