The Enchanted Aesthetic: August Syllabus of Enchantment

A monthly invitation to slow, study, and savour the poetry of life and art for August through the lens of Dreamers by Albert Moore

Dearest Enchanted One,

"Rest and be thankful."
- William Wordsworth

August arrives warm and slow with a month of afternoons that stretch forever, golden and drowsy, like a cat asleep in the sun. It is the season of half-waking, of daydreams that blur into reality, of living just on the edge of elsewhere.

It’s here that the world feels soft around the edges now, as if the veil between here and something other shimmers just slightly. But there’s a quiet lushness to it all. The kind that asks you not to strive, but to sigh.

And yet, even in all its hazy gentleness, the air hums with the memory of something unfinished. From a page turned, but not quite read, a letter unsent, or maybe a song left echoing in the distance.

Because isn’t that just August? The month that, as Taylor Swift once sighed into the salt-washed wind of folklore, “slipped away like a moment in time.” A time of ‘almosts’, of golden pauses and of bittersweet dreaming beneath heavy skies.

But most of all to me August is a month made for those who know how to ache beautifully.

As Leo season reigns in the starry skies, we are invited to luxuriate in life and to be bold in beauty, unhurried in ritual and radiant in reverie. In other words, to live as the dreamers do.

With that, this month’s enchanted syllabus is a lingering ode to the dream before the turning. Think sun-warmed still lifes, cotton gowns, Albert Moore’s marble muses, and a soul that knows how to bask. By the end of this letter, my hope is that you will soon be that soul!

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A Living Tableau Inspired by Albert Moore’s Dreamers

Above: Dreamers Albert Joseph Moore (1841–1893) (Image credit: Birmingham Museums Trust) via ArtUK

There are some paintings that feel like dreams you remember long after waking. Albert Moore’s The Dreamers is one of them, and this month’s syllabus is devoted to this wondrous piece.

In The Dreamers, two women recline in a sea of gold and silence, adrift in golden repose, wrapped in the hush of a summer afternoon.

Here, they do not simply pose; they surrender to stillness. A world where they are not waiting for life to begin, they are already inside it, soft as a sigh, the moment stretching like silk around them. Nothing is asked of them. They just simply are.

Albert Joseph Moore, a British painter of the late Victorian era, was a master of such serenity in this masterpiece. Closely associated with the Aesthetic Movement, Moore’s life and work were a devotion to beauty without burden and form without function.

Moore painted not to tell stories or send messages, but to offer the eye a place to rest. He believed deeply in art for art’s sake; that art need not moralise, persuade, or even explain itself to be meaningful. Beauty, for Moore, was its own language.

The Victorian ideal of art for art’s sake, so dear to Moore and his peers, held that beauty need not serve a purpose to possess worth. It need not educate or impress. It simply, only, needed to be.

This was a radical idea in a world obsessed with industry, progress, and utility. And it remains so today. To surround oneself with beauty, even in the most fleeting or private of ways, is an act of soulful reclamation.

So, let August be a museum of your own making. Collect textures, admire the colour of your tea, arrange a bouquet no one else will see, wear the soft dress and savour every squeezed juice from the fig.

In The Dreamers, there is no urgency, no striving, no performance just simply presence. The women do not sleep out of exhaustion, they sleep as if sleep itself were a kind of artistry: a chosen softness.

This month, let beauty be your daily prayer: wordless, tender, alive. And when moments of decadence creep in, remember, you are not wasting time when you devote yourself to the beautiful.

The Dreamers, painted in 1882, exemplifies this philosophy. There is no narrative, no title to lead the mind beyond what the eye beholds. And yet, it moves us. It stills us. And ultimately, we come to recognise something familiar in its softness, something ancient and sacred.

It’s because of all this that The Dreamers is the perfect muse for August, that liminal, shimmering cusp between the dazzle of July and the quiet rustle of September: a month held in the breath between seasons.

And so we drift, too, like the dreamers, toward the inward.

At The Academy of The Enchanted Arts, I speak often of living as art, not merely making it. And this month offers a sacred invitation to do just that.

To turn your days into a still life of aesthetic ritual, gentle luxury, and devotional repose. To nap without guilt, to walk slowly through the world and to let beauty arrive without needing to grasp it. And finally, to let your very being become the painting, not simply to admire it.

So, this August, let us reclaim our naps, our hammock hours, our drowsy afternoons with a book resting more on our chest than in our hands. And let us lie down not because we must but because we may.

Because idleness is holy.
Because restoration is visionary.
Because the world needs more rested dreamers.

To Live as The Dreamers Do

While January is often crowned the beginning of the year, it is August that quietly births the next chapter albeit softly, silently and beneath the surface.

It is the garden thick with bloom and beginning to shed, the scent of change in the heat and the hush before the turning. A season of endings, yes, but also of arrivals.

So lie down, enchanted one, and let’s listen together.

What new dream is stirring beneath the drowsy hum of the afternoon?

What if your rest is not the end of action, but the beginning of vision?

What seeds are being planted in this very idleness: seeds that will break through the soil come September?

So dream, enchanted one. Rest, recline, revel and return to yourself as something sacred. This is your moment to become The Dreamer.

To embody this even more deeply, here are a few contemplations to live inside this painting to turn your August into a still life of gentle luxury, aesthetic ritual, and poetic ease (you’re welcome to dream about them aloud, write your reflections in the comments or unravel these answers in your journal):

➤ Close your eyes, as the Dreamers do. What does your imagination whisper when the world goes quiet?

➤ What small rest or pause could unlock your imagination this month? Where do your daydreams long to go?

➤ If August is a cocoon, what version of you is quietly forming within?

