Illustrations from the threshold


OF TALE & THICKET

When the gallery put out a call for work inspired by Midsummer, I wasn’t sure. I’ve always been more of an autumn-winter creature—the hush, the turning inwards, the long shadows. Midsummer felt too bright, too loud somehow. But a friend gently suggested I think about the night of it—the shortest one of the year—and the quiet that comes just before dawn. That helped something shift.

I found myself returning, as I so often do, to the places in-between. The edges of fields. The hush of a hedge in bloom. The soft hour when the world feels thinner than usual. That’s where this painting began. With a sense of something waiting—just out of sight, just before the light.

And so, this small story began to stir…

The Hedge Between the Worlds

There is a hedge at the edge of the Fae country—

a rambling, tangled thing, grown thick with honeysuckle and old secrets.

Some hedges mark the end of a field.

Others, the beginning of a story.

This one, I think, belongs to the latter.

It is just before dawn on the shortest night of the year.

The silence is deep and full of mysteries.

The air lies quiet and luminous, as though moonlight itself were singing—

softly, secretly—

to those who remember how to listen.

And there, in the soft tangle beneath blossom and thorn,

something stirs.

A dormouse, curled in her woven nest,

blinks into the half-light.

Her nose twitches at the warm scent of bramble and leaf and blossom,

and though her waking is slow,

she knows.

She is small enough to pass between things.

She understands the liminal places.

She belongs to both worlds.

The imaginal and the worldly

share this hour equally.

And hanging from the stems around her,

thin ribbons—faded now—flutter gently in the breeze.

Prayers, perhaps.

Or offerings.

Or memories.

Who tied them? .