The Liminal — Strawberry Moon Cycle — June 2026

JUNE 14, 2026 · STRAWBERRY MOON · FOURTEENTH ISSUE · WWW.FOXANDTHISTLE.STUDIO

THE FOX & THISTLE LIMINAL

A MONTHLY CREATIVE ALMANAC WEAVING TOGETHER ART, EXPRESSION, AND REFLECTIONS

Look Out For: Honeysuckle, wild roses, clover, Queen Anne’s lace, milkweed, bee balm, fireflies flashing, cicadas buzzing, swallows swifting, goldfinches gathering, fawns shading, rabbits flaunting, turtles in roadways, dragonflies skimming, thickening canopies, heavy air, thunderstorms surprising, creeks warming, blackberries ripening, mulberries staining, hayfields growing, corn stretching, twilights lengthening, & the mosquitoes out for the kill!

Look Up For: A new supermoon on June 14th, the closest of 2026, creates ideal dark-sky conditions. Venus remains bright in the western evening sky while Jupiter sinks into the sunset glow. Mars passes near the Pleiades star cluster in late June, and Saturn continues climbing the pre-dawn eastern sky. On July 4th, Mars passes extremely close to Uranus, making the distant planet unusually easy to find with binoculars. Mercury disappears into the Sun’s glare by mid-July before returning to the morning sky later in the month.

Strawberry Moon → → 🌑 6/14 🌗 6/21 🌕 6/29 🌘 7/07 🌑 7/14 ⋯ NEXT: Buck Moon

Inside this Issue: the Nightly, Duck & Parry, Between Layers, Lost & Found Desk, Apple Tree Update, Poem on Finality, Cadavre Exquis

I’ve been sharing playlists in the spirit of what I’ve been listening to lately:

THE NIGHTLY — SAD. OLD. RADIO. It’s a never ending online stream, curated by folks who don’t want the songs of yesterday to be forgotten. Something like 5,200 songs cataloged. Give it a listen.

My favorite music is that which doesn’t require frontal lobe focus.

FESTINA LENTE — MAKE HASTE SLOWLY

Part Six: ADAPTATION — Dolphin & Chameleon

Construction season is moving into full swing. While good for my pockets, it inevitably leaves less time for my art. In the spirit of Festina Lente and ADAPTATION, I plan to embrace the sweltering heat and the temporary shift in rhythm, trusting that manual labor offers its own reward towards my creative pursuits.

ADAPTATION THRU UNDERSTANDING. ADAPTATION THRU FORM.

The practice that naturally arose out of my divergent works and styles has become the defining feature that allows me to try new hats on. The multiplicity itself: different forms, changes in approach, and the fixed time constraint is the flipside to not being fragmentary. It enables flexibility. It is flexibility.

THE LIMINAL will continue on schedule, and I’ll keep working behind the scenes as time allows.

BETWEEN FORMS — THE ARCANA

Fox & Thistle Studio is introducing the ARCANA. Essays exploring the superstitions, meaning, and lore surrounding humanity's objects and conceptual practices. Echoes of ritual, craft, and memory.

This first entry is titled the Candle Snuffer. It was written a couple of months back and I’ve been puzzling out how to fit these kinds of background pieces into my broader work. It occurred to me to treat it as an intermediary layer between curiosity and curation.

“In our oldest oral traditions, stories were told by flickering light. Our heroes were mightier before a roaring fire, while beasts, devils, and demons lurked behind the darkness. Firelight allows duality. The brighter the flame, the darker the shadow. In this way, our hopes and fears were inseparable companions, and superstitions took shape around something just beyond sight.”

Read the Full Essay

Forthcoming in THE ARCANA: the Nautilus, the Needle, the Mask, the Mirror, the Arch...

*The branch with three acorns printmark is modified from a printer’s device by Engelhard Schultes, Lyon, 1491.
** Illustration by A.B. Frost from “Phantasmogoria” by Lewis Carroll.

No praise is finer than that which is passed along by our readers, please pass THE LIMINAL along!

Several years ago, one of my neighbors had a mighty red oak taken down in his front yard. I found this large flat wedge that measures about 14" x 14" and rises in the back to about 5 inches. The gentle upward slope has just the right tilt for drawing on my tablet. I woodburned my studio name into the surface and now use it as a small tabletop sign at shows and sales.

[Four photos shown below:]

1. Raw wood slice on grass (front view)
2. Wood slice with “Fox & Thistle” woodburned into it
3. Tablet propped on the wood slice displaying the Fox & Thistle logo
4. Hand drawing on tablet with stylus, resting on the wood slice
   
   
   

MIDSUMMER PRUNING

The Summer Solstice means it’s almost time to trim my espalier apple trees. The green bushy uprights get pruned back (except for the ones that are kept for shaping later) to make the horizontals more light and airy. Each one will get cut somewhere above the third leaf node to reduce vigor and some of these will eventually become tomorrow’s fruiting spurs. This is the third year the trees have been in the ground (I had them in pots for years) and they’re more established than ever.

Espalier update next month!

[Left photo: McIntosh] [Right photo: Snow Sweet]

FESTINA LENTE

The hard way is the easy way
the easy way, the hard
the hard way is the holding on
the easy way the guard

the guard of all that came before
the ways things were, not are...
the easy way means backing up
the hard way leaves a scar

the paths they each blend and meld
they are both near and far
the hard way, it’s not just easy
the easy way, it is not hard

More poems in the Verses section of our blog, IMPETUS INACTION

We invite minstrels & musicians to freely weave our Verses into melodies—and to please share if they do.

I'm thinking of starting a round of THE EXQUISITE CORPSE (Cadavre Exquis). It's a parlor game that the surrealists used to play in which one person draws a panel on a page, lines extending into the next frame, and the next artist draws from those lines and extends, and so on. I haven't worked out the details, but I'll set it up to be digital so anyone in the world can play. The plan is to include it in this newsletter a month or two behind, so the drawing is never revealed to the artist working on it. The full drawing will be hosted as a page on my site. Each artist will get a short feature, and a fresh backlink to their website, social media, or wherever they prefer.

If you are an artist and interested, please reach out at liminal@foxandthistle.studio