The Depth of Summer: What Are You Tending?

The Tending arrives four times a year: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. It is a space to think alongside, to stay in genuine relationship with what is unfolding, and to tend to the questions that matter between the moments that bring us together. If this letter found you at the right moment, you are warmly invited to subscribe and to pass it on.

I'm writing from London, in the Northern Hemisphere, where the summer solstice (the longest day of the year, when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky) passed on June 21 and the days have been getting shorter since. But wherever you are reading this, whatever season is outside your window, I suspect you feel it too.

Do you feel the pressure in the air?

Because the numbers from this summer are hard to look away from. France recorded 43 degrees Celsius, its hottest day since measurements began in 1947. Germany broke its all-time national temperature record. So did Poland. So did the Czech Republic. The UK broke a June record that had stood since 1976. Across Washington DC, New York and Philadelphia, July temperatures hit highs that hadn't been seen in decades. Drought is spreading across parts of the Americas, the Middle East and Central Asia. Global ocean temperatures on June 21 hit their highest ever recorded. And a strengthening El Niño means above-normal temperatures are now projected across the Arabian Peninsula, northern Africa, the Indian subcontinent, eastern Asia and Central America through the rest of this year.

But what I keep returning to is that the climate is not separate from everything else we are carrying. It is just the most visible expression of it. A system asked to absorb more than it was built for, for longer than it could hold, until the pressure became impossible to ignore.

And what we are all living inside right now is the same dynamic at a different scale. When the pressure outside becomes this sustained, something happens to our Windows of Knowing. The inner window, our values, our intuition, what we actually believe when nobody is performing for anyone, starts to contract. The relational window shrinks. And we find ourselves moving through our days, our work, our closest relationships from behind glass. Present but not fully arriving. Responding but not genuinely meeting what is in front of us.

This is not a personal failing. It is what accumulated pressure does to human systems. And it is happening collectively, not just individually, moving through our organisations and our teams and our communities in ways most of us can feel but few of us have named.

And the instinct, when pressure builds this intensely, is always the same. We reach for more Doing. Some of us push harder, faster, louder, trying to outrun the feeling that we are not enough for what this moment is asking. Others retreat entirely, going quiet behind screens because the unpredictable, messy reality of other people feels like more than we can hold right now. Both are the same impulse. Both are Doing without Knowing. Doing without Being. We keep moving, but we have lost contact with the ground we are moving from.

The cost of that is not only exhaustion. It is something harder to name. We act but nothing real shifts in us. We produce but we don't grow. We respond to the world but we stop being genuinely changed by it. A leader, a human being, who has stopped being changed by what they encounter, can still function. Can still perform. But cannot transform. Cannot bring others with them into anything genuinely new.

More Doing from that place doesn't restore the ground. It depletes it further.

Which is why I keep thinking about the apple tree.

When it is struggling, the instinct is to tend the fruit. Polish it, protect it, manage what is visible. But the fruit is only ever evidence of what is happening below ground. The invisible biology, the soil, the root system, the living network connecting this tree to every other tree around it, this is the Being space. The reservoir that Knowing and Doing both draw from. Research on apple trees specifically shows that when soil is repeatedly extracted without ever being restored, it loses its capacity to support the very thing it once grew. And the instinctive fix, more fertiliser, more external input, can actually reduce the tree's underground network, making it more dependent on what comes from outside and less able to sustain itself from within.

When we tend only the surface, we weaken what is underneath…What the tree actually needs is for someone to ask what the soil has been missing. What has been extracted without being restored. What the invisible system underneath needs to rebuild its capacity to sustain life…We do this to ourselves constantly. And this summer, at this particular moment, I think we are doing it more than ever.

So I want to leave you with one question, worth sitting with rather than answering quickly:What have you been extracting from this summer, without stopping to ask what it needs to be restored?...That answer will tell you more about the state of your soil than anything visible on the surface.

Tend the root. The fruit will follow.

Write back if something here moved something in you. Let this be the beginning of a conversation rather than the end of one.

With care for "ALL",

Dr. Laila Marouf