Category Archives: Great Wheel

Great Wheel

Putting Away Last Season

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Lughnasa                                                       Harvest Moon

A chilly morning, great weather for sleeping.  September rolls along, the harvest moon in the sky.  This weekend will see all the honey extracting materials put away until next season.  Some weeding in the perennial bed.  The last of the candles made.  Putting away last season, getting ready for the next.

My Zojirushi came yesterday.  At low wattage it keeps water at the right temperature for tea.  Green 175.  Oolong 206.  Black 212.  It will simplify gong fu cha.  I plan to set it up this afternoon.  Getting ready for the next season, which includes a lot of writing time.

It’s the middle weekend of September.  The kids are back in school.  The Great Wheel turns.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Darkness Approaches

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Lughnasa                                                            Harvest Moon

The night takes on a different quality as fall approaches.  In my study I’m half below ground with windows opening out at waist level, the lawn sweeps toward me.  An animal safe in a warm burrow, protected from the storm and cold, or, I would be if there were any storm and cold.

(Giovanni Battista Ciolina – Melancholy Twilight (1899)

The change in light, the lower night time temperatures, the scudding clouds like there were today change the seasonal tone from brightness and beaches and growing things to  darker and more forbidding shades.  As this shift deepens and the night begins to overtake the day, as happens at Mabon, the Fall Equinox, most of us feel a bit uneasy, perhaps even a good deal.

By late November and well into December this uneasiness has intensified, perhaps that paleolithic fear that the sun would no longer rise at all, or that it would remain in its pale and weakened state, never again to warm us and encourage the plants.  So we fight back with bonfires and candles and festivities, lamps and decorations, gifts and food, celebration in spite of the vague menace.

Thus, by some wry twist the darkest and bleakest days of the year have the most joy, the most song, the most brave gestures we know.  We will move, around Thanksgiving, into Holimonth, a season stretching from then until Epiphany that features many of the best loved days and nights of the whole year:  Hannukah, Christmas, Posada, Winter Solstice, New Years, Deepavali.

Perhaps I would even go so far as to declare a Holiseason beginning on September 29th, the feast of the archangel Michael and lasting from then right through Epiphany.  All of October, November and December months of special observance with holidays as peaks lifted up from a plateau of enhanced sensibilities that lasts the entire time.  Why not?

Cooking, Family, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Health, Our Land and Home

Midwest Grimoires

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Lughnasa                                                                  Honey Moon

Finished spraying.  As the crops come in, the amount of spray needed diminishes.  Today I really only needed the reproductive spray because the remaining vegetables are mostly in that category:  tomatoes, ground cherries, egg plants, cucumbers, peppers, carrots. Granted there are a few beets, some chard and the leeks yet to harvest but they seem substantial already.  They also benefit from the showtime, nutrient drenches and the enthuse that I will spray on Saturday morning.

Kate roasted the broccoli and froze it.  She’s also making pickles today, cucumber and onion.  She’s in back to the land, earth mother mode and has been for several weeks.  She consults her canning, pickling, drying, freezing books like grimoires from calico clad wise women of the rural Midwest.  And does likewise, tweaking the recipes when she wants.

Art and Culture, Great Wheel, Writing

The Voice of Autumn

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Lughnasa                                                                     Honey Moon

Even though the heat blazed down like mid-July today, the twilight comes much earlier. The wind moving among the trees in our woods sounds like the voice of autumn, not the return of mid-summer.  May it be so.

My heart has already begun its turn inward, the work of Loki’s Children and Changes, a novel after the trilogy is done, beginning to dominate my early morning and post-nap moments.  No, I’ve not made the complete transition yet, the bells have not yet rung, but soon, soon the night will begin falling earlier, the state fair will be finished and Michaelmas just around the corner.

September 29th is daughter-in-law Jen’s birthday and Michaelmas.  Michaelmas was the date that began school terms in England and can be seen, as a friend once noted, as the springtime of the soul.  It is the holy day of St. Michael, the archangel, the warrior of god.  A complicated day with many threads woven into to its tapestry.  All this is within a month or so now, the year has begun to change.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel

Harvest

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Lughnasa                                                                   Moon of the First Harvests

As we settle in to the season of Lughnasa, we can look back over our lives and anticipate the harvest festivals current and those to come.  They’re a time to consider the notion of harvest, of a growing season completed and the crop taken in.  What in your life have you been nurturing, feeding, weeding, making sure it gets sun and water and space? Is it time now to start picking the fruit?  Worth considering.

