Category Archives: Great Wheel

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, Third Phase

Mabon 2014 and the Springtime of the Soul

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Fall Equinox                                                                      Leaf Change Moon

Today the earth’s celestial equator (the earth’s equator projected into space) passes through the sun’s ecliptic (the sun’s apparent path throughout the year, actually caused by earth’s orbit.) You usually hear this put the other way around; that is, as the sun passing through the earth’s celestial equator, but that represents the stuckness of paleolithic astronomy that assumed the earth was the center of the solar system. From the diagram above you can see the sun’s declination (degree above or below the celestial equator) is 0 on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.

This same diagram is very clear about the solstices, too. You can see that when the earth’s orbit tilts the northern latitudes toward the sun, the sun is highest in the sky-the summer solstice.  When the sun is lowest in the northern sky-the earth tilts away from the sun and gives us the winter solstice.

Since the summer solstice day time has exceeded night time. In theory the autumnal equinox is the point of equilibrium between light and dark, but at our latitude that day actually occurs on September 25th this year. This is, however, the day the Great Wheel celebrates and it does so because of the sun’s zero declination at earth’s celestial equator.

This week then the victory of the sun, made complete on the summer solstice, begins to wane. The dark god of deep winter gains greater and greater authority as the sun’s rays spread out over a larger area of earth, thus weakening them, and the number of hours that the sun is in our sky, even in its weakened condition relative to the soil, decrease steadily until the night of the winter solstice. Thus comes the fallow, cold time.

It is no accident that the harvest season is now. Over the 475 million years (give or take a hundred million) since plants made it out of the oceans and onto land, plants have adapted themselves to the conditions that work with their particular genetics. Key aspects of a plant’s life include carbon dioxide, soil nutrients, available fresh water, adequate sunlight and temperatures adequate for all these to work with the plant’s life cycle.

Thus, as the earth’s orbit carries it to different relationships with solar strength, temperatures change along with it.  At its maximum when the earth tilts toward the sun and the sun is highest in the sky, the sun’s rays fall on a smaller area of land. Here’s an excellent simulation. University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Plants have had the past 475 million years to refine their growing season so that it takes maximum benefit of the sun’s strength. In a very real sense the growing season is a clock, or an astronomical observatory directly correlated to the earth’s orbit around the sun–The Great Wheel.

On a spiritual level, if we follow the ancient calendar of the plants, the season of external growth, flowering and seed making, is waning now. Just as the plant either dies out and anticipates its rejuvenation from scattered seed or goes dormant and waits with stored energy below ground in roots or corms or bulbs, so we might consider this season as the one where we shift inward, away from the external demands upon us and the expectations put on us there.

Now we shift toward the interior life, the Self becomes more of a focus, our spiritual life can deepen. We can see this shift in the human life cycle if we compare the second phase of life with its emphasis on family creation and nurture and career, to the third, with its pulling back from those external expectations. The third phase is a post growing season time of life, not in the sense that growth ends, but that its focus is more down and in rather than up and out. The third phase is the fallow time.  Michaelmas on the 29th of this month is known by followers of Rudolf Steiner as the springtime of the soul.

The third phase marks the beginning of the springtime of the soul for the individual.

Great Wheel

Movement Toward the Springtime of the Soul

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Lughnasa                                                                                 College Moon

The rain and cool have come. The sun is lower in the sky. We will have lost 23 degrees of declination from June 20 to September 20. We have already lost 2 hours and 25 minutes of daylight June 25 through yesterday. The slide toward the Winter Solstice has proceeded and will accelerate on Mabon, September 20th, when the hours of night once again exceed the hours of daylight.

All of this is good news. Especially this year. Both Kate and I are ready to have a smaller property with less growing season work. Not because we don’t love it, but because we want more time now for other matters, like grandchildren and our creative work. The coming of the fallow time means the last garden here and movement toward a new year.  2015 will find us creating a new outdoors life in the Rocky Mountains.

 

Commentary on Religion, Great Wheel, Minnesota, Photography, The West

At the Fair

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Lughnasa                                                                            College Moon

This guy was in line ahead of me for a discounted senior ticket:

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Samsara

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A howl from the West. Our future.

 

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More of samsara.

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Dulling the pain of samsara.

 

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fiddledIMAG0601Kate chooses her way.

fiddledIMAG0603Leaving the earth behind

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Mortals

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What we become if we remain at the State Fair too long.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Great Wheel, Memories, Minnesota

Cheese Curds

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Lughnasa                                                           Lughnasa Moon

State Fair. A Lughnasa festival writ large. Texas and Minnesota, 1 & 2 in terms of state fair attendance. So Minnesota’s is big. And filled with the improbable from seed art to deep-fried pickles on a stick. Princess Kay of the Milky Way gets immortalized in butter, meaning there is an occupational niche for, yes, butter sculptor.

(Antrim, Ireland. Old Lammas Fair.)

