Category Archives: Great Wheel

Great Wheel, Writing

New Moon Coming

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Samhain                                                                             Thanksgiving Moon

The Thanksgiving moon has almost winked out.  After the new moon, the Winter Solstice Moon will rise, the lunar watch over our longest night.  That’s only 10 days away.  As I’ve written often here, this is my favorite holiday, that pause in the cycle of the year where we can focus on the night, on the darkness, on the fecundity and the danger.  I guess I’m in my own Advent season right now.  As the time ticks away, closer and closer to our latitude’s longest absence from the sun.

By the time it comes, Missing will have its revision finished, this first one and have been printed out and in the hands of beta readers.  This liturgical season, Samhain, summer’s end, is the season of the final harvest and it’s fitting that at its end the work on Missing will wrap up for now.  It is also fitting that, in the liturgical season of the Winter Solstice, that a new book will begin, Loki’s Children.  In the darkness seeds grow, push out roots, explore the path to the air.  Waiting for springs warm days.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays

Holidays

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Samhain                                                                   Thanksgiving Moon

A holiday, a holy day.  A festival.  Lights.  Gifts.  Banquets.  Feasts.  Holiseason, that long season from Samhain through Epiphany, includes so many.  We know why, those of us in temperate climates where the nights get longer and longer until the day fades into a few hours of weak, cold sun.

And yet. The Winter Solstice, less than a month away now, celebrates what the other holidays bravely front with lights and smiles.  The darkness.  In the dark.  Afraid of the dark.  Blackness.  Dirt. Hecate. The Underworld.  Cerberus and Charon, Acheron and Lethe.  The awesome Stygian oath.  Death, not life.  Life is bright, daylight, sunshine.  Death is night, darkness, moonshine.

My own nature tends toward the dark, a melancholic soul, its shores washed by rivers running through the underworld of the psyche.  I feel at home as the cold grows and the darkness become dominate.  This feels to me the way I imagine the beach must feel to those who love the sun.  A place to relax. To just be.

What does a holiday really represent?  It is a memory, an anniversary of an idea, a placeholder with significance itself.  Christmas, with no known anchor in history, commemorates the Christian understanding of a monotheistic God assuming human form, an incarnation.  Thanksgiving has a generalized idea behind it, a combination of national solidarity, harvest festival and family gathering.

A holiday may, too, identify an event that can occur on only that date.  July 4th is such a date, for instance, as are birthdays.  The Winter Solstice and all the solar holidays are such holidays.  But, taken from that perspective, they are astronomical facts, rather than religious moments in themselves.

Over time though even such particular events accrue meaning.  Some of the meaning for solar holidays accrues due to their position in the larger astronomical reality of seasonal change.  So Spring equinox takes on the flavor of renewal, resurrection, rebirth.  The summer solstice the growing season and the fall equinox, the harvest.

The Winter Solstice then takes part of its character from the cold, the dark, the bleakness of the fallow season.  In early farming cultures it also signified, in its end, the return of the sun and the gradual increase of light and warmth that promised another year of agricultural growth.  It has, perhaps peculiarly among the solar holidays, a distinctive dark aspect and a distinctive light aspect.

It is its dark aspect that I celebrate.  It fits my more hermetic, introverted self.  There is, too, as I said above that melancholic stream acknowledged best in a holiday of the dark.  Meditation takes me down and inside my self, a time of quiet darkness, an intimate moment.  Darkness, too, is necessary to so many plants, bulbs and seeds alike, time to germinate, just as ideas sow themselves in the rich fields of the unconscious.

It’s the best time of the year.

Garden, Great Wheel

Summer’s End

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Samhain                                                       Fallowturn Moon

All the leeks have left the earth.  I pulled them out, chopped off the roots and the upper green leaves, stripped off the outer layers of soil cover and put them in the bucket that held the pro-sweet syrup I fed the bees in September.  The carrots, too, have left the earth.  Fat, long, orange, soil clinging to the delicate roots sent out for more nutrients, they come up with the leaves intact.  Soup ingredients and ingredients for leek au gratin that I plan to make tomorrow.

After this final harvest, summer’s end at last for produce, I took my Gransfors-Bruks felling axe over to the elm tree, a small one.  It had begun to impinge on the gardens sunlight and Kate wanted it gone.  Warming up to my aerobics for the non-resistance days, I began to chop.

This took 20-25 minutes and saw me chopping, resting, breathing hard, chopping again, resting again.  At one point it seemed the tree would remain upright with only a small layer of wood holding it up.  Then, as trees do, it began to lean gracefully and fell slowly down, right where I had planned.  The ax work is intense.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities, Weather +Climate

Ring a Ding, Hear Them Sing, Holiseason Is Here!