As is, too, the notion of what you may plant for the next growing season.  More time for travel?  More reading in a certain area?  More time with family or a particular person or a particular set of people?  More time devoted to your health whether exercise, diet or meditation?

Whatever your crop you can take a cue from mother earth.  What does your crop need to flourish?  What will give it a good start?  What kind of nourishment will it need along the way to get its roots and leaves in place?  How much space (time) does your crop need, apart from others?

Maybe next Lughnasa or as soon as Mabon (Fall Equinox) or Samhain (Summer’s End) you’ll have some fruit ready to pick.  If you do, celebrate it.  Have a bonfire.  Buy yourself or cook yourself a special meal.  Go on that trip.  Harvest time is festive.

Great Wheel

Lughnasa 2013

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Lughnasa                                                                            Moon of the First Harvests

Today begins the first of the three harvest seasons, Lughnasa.  This is the holiday of first fruits, the celebration of those beets, carrots, onions, garlic, chard, herbs, peas and the cherries, currants and pears already brought inside.  In the Catholic tradition this was called Lammas, the feast of the first breads, baked from the first harvested wheat or other grains.

Lughnasa, Mabon (Fall Equinox) and Samhain (Summer’s End) celebrate the beginning, peak and end of the harvest.  This is the time of year when the hard work of late spring and early summer produce results.  In many agricultural societies these were the months that determined life or death over the fallow winter months beginning at Samhain.

There are many traditions and customs peculiar to these harvest times, not the least in our society, of course, the beginning of school.  The State Fair and all the county fairs held in these months echo these traditions since the holiday itself, August 1st in this case, usually began a week long market fair where goods were exchanged, feasts held, dances and games held, new relationships begun or ended.

This year a new harvest.  The first fruits of the broadening grasp of human diversity in Minnesota.  Gay couples can and have already married here.  Coming only days after the Pope’s who am I to judge, this may be a first harvest worthy of the history books.

Kona’s death was, too, a harvest, a life lived fully, ripened and now mature.  Lughnasa 2013 will be remembered.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Third Phase

the moon

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Summer                                                                    Solstice Moon

The super moon has come and gone, the moon only its normal lunarity tonight.  Deciding that each moon at perigee is a super moon strains the adjective too far.  The marginally larger and closer moon would be truer.

The lead up to the super moon did reignite my never far dormant moon watching passion.  This Japanese ritual seems very well suited to life’s third phase.  Quiet, dignified, can be done without glasses at home.  No money changes hands.  A glass of tea, or a shot of single malt, a beer.  Some cheese and the moon beside us on the deck.

As our closest neighbor in the overwhelming emptiness that is our universe, the moon has a special place, a unique place in our lives.  It illumines the night, goes through its phases each lunar month, defining tides and creating romantic moments.

I’m finding it hard to describe why the moon fascinates me so much.  Not about astronomy.  Or moon walks.  Something about its floating, silvery presence.  A silent partner to the dark its moods changes with the seasons.  The floating harvest moon, round and large and orange differs from the white full moon that passes through the cold skies of the winter solstice time.  The moon of the summer can preside over long evenings outside, a dim lantern providing just the right amount of just the right kind of light.

It also figures in story and myth.  The goddess Diana and her crescent moon, which appears in so many portraits of the virgin mary, especially our Lady of Guadalupe.  Lon Chaney’s version of the Wolfman:  “Even a man who is pure at heart, and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.”

Not quite getting there and I’m tired.  Will try again soon.

Garden, Great Wheel

Yes

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Beltane                                                                           Solstice Moon

 

The earth has reached the point in its orbit where its tilt reaches toward the sun.  This is one solstice, the solstice of leaning toward.  At the solstice of leaning toward, the sun reaches its highest point in the sky.  Heat begins to build and will continue to do so after the solstice even though the arc of the day has begun to diminish and the arc of the night to expand.

This solstice can be seen as a moment of extravagance, of the sun blessing us with its bounty. (though it must be observed that the sun spends itself without discrimination as regards our home.  it is, rather, our capture of more of its expenditure that defines the season)  In that regard we can look into our lives for those blessings, those extravagances that assert themselves right now, throwing heat and light into our days.