The cows and the pigs and the horses and the chickens and the llamas and the rabbits and the pigeons and the sheep are all here in the city now, rooted out of their familiar stalls or sheds or fields, loaded in wagons and driven into the concrete jungle that is St. Paul, or Falcon Heights if you’re going to be picky.

The DNR has the great pond with Minnesota fish, right across from the giant slide where the gunny sacks serve as seats.  Along the street that runs to the main entrance and you hit cheese curds fried and politicians hoping to avoid being fried.

Then there’s machinery hill where, like the livestock, farm machinery comes into the city for a few days. The tractors seem at home there, a place they belong as much as in the field following the gps to the other end of the furrow.

And the people, walking arm in arm, carrying a WCCO bag, a bunch of colorful brochures and printed information from the DNR, colleges, that wonderful gizmo the hawker made seem magical. They might be eating honey ice cream, purchased at the bee exhibit run by members of the Minnesota Hobby Beekeepers Association.

Carried above the noise and crush of the crowds are ringing bells, flashing lights with their lustre lost in the daylight. The Fair’s id, the Midway. Riding, swooping, throwing, carrying big soft bears no one would buy. Where pointlessness is exactly the point.

It’s all underway right now, through Labor Day. This one will be our last as Minnesota residents and we’re going, probably on Monday. I’ll be headed for the cheese curds.

 

Anoka County, Garden, Great Wheel, Myth and Story

The Season of Harvest

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Lughnasa                                                             Lughnasa Moon

Lughnasa celebrates the beginning of the harvest. Already underway by August 1st, at least here, and continuing through early to mid-October the harvest is concerto after concerto, first the beet and carrot concerto, then the onion, then the garlic. Soon the green beans and the sugar snap peas chime in and the collard greens play their deep green notes and the chard lights up the hall with its rainbow of colors. The opposite of chamber music garden music counts on ancient melodies like the sound of the rain, the wind and thunder of storms, the subtle bass notes of fertile soil.

(alma-tademas-harvest-festival)

We have already passed the allegro first movement and now enter the adagio, the time when various crops come slowly to maturity in late summer and early fall. Around Mabon, the autumnal equinox, the grain crops and corn and beans will begin to peak, the sound of combines and corn pickers, the brilliant blue notes of the September sky, grain falling into golden piles on the wagons, yellow corn piling up. And finally, as October sees the first frosts and the last of the crops come in, the final movement, begun in a frenzy of gathering will trail off, cold and bleak, senescence browning the once vibrant greens.

At the end, summer’s end, is Samain. It marks the end of the growing season and thins the veil between the worlds. As the vegetable world dies again and the fallow season begins, Samain is a time between rich, fruitful life and the darkness and chill of death. It’s an appropriate time for the barrier between the living world and the world of those who have died in it to become permeable, for the dead to come to the living and the living to the dead.

We are now in the harvest season punctuated by Lughnasa, Mabon and Samain, beginning, middle and end. Dance to its music. The music of life renewed and come bountiful.

Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, The Move

Summer’s Exhaust

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Lughnasa                                                              Lughnasa Moon

Summer’s exhaust has begun to hit our nights as warmer days recede slowly toward the equator.  The light has begun to change, especially in the evenings, but visible during the day as well, coming to us at a different angle. The change is noticeable now, a month and a half after the sun’s greatest height of the year on the Solstice. These subtle clues cue birds and other animals to begin edging toward migration or fur growing or nut gathering. They come to each living thing in a scale appropriate to the action needed, less subtle to the birds and the bees, more subtle to us large mammals.

I’m celebrating the ending of my last northern summer, one I’ll trade next year for a mountain summer, which must be as distinctive in its own way. When I moved north, now 45 years ago, I wanted cleaner breaks between seasons. And I got them. I’ve appreciated the heat and humidity of summer here. The cool blue of fall. The icy depths of winter and the explosive coming of spring. Moving west into the mountains, I’m hoping to modulate the heat and humidity of summer and lessen the brutality of the winter.

It might have been my August trips to Stratford, Ontario as a boy that made me yearn for the northern summer. Along Lake Huron then the skies were heart-breaking, a mix of faded heat and oncoming chill. I felt stimulated, alive both to the weather and to the cultural tradition of Shakespeare and the theater. It was then, too, in 1963 at the Black Swan Coffee House in Stratford that I first heard a radical critique of American policy in Vietnam. Perhaps those things forged a bond, the northern summer and activism, because they’ve been joined since my move to Wisconsin in 1969 only six years later.

 

 

Garden, Great Wheel, Our Land and Home

Among the Gooseberries

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Lughnasa                                                                     Lughnasa Moon

1000P1030763Gooseberries favor the small animal, especially birds, who can either land on the stem among their thorns or reach up with small paws to retrieve the prize. The larger animal like the one seen here must carefully grasp the branches where the thorns are not, wear protective clothing for vulnerable skin and have on gloves to guard the even more sensitive fingers and palms, the hand as a whole. Having done that, though, the gooseberry rewards all of them with a tart sweet berry that might make the body of a clever purple or green goblin, especially if he were fitted with an acorn head carrying its jaunty cap.

