Really Like Your Peaches, Want to Shake Your Tree

What K. Nance Said about Lughnasadah (just passed).

I came home from work and went straight to my fig tree. Stood there and ate figs directly from the tree.

May your High Summer be bountiful. May you do amazing magic on this New Moon.

Picture found here.

Fruits Of The First Harvest

August

~Mary Oliver

When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the brambles
nobody owns, I spend

all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking

of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body

accepts what it is. In the dark
creeks that run by there is
this thick paw of my life darting among

the black bells, the leaves; there is
this happy tongue.

Picture found here.

May your happy tongue enjoy all the fruits of Lughnasadah.

Can You Feel It?

For about 30 seconds tonight, I could feel the change. Almost everything except for the black-eyed-susans, the toad lilies, and the pineapple sage is through blooming. A few birch leaves have begun to fall. I'll hear acorns hitting the roof within weeks. We're into tomatoes, corn, patty pan squash. Here we go, the wheel is turning round.

How lucky I am to watch it. Again. It never gets old.

Full Moon Farmers' Market

Photos by the author. If you copy, please link back.

I Never Made Promises Lightly

Can you feel it coming?

What Are You Harvesting?

Lammas

(Lyrics by Arnon Clark / Music The Mingaulay Boat Song)



Chorus – Now is Lammas, Summer Harvest
Bind the sheaves tight and carry the grain home.
Feed the children, all the family
Food and plenty throughout the fall.

Call it Lammas, Lugh or Lughnasadh, but gather closely the first fruits of harvest.
We’ve no fear now, of want or famine, by the love of the God and Goddess.
As the long days all grow shorter, and the Horned One, He wanes and weakens,
We have plenty, and good eating, through His dying to live again.


As the sun sets, so the moon will rise. Praise the Lady and light the fire.
From Her body, and His sacrifice, comes our harvest and our lives.
Join your voices, spirits and your hearts. Bring your love now, and join together.
For the harvest it is gathered, and the time for the dance is come.

-Chorus (repeat)

*******

Brutally hot, today, in the MidAtlantic, on one of the strongest, most magical Full Moons I've ever known.

I spent most of it inside, running out for just a few moments to harvest sage, harvest thyme, harvest basil, harvest lavender, water brugmansia, water lilacs, water even the rosemary.

I spent most of it at the farmers' market buying tomatoes and I spent most of it making gazpacho and tiny, cold potatoes, stuffed with sour cream, caviar, and chives, for tomorrow's gathering.

I spent most of it at my altar, rocking, chanting, overcome with this Moon's magic, lighting candles and incense and smudge sticks, running my roots deep into the warm Virginia clay, twisting around the oak roots and maple roots and crape myrtle roots and birch roots and gardenia roots and cryptomeria roots. I spent most of it grounding and wrapping my roots around the foundation of this cottage, around the deep roots of the wisteria-covered shed, around the etheric roots of the fire pit.

I spent most of it knitting a warm, winter sweater for G/Son with handspun, hand-died yarn, yarn the color of burning embers, warm yellows, shining sunsets. With every row, I knit in safety, glamour, good health, warmth.

I spent most of it writing legal prose, figuring out the best way to describe the issues in a case, explaining evidence, being spare. I love that work. I really do. It's mostly what I was born to do.

I spent most of it watching a half-dozen episodes of Dark Shadows. I began a few years ago with Episode 1 (Victoria on a train, Elizabeth at the window) and I'm now up to the I Ching and Quentin Collins. When I finish, I'm going to go back to the beginning.

I spent most of it blogging.

I spent most of it realizing how much I love my life.

I did.

How did you spend it?

Picture found here.

The Beloved Must Die

Friday Night Lughnasadah Blogging

If you stop, ground, and listen for just a moment, you can hear it coming.

Surprise Harvest

Today, I am harvesting seeds. Sweet peas, climbing beans of different kinds, broad beans, kale, cilantro, spinach . . .

I love the circularity of this. I love taking part in this wonderful, external cycle of seed-to-plant, plant-to-seed, seed-to-plant. It continues to amaze me that a kale seed the size of a pinhead can grow into a plant whose leaves I can feast upon all winter and which, one day in spring, will bloom with yellow flowers the bees will love. And, furthermore, that from those flowers will grow dozens of slender pods that by the end of the summer will have dried and cracked open, spilling thousands more seeds to start the cycle anew.

~Marian Van Eyk McCain in Crone: Women Coming of Age, Issue No. 3, 2010.

Three years ago, when we put in the raised herb bed, I tried again to grow dill. It's one of my favorite herbs. I'd tried and failed miserably to get it to grow in the old herb bed, but that was in a too-shady spot and my hope was that the newer, sunnier bed would be better for it. Failure. Three or four weak, yellow, two-inch long seedlings showed up and died. Fine. I'm a big girl and I can take "no" for an answer. Dill just didn't want to grow here. The next spring, I gave the space to pineapple sage, which went mad. This year, I moved the pineapple sage to a pot, unable to figure out any way at all to use that much pineapple sage, and stuck basil in that spot.

