Sitting at July's Table
July with James Baldwin, Mary Oliver, Derek Jarman & Luca Guadagnino
The days stretch long into evening, gardens reach their fullest expression, and the world seems to ask a little less of us than it did in spring. It is a season of inhabiting, of staying with what is here, allowing warmth, colour and quiet to do their work.
This month, we turn to James Baldwin, whose reminder that “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world...” speaks to the quiet companionship that art offers. We revisit Mary Oliver’s I Worried, a gentle invitation to loosen our grip on fear and return to the simple act of living.
We also spend time in Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage garden—a place created against impossible odds, where beauty became both resistance and devotion. Through his words and the landscape he cultivated, we reflect on making something luminous with whatever is at hand.
James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented
in the history of the world, but then you read.
It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most
were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive,
who had ever been alive.”―James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Derek Jarman on His Garden’s Boundaries
Set against the stark shingle landscape of Dungeness, Derek Jarman transformed Prospect Cottage into one of Britain’s most iconic gardens—a place where art, resilience, and nature became inseparable. In a landscape many saw as desolate, Jarman found endless possibility, creating a garden that reflected his boundless imagination.
“There are no walls or fences.
My garden’s boundaries are the horizon.”
— Derek Jarman
A Call Me By Your Name Kind of Summer
“Is it better to speak or to die?”
Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name is the ultimate Northern Italian summer movie—a sun-drenched masterpiece where every frame feels like a memory you wish you could step into. Guadagnino created something timeless, filled with aching beauty, quiet emotion, and the bittersweet intensity of first love.
What A Waste…
“But to make yourself feel nothing
so as not to feel anything
—what a waste!”
It is one of the film’s most enduring lines, capturing the universal dilemma of whether to risk everything by expressing how you truly feel or remain silent and live with regret. In just a few words, it distills the fear, courage, and vulnerability that come with loving someone.
“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!”
―Andre Aciman, Call Me by Your Name
Together, these lines remind us that even heartbreak is more meaningful than shutting ourselves off from love altogether. Few films capture the beauty of feeling so completely.
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