➤ What might it feel like to plant new hopes now, not in January, but here, in the golden haze of midsummer?

Embodiment Practices: Living like a Dreamer

Inspired by Moore’s Dreamers, these practices invite you into sacred idleness:

Silken Hour: Choose one hour this week to do absolutely nothing. No phones, no purpose, just recline, observe the light on the wall, listen to a breeze, sip something cool. Exist as art.
Dress in Reverie: Let your clothing be soft, draped and delicious. The Clara dress by If Only If, buttercup yellow, all gingham dreams and nostalgic charm, is made for the season of cottons nightgowns all day. Pair it with Orebella’s Blooming Fire, a scent kissed by sun.
Beauty as Ritual: Each day, find something beautiful that serves no purpose. For example, a petal on a page, a swatch of colour or a painting you adore. Now, sit with it in silence and let it change your breath.
The Nap as Oracle: Set an intention, then take a nap. Record what images or dreams came. What might your inner world be saying?
The Art of Looking: Choose a painting (perhaps The Dreamers), and spend ten minutes simply observing (if you think you’ll get distracted, set a timer!). Trace each curve, colour and shadow. Let looking become devotion.

Reading List: The Art of Dreaming

Let these books accompany your August. Some are rich with image, some lush with thought, all are dreamy companions.

1. Devotions by Mary Oliver
A sacred companion to slow mornings and golden hours. Oliver’s poems are portals into awe” simple, reverent, and full of quiet majesty.

2. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
A tender, whimsical, and deeply philosophical portrayal of a child and her grandmother on an island. Perfect for celebrating the dreamy, drowsy freedom of August.

3. Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
Childhood adventures in the Lake District that honour idleness, imagination, and the enchantment of the natural world. The perfect read for soft-focus nostalgia. Even more wondrous? Join me at the house that inspired the book, Lanehead, at my retreat Take Me To The Lakes in June 2026.

4. The Waves by Virginia Woolf
A poetic meditation on the passage of time and the rhythm of being. Ideal for August’s liminal mood: fluid, layered, and hypnotic.

5. Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
For quiet afternoons of soul-searching. Rilke speaks to the sacred solitude needed for artistry and reminds us to trust the unseen gestation of beauty.

6. The Moomins and the Great Flood by Tove Jansson
A dreamy return to innocence and wandering, this tender tale is full of longing, adventure, and light. Pure August magic!

Playlist: We Spent the Summer Draped in Silk

This month’s curated soundtrack is a spell of hush and golden hour haze. Think silky harmonies, and music that hums like heat through open windows.

Your August playlist ‘We Spent the Summer Draped in Silk’ is a playlist made for lounging on linen sheets, for sipping nectarines under a tree and for writing poems you may never share.

From Sufjan Stevens to First Aid Kit, from the pastoral hush of folklore to the dreamy shimmer of Celine Cairo, each track invites you to stretch, exhale, and let beauty arrive unannounced.

Let it play as you daydream and lull you into a reverie.

The Enchanted Lens: Something to Watch

The Secret Garden (1993 or 2020)

For your ‘Enchanted Lens’ recommendation, step gently into the world of The Secret Garden: a timeless tale of retreat, healing, and the transformative magic of nature.

Much like the languid stillness captured in Albert Moore’s Dreamers, this story invites us to find sanctuary in quiet wonder and creative renewal. The garden itself becomes a living poem, a secret place where beauty blooms in the soft light, and where souls are gently coaxed back to life through tenderness and care.

Watching this film is like sinking into a warm afternoon of August: a slow unfolding of hope, mystery, and the deep, nourishing power of connection with the earth and ourselves. It’s the perfect companion for a month dedicated to sacred rest and the blossoming of inner worlds!

A Poem for Reflection

“The lake was a perfect mirror — a soft glittering calm. Not a sound, not a breath — All was still.
The wind slept in the folds of the hills…”
- Dorothy Wordsworth

There is something unspeakably sacred in this image. A lake so still it becomes not just a body of water, but a mirror to the soul. Dorothy’s words invite us into a world of inner hush. A landscape not shaped by drama, but by tenderness.

Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of William Wordsworth, yes, but also a profound artist in her own right, was a keeper of the quiet things. She wrote not for fame, but for feeling.

Her journals brim with soft observations: the way a shadow fell across the lane, the sound of rain on slate, the gleam of the lake under a full moon. Her life was one of noticing and of reverent attention.

And so, this moment, the wind sleeping in the folds of the hills, becomes not just a line in a diary, but a guide to August living. A way of being. To be still enough that the world begins to whisper again.

This is the soul of my Take Me To The Lakes retreat. We return to these hills, to these sacred waters, not to escape, but to remember. To walk the very paths Dorothy walked. To sit by her mirror-lake and breathe with the slowness of poets.

So, come with me to Coniston in Monday 1st June to Friday 5th June 2026. We will read, we will dream and we will become mirrors, soft and glittering, in the folds of the hills.

Click here and let me Take You To The Lakes

In Closing….

Enchanted one, if July was the rose in bloom, then August is the echo of a breeze that carries a half-remembered song and the shimmer of silk on sun-warmed skin.

This is the month for lingering. For beauty that serves no purpose but pleasure. For art that hums like an invisible string beneath the surface of things.

Let August be your folklore era: wistful, wayward, soft around the edges. Let it slip through your fingers like golden hour, and don’t try to hold it. Just live inside the dream of it.

There is, as Albert Moore knew, a holiness in the hush. A rebellion in rest. A splendour in simply being.

So, dearest enchanted one, this August….be the dreamer.
Be the hush.
Be the slow golden hour before the leaves begin to turn.

With all my love and enchantment,
Georgie xoxo

Categories: : The Enchanted Aesthetic