And, then, a funny thing happened. Dill started sprouting in every section of the herb bed other than the one where I'd originally tried to grow it. Giant dill. Huge, healthy dill plants, full of that amazing scent and flavor. Lots of huge, healthy dill plants. Lots. Dill plants that I certainly didn't plant, at least not in those spots and at least not for the past two years. Dill that I've used all Summer long with a sense of wonder at the ways nature works.

Now one of the things I love about a herb garden is the sense of orderliness, the geometry of each herb in its place, the narrow mulched paths in between them. I'm pretty ruthless about pulling up Italian parsley when it begins to crowd over into the curly parsley's spot or about weeding the Greek oregano back into its own spot when it begins to get too familiar with the marigolds. But I couldn't make myself pull the dill, so it's grown all summer, two plants in the parsley, a plant in the sage, one or two in the rosemary patch -- you get the idea. And, now, just before Lughnasadah, the feast of the first harvest, it's gone to seed in great, glorious headfulls of hundreds of dill seeds.

"So, good, finally you're dead," I say to the dill, "and now I can pull you and restore some order." But, of course, I can't throw those seeds away, even though there are enough of them to populate several herb beds the size of mine. "Maybe I'll give some away to friends, " I think, justifying myself as I fill a large bag with the brown heads full of seeds. "And I can use some dill seeds for flavoring over the winter," I continue. "Maybe I'll use some in seed bombs for guerilla gardening. These are obviously strong seeds, seeds of survivors, even if they do apparently need to sit in the ground for a long time before they wake up and grow."

[W]e, the elders are the seed-savers of our culture. And seed-saving, in many forms, is now an imperative. For in these rapidly-changing times, there is much we are losing and much more in danger of being lost. That includes not only the native plants and animals which are disappearing for ever but the domesticated plants too. With the spread of industrialized agriculture, many traditional varieties of fruit, vegetables and grains have been irretrievably lost.

Id.

What will you harvest? What will you leave behind? Will any of it have come as a surprise to you?

Will you really, finally die
after I use all the Sweetmeat squash seeds
you gave us years ago? Your fat, happy seed children.
I still plant lettuce seeds, Buttercrunch, that came from your serious saving.
Will you fade when the envelope is empty
of life rattling around in seed form?

. . .

Food to share, food to dry, to can
before the shrivel and pucker of pods
where the next generation of seed babies
snuggles down in the cold nursery of winter
to await the next incarnation
while decay enjoys its own feast
and compost works its slow resurrection.

~Bethroot Gwynn, quoted in We'Moon 2010: Gaia Rhythms for Women: Reinvent the Wheel.

Photo by the author. If you copy, please link back.

Blessed Lughnasadh

Blessed Lughnasadh

Blessed Lughnasadh

Blessed Lughnasadh

Luhgnasadah

Fields Of Gold

For me, this song is always about Lughnasadh.

Closer And Closer To Lughnasadh

I've posted this before, but I love it so much that it's worth making an annual tradition out of it. Marion uses the more xian term, "Lammas," but that's ok. I love the way she says it.

And, Just Like That, Lughnasadh Is Coming

What I Love About This Religion

Touch The Buckle Of My Spine

In comments below, the incomparable Anne asks for a harvest poem. The best one in the whole world, and a perfect one for Lughnasadah, is, of course, by Mary Oliver:

Little Summer Poem Touching the Subject of Faith

Every summer
I listen and look
under the sun's brass and even
into the moonlight, but I can't hear

anything, I can't see anything -
not the pale roots digging down, nor the green stalks muscling up,
nor the leaves
deepening their damp pleats,

nor the tassels making,
nor the shucks, nor the cobs.
And still,
every day,

the leafy fields
grow taller and thicker -
green gowns lofting up in the night,
showered with silk.

And so, every summer,
I fail as a witness, seeing nothing -
I am deaf too
to the tick of the leaves,

the tapping of downwardness from the banyan feet -
all of it
happening
beyond any seeable proof, or hearable hum.

And, therefore, let the immeasurable come.
Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine.
Let the wind turn in the trees,
and the mystery hidden in the dirt

swing through the air.
How could I look at anything in this world
and tremble, and grip my hands over my heart?
What should I fear?

One morning
in the leafy green ocean
the honeycomb of the corn's beautiful body
is sure to be there.


Goddess, I love that. Let the immeasurable come. Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine . . . How could I look at anything in this world and tremble, and grip my hands over my heart? What should I fear? One morning, in the leafy green ocean, the honeycomb of the corn's beautiful body is sure to be there. With apologies to Rumi, the buckle of my spine is running after the unknowable, calling, "Hey! Over here! Come touch!"

Tomorrow is Lughnasadah and a Dark Moon. How can you look at anything in this world and tremble and grip your hands over your heart? What should you fear? Once again, once again, once again, as it has for thousands and thousands of years, as it has ever since Native Americans bred teosinte into maize, once again, tomorrow morning, in the leafy green ocean, the honeycomb of the corn's beautiful body is sure to be there.

The blessings of Lugh and the blessings of Lugh's mother upon you and yours.



Art found here.

Aw, Come On

Eight days. Eight days out of the entire year. For Wiccans, those are the Sabbats. Eight days. And even then, we can't set them apart, take the days before them off to prepare and the days after them off to recover. Eight. Eight times every year. Eight sabbats. Eight days, just a bit more than one week, out of every year.

I swear in the days still left, we'll walk in fields of gold.

Art here.