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Samhain                                                                      Fallowturn Moon

Geese honking, flying in some direction, no longer always south.  Trucks with rickety wooden sides piled high with split oak come into the cities to sell firewood door to door.  Golf carts head south on flat bed trucks.  Irrigation company trucks haul air compressors behind them to blow out irrigation systems.  Bee colonies board trucks headed for California, Texas, Florida where crops can be pollinated over our winter.  Signs for various aspects of deer processing go up.  County Market near us has been advertising sausage mixes and consultation with experts.

Soon the early Christmas trees attached to the tops of cars will appear on Round Lake Boulevard, cut at the cut your own place north of us.  The skies have already turned gray, the wind chill.  Snow comes first in this month, too.

All Hallow’s today.  In one interesting variation on this theme I found that in some traditions this is the day the souls of those who died in the last year are judged.  Cheery thought, eh?

We have entered, according to my sacred calendar, holiseason.  It stretches from Samhain to Epiphany and includes Samhain, All Souls, Día de los Muertos  Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s and Epiphany but also Hanukkah, Posada, Deepavali (Diwali), Advent, Boxing Day, the Mayan 5 useless days at the end of the year and my favorite, my low holy day, the Winter Solstice.

So light those candles, dig out the decorations, crank up the holiday music and let’s party like it’s Holiseason 2012.

Great Wheel

Samhain 2012

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Samhain                                                                 Fallowturn Moon

Summer’s End.  That’s the Celtic name for this holiday, Samhain.  It is the last of the three harvest festivals:  Lughnasa, Mabon or the Fall Equinox, and Samhain.  After today, nearly all the crops are in and the long fallow season begins, a time of careful attention to stores, of storytelling around the fire at night.

Here at Artemis Hives and Gardens we will shut up the bees in their winter wraps in the coming week since there is nothing outside for the bees to eat.  They will have to survive until the first blooms of 2013 on stored honey, certainly that over the winter, though I may feed them again in the early spring.

Too, there are still leeks and carrots in the ground. I’ve still not got round to harvesting and cooking them.  This week for sure.  Once they’re out I’ll apply composted manure where I haven’t so far, then leaves or rotted hay, food for next year’s crops.  I also have a bag of composted manure for the lilies and iris I planted, then leaves on them.  I can lift over 30 pounds now.

The Celts considered tonight a moment when the veil between the worlds thinned.  The dead, the folk of faery, gods and goddesses can cross more easily into this world.  Adventurous mortals might try crossing the other way if they dare.  I learned today that some thought this was a time when inspiration might come from the otherworld, so it is considered a time to keep the heart and mind as open as possible.

(chalice centre)

Samhain is a time to look at your life and ask what needs finishing, wrapping up.  This is a good season for endings.  It is traditionally, in the Celtic faith and Christian adaptation of Celtic ideas, a time to remember the dead.  Tomorrow will be All Souls and begin the two day celebration of Día de los Muertos.  It corresponds to Samhain in its remembrance of the dead, welcoming them home for a visit, though it tends to have a more upbeat note with celebrations and meals served in cemeteries, ofrendas that memorialize a loved ones favorite foods, music, flowers, art. Ofrendas can become very creative and are an ephemeral art form all on their own.

Perhaps this is a year to create an ofrenda for your ancestors.

(wikipedia)

So look at that project that keeps hanging around, never quite finished.  Listen with open mind and heart for inspiration.  Perhaps you, too, have garden tasks yet to finish.  You might also consider those of your family who have died and recall them in some concrete way.

Great Wheel, Writing

The Fallowturn Moon

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Samhain                                                                      Fallowturn Moon

Went out last night with the trash, rolling a plastic container, two really, down our long sloping driveway.  Night time and a dark sky lit well by a full moon, the Fallowturn moon.  Tonight, when the kiddies are out gathering in tribute from each home at which they arrive at least there will be light.  If the skies stay clear.

I’ve been working on Missing this morning, revising, a lot of taking it from third person to first.  Other adjustments, too.  As I go, other ideas come to me, more distanced from it now, trying to read it as a reader, not a writer.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Poetry

What He Said

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Fall                                                                Harvest Moon

Hamatreya [excerpt]

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

EARTH-SONG

 

“Mine and yours;
Mine, not yours.
Earth endures;
Stars abide–
Shine down in the old sea;
Old are the shores;
But where are old men?
I who have seen much,
Such have I never seen.

“The lawyer’s ded
Ran sure,
In tail,
To them, and to their heirs
Who shall succeed,
Without fail,
Forevermore.

“Here is the land,
Shaggy with wood,
With its old valley,
Mound and flood.
But the heritors?
Fled like the flood’s foam.
The lawyer, and the laws,
And the kingdom,
Clean swept herefrom.

 

“They called me theirs,
Who so controlled me;
Yet every one
Wished to stay, and is gone,
How am I theirs,
If they cannot hold me,
But I hold them?”

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work

Ora et Labora

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Fall                                                               Autumn Moon

Frost last night, but no freeze.  Either way, not too damaging for us.  Our harvest of above ground bearing vegetables and fruits is almost over.  Left are root crops like leeks and carrots, a few onions, some beets and a late crop of kale and chard.  All of these are frost hardy, even freeze hardy.