Oh, and the smart gardener (not me) would plant them with sufficient room around each bush to easily access the branches. This cramped planting requires perilous maneuvers.

On the other hand this gardener (smarter in this instance) did move all these gooseberry bushes. They languished in the shade during the day and he dug them up and replanted them in this sunny spot where they thrive. This is about learning the language of plants. They speak with leaf color, insect infestations, poor fruit production, spindly branches. The gardener must listen intently as the plant communicates its needs, then do what is necessary to meet them. If a plant can be placed in a location right for its health and provided with adequate nutrition and water, then it will produce and produce and produce without much care.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Lughnasa 2014

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Lughnasa                                                                      Lughnasa Moon

In times before the pagan revival this holiday had the name Lammas, even among witches. Lammas, a modern English transliteration of an Anglo-Saxon word for loaf-mass, was celebrated on August 1st. The Roman Catholic imperial strategy of subjugating, then eliminating rival religions moved forward in part by absorbing and renaming other faith’s holidays.

It is not so easy, though, to stamp out folk religions. The old ways were held tight in rural areas and those doing so were called heathens (on the heath) or pagans, from the Late Latin paganus, or country-dweller.

Here’s an example. On Lammas parishioners would grind the first of the wheat harvest, then bake loaves of bread and take them to the church for blessing. According to this wikipedia site, many would then take the bread home, break it into four pieces and put them at the four corners of the grain storage building for protection against spoilage and rodents. So Lammas remained a first-fruits harvest festival, even under the Roman Catholics, but they replaced celebration of the grain itself with incorporation of the grain into the Catholic eucharistic symbology.

(a welsh corn dolly)

As the wheel turns, so does the nature of belief and faith. In this more pagan friendly world most neo-pagans, though not all, have returned to the original Celtic, Lughnasa. While I don’t align myself with any of the contemporary pagan splinters like Wicca, neo-paganism or Asatru, I do align myself with the impetus for the Great Wheel, the changing seasons themselves, and with the value of holidays to celebrate those changes. The Celtic holidays come from within my genetic heritage, so they make sense for me.

Sitting on the counter upstairs is a large laundry basket, the plastic kind that can be IMAG0382carried on the hip, filled with collard greens and chard. In the shed, drying, are yellow onions and garlic of different varieties. Downstairs, in the pantry, Kate has already stored bright orange jars of carrots, blood red jars of beets and jars the solid green of green beans. We have, too, eaten onions, chard, carrots, beets, green beans and collard greens already, so this is a good time to thank the land and the weather and the plants for the food they’ve already produced.

(onions and garlic, 2014)

In Celtic lands Lughnasa would have seen a corn maiden brought in from the fields in the first grain cart holding harvested wheat. (corn, in the British use, being wheat) And corn dollies would represent this symbol of the land’s fertility throughout the long, fallow months.

These holidays were not a single day (as we tend to celebrate them now, if we celebrate them at all), but were market weeks, when produce and crafts would come into a town and villagers and farmers would shop. Games were played, dances held, and marriages, of a 3-month or a year-and-a-day length could be entered. Both were considered trial marriages, the 3-month trial up at Samhain or Summer’s End.

Since these markets enjoyed the first fruits of many harvests, they were occasions tied to the rural life. In the United States Celtic peoples continued the Lughnasa heritage with county fairs and state fairs. Though the Minnesota State Fair is a much more expansive event than the typical Lughnasa festival, the Anoka County fair held recently or the 4-H fair held annually in my hometown of Alexandria, Indiana were probably similar.

In my world Lughnasa is much as it always was in terms of intention, a moment to stop and consider the strong bond between our land and our stomachs, our land and our survival. If nothing else these holidays make us pause and reflect on what’s happening in a world, the plant and animal world, that we might otherwise ignore. It’s for this reason chiefly that I think broad awareness of the Great Wheel and celebrations of its holidays could be a balm for an overheated world.

 

 

Garden, GeekWorld, Great Wheel

Green Day

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Lughnasa                                                                Lughnasa Moon

Out this morning to harvest collard greens and chard. Kate’s going to use the pressure 500P1030729cooker to can them so we can move them with us next year.  A few more garlic should be ready and perhaps more onions.

We’ll have a year without a garden, most likely, next year. If we can get out of here by April, not impossible, we might land in Colorado soon enough to get raised beds made, new soil in place, and a 2015 garden in. Remains to be seen.

(collard greens and chard + onions in May)

Today is Lughnasa and that post will come, appropriately, after I bring in the greens. August means the downside of the summer has well begun as my round calendar tells me graphically at a quick glance.

There will be today, too, a post on what the web calls content curation. I was not the first sun calendarto think of that term relative to the information firehose analogy. There are several strategies for curating content, but the first and most basic one is to know what kind of information you want. I’ve made baby steps in this direction with Feedly, the links listed on the right here, bookmarks and an uneven deployment of hashtags.

(note: we are at about :20 to the hour if this were a wall clock)

But more on Lughnasa and content curation later today.