The summer solstice begs us to enjoy them.  Grand kids shine their innocence, a brilliant beacon, into us and in the reflection of that innocence we find ourselves restored.  We can wonder whether astronauts have tushies, read books all the time, giggle at negative numbers, shoot long threads of silly string over the forest, smile or even act mischievously in that ingenuous way kids have.

The garden’s green and growing things:  carrots, lilies, iris, beets, leeks, hosta, juniper, kale, chard, sugar snap peas, lilacs, hydrangeas, ferns, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, asparagus, strawberries, rhubarb, raspberries, daisies, peonies, bug bane and begonias.  The orchard with hundreds of apples, cherries, plums and pears, currants and blueberries, gooseberries.  What a cornucopia.  And the bees, working at building their colony.  This is life throwing itself away for the life of others, a joint dance with humans and plants and animals in it together.

23 years of marriage.  A wondrous extravagance, giving that many years and promising that many more.  The time, the memories, the trust, the hopes, the suffering, the joy.  Yes.

This is the time to say yes.  Yes marriage.  Yes garden.  Yes grand children.  Yes home.  Yes state.  Yes earth.  Yes sun.

This is the time to lean towards.  To react with great warmth.  To shine as brightly as you can.  Wherever you can.  Yes.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities, Third Phase

Outside, Inside. Again.

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Beltane                                                                          Solstice Moon

Summer is its own creature, a season apart from the others, especially here in the north.  Things grow.  Outside has only insect barriers, no cold or ice or snow or chill.  Yes, rain and thunder and tornadoes and derechos. Yes.  But only occasionally.  Usually the sun shines, heat climbs, jackets and boots stay in the closet.

It is now, finally, summer.  In three days the summer solstice will arrive, midsommer as celebrated in Scandinavia.  Here, this year, it will almost mark the beginning of our actual summer.

With the bees and the flowers, the vegetables and the woods, now the fire pit and visiting kin you would think I might love the summer.  And I do, in my way.  I appreciate it, look forward to it, enjoy it.  In particular I like working outside, planting, tending, harvesting.  Having the self expand out into the world beyond the house feels good, extends my understanding of who I am and of those whom I love.

Still, I will celebrate not the light on the day of the summer solstice, but its opposite, the beginning of night’s gradual increase.  I don’t know whether it’s my northern European DNA, or the mysterious lure that drew me north ever since reading Jack London, or a tendency toward melancholy, or a more general sense that my most vital activity occurs when the nights grow long and the temperature falls.

What I do know is that as the shadows lengthen and twilight comes sooner, my inner life begins to deepen, ideas bubble out of my interior.  My creative self flourishes.  It just occurred to me as I wrote this that attention outside draws me away from myself and from the inner work, undoubtedly a good thing, but as I sense the need for outside attention wane, my inner world grows more demanding.

If this is in fact the way it is, then I’m glad, for it means my inner life and the progression of the seasons have begun to synchronize in a powerful, subconscious way.

Garden, Great Wheel, Our Land and Home

Heat

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Beltane                                                                              Solstice Moon

All beds but one mulched and that one I want to plant some carrots in tomorrow or Sunday.  Planted another row of carrots in the large raised bed today.  Put down jubilate and transplant water on the carrot seeds and on the leeks.  Having the heat is good, the tomatoes, peppers and egg plants need it.  Now this isn’t much heat, I know, if you’re reading this in, say, Riyadh or Singapore, but still it counts here.

The growing season has begun to rock on.  I thinned some early beets and onions today, the strawberries have fruit and all the orchard trees have fruit, too.  Kate’s already given away rhubarb and lilacs, plus tomato marmalade from crops awhile ago.

In just one week the sun will hit it’s peak height here in the northern hemisphere:  “The summer solstice occurs when the tilt of a planet’s semi-axis, in either the northern or the southern hemisphere, is most inclined toward the star (sun) that it orbits. Earth’s maximum axial tilt toward the sun is 23° 26′. This happens twice each year, at which times the sun reaches its highest position in the sky as seen from the north or the south pole.”(Tauʻolunga)

After that, as the maximal tilt gives way, slowly, the days grow shorter, the dark begins to dominate and I move into my favorite half of the year, the part headed toward the winter solstice.  Though I love the growing season, it doesn’t feed me in the same way the gradual darkening and cold does.

It’s great right now though, heat for the plants, which will, ironically, feed me when the dark season comes.