I have another leek dish to make, a leek gratin.  Will have several leeks left after that so I may have to return to the chicken pot pies or leek and potato soup.  Both are good.

All in all a good gardening year except for the failure of my bee management plan and the theft of our honeycrisp crop by those #$!%XXX squirrels.  Looks like I pulled out a save with the bees by going with over wintering.  Just no honey this year.  Next year.  Good thing Artemis honey is not a for profit business.

Ruth Hayden commented on our gardening and bees as not about poverty, but “…about creativity.”  In the broadest sense, yes.  In the particular though Kate enjoys the Iowa farm mom aspect of putting food by:  drying, canning, freezing, storing.  Both of us enjoy and I find essential the spiritual aspect of gardening, the close connection to the soil, to the source of our food, to the seasons, to the vagaries of weather and the changing of climate.

You might say our garden is our church, or, better really, our meditation and our sutra, our bible.  Ora et labora.  Work and prayer is the Benedictine motto.  I like it too.  Work as prayer, especially work with plants.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Third Phase

Mabon and the Fall Equinox

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Fall                                                                                           Harvest Moon (I changed this name when I discovered the Harvest Moon was the closest full moon to the Fall Equinox)

 

Autumn
by T. E. Hulme

A touch of cold in the Autumn night
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded;
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.

 

My thoughts

This Equinox I’m offering some resources from around the web that speak to this, the second harvest holiday.  This is the liturgical fall, as I said yesterday, as opposed to the meteorological fall which occurs September 1st.

The crone aspect of this holiday strikes me especially this year.  Why?  Because it honors the triple goddess [maid-mother-crone] in her final form of three. The final form, that is, until the new year begins. She begins the year as the maid, shifts with the beginning of the growing season into the mother and then, with the coming of fall enters the crone.

I don’t go further with the triple goddess idea (from Robert Graves) than its emphasis on the seasons recapitulating  the main phases of human life.  In this way the fall turn of the goddess into the crone, the wise woman/healer, marks the seasonal reminder of the Third Phase.

My own version of the three is:  Student, Family (householder in the Hindu tradition), Third Phase (retirement in the Hindu tradition, but in a different sense than our own, about which there is no cultural consensus.  Hence, for me, the third phase).  The crone encourages an inflection in the third phase that I like i.e., a sense of fulfillment, of gathered wisdom, of grace gained from an expected and welcomed transition.

This is also the season of age passing onto death.  Death marks the end of the third phase and since it does, preparation for dying is an essential aspect of the third phase.  An essential, perhaps the only essential, realization here is that death is and that it comes for us all.  Though essential, this is a truth difficult to grasp in its deeply personal sense and once grasped, to accept.  It requires wisdom, patience and gentle resignation, all characteristic of the crone as I have come to understand her.

She could just as well be he.  A wise old man, the one on the block that others come to.

This is the season of harvest.  Enjoy the fruits of your labors.

Mabon

Aging Goddess

The triple Goddess – worshipped by the Ancient Britons, is now in her aspect of the aging Goddess and passes from Mother to Crone, until she is reborn as a youthful virgin as the wheel of nature turns.
At the Autumn equinox the goddess offers wisdom, healing and rest.

Apples
To honour the dead, it was also traditional at Mabon to place apples on burial cairns, as symbolism of rebirth and thanks. This also symbolizes the wish for the living to one day be reunited with their loved ones.
Mabon is also known as the Feast of Avalon, deriving from the meaning of Avalon being, ‘the land of the apples’.

Mabon Traditions

The Wicker man
There was a Celtic ritual of dressing the last sheaf of corn to be harvested in fine clothes, or weaving it into a wicker-like man or woman. It was believed the sun or the corn spirit was trapped in the corn and needed to be set free. This effigy was usually burned in celebration of the harvest and the ashes would be spread on the fields.

‘The reaping is over and the harvest is in,
Summer is finished, another cycle begins’

In some areas of the country the last sheaf was kept inside until the following spring, when it would be ploughed back into the land. In Scotland, the last sheaf of harvest is called ‘the Maiden’, and must be cut by the youngest female in attendance.

To close:  a prayer, written by Kathleen Jenks of the wonderful website Myth*ing Links:

Kathleen was a professor at Pacifica and is now a private consultant.

As autumn returns to earth’s northern hemisphere,
and day and night are briefly,
but perfectly,
balanced at the equinox,
may we remember anew how fragile life is —-
human life, surely,
but also the lives of all other creatures,
trees and plants,
waters and winds.May we make wise choices in how and what we harvest,
may earth’s weather turn kinder,
may there be enough food for all creatures,
may the diminishing light in our daytime skies
be met by an increasing compassion and tolerance
in our hearts.
 

Warmly,

Kathleen