As I record this on the Summer Solstice - a moment when nature stands in its fullest expression, it feels like the perfect time to reflect on a season of conversations that, in different ways, have all pointed towards one essential human need: belonging.

• At the Summer Solstice, when the light reaches its fullest expression, we are invited to pause and ask what has ripened in us, what is ready to bear fruit, and what kind of power we wish to carry into the darker half of the year.
• The shift from Oak King to Holly King reminds us that true strength is not domination but stewardship - how can the warrior within us create the conditions for feeling, tenderness and relationship?
• Belonging begins with safety. Before we can feel deeply, we need to feel held. Yet the natural world offers a remarkable invitation: trees, rivers, birds and plants ask nothing of us before we speak. 
• Angela Hanscom reminded us that children belong through their bodies first. Movement, risk, balance, play and sensory experience are not extras; they are part of how we come to know ourselves and our place in the world.
• Children often meet the world as a community of living subjects rather than objects. Perhaps part of adulthood is remembering that capacity for relationship with the more-than-human world.
• Jessica Newberry Le Vay challenged the idea that climate anxiety is something to be fixed. Grief, worry, anger and sadness may be healthy responses to a world under pressure - evidence not of pathology, but of care.
• Emotional resilience does not come from avoiding difficult feelings but from learning how to hold them together, in community, with purpose and agency.
• Mo Wilde brought us back to ancient relationships between people, plants, food and seasons, reminding us that health has always been rooted in reciprocity with the living world.
• Many people arrive at the GP with symptoms that cannot be neatly explained or measured. Sometimes what hurts is not simply the body, but loneliness, grief, burnout, disconnection or the absence of belonging.
• Health may not exist solely within the individual. It may also live in relationships, communities, purpose, access to nature, and our connection to something larger than ourselves.
• Outdoor consultations, walking groups, community gardens, shared fires and time in nature are not soft alternatives to healthcare. They may be part of the medicine itself - helping people regulate, connect and remember they are not alone.
• This season has returned again and again to one simple truth: health is more than the absence of illness. It is connection. It is movement. It is meaning. It is relationship. It is belonging.

Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com