Fall Harvest Moon
The funeral of the moon-every morning
Come nightfall you discover the body of the newborn moon
and help return it to the sky
leaving a mere trace in the snow
a thawing light impression
Category Archives: Great Wheel
Ora et Labora
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.
Mabon and the Fall Equinox
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.
Kathleen
Apples and the Equinox
Lugnasa (Fall Eve) Autumn Moon
“O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stained
With the blood of the grape, pass not,
but sit
Beneath my shady roof, there thou may’st rest,
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe;
And all the daughters of the year shall dance,
Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers. ”
– William Blake, To Autumn
Tomorrow at 9:49 we move into liturgical fall (as opposed to meteorological fall). I’m partial to the liturgical fall, especially with its astronomical significance. The sun comes up on the equatorial plane–as projected 93 million miles plus into space of course. Otherwise, crispy critters. Full entry tomorrow.
The campaign moves on, annoying me less than many because we cut the cord, or the coaxial, with Comcast and no longer have cable television. Though we do have a basic component of broadcast channels, we never watch them (they bring down the cost of the broad band service) and thus miss the television political ads.
That does not mean we miss out on television shows altogether though since subscriptions to Netflix streaming and Hulu mean many of them are available to us, just not CBS programs. BFD. My current new favorite is Grimm, a weekly tale of a Portland detective’s life as a homicide investigator and a Grimm who has the family vocation of seeing and vanquishing fairy tale creatures and/or learning to live with them.
Kate and I went around the outside this afternoon identifying tasks that need to be done. What needs pruning, weeding, transplanting. What we want in next year’s vegetable garden and where to plant it. Where the iris and the lilies and the tulips I buy will go. What needs to come out altogether. The yews out front, for example. Long past their prime and now tall enough to hide the house.
I harvested the apples off the leaning tree of Zestar. Boy, are they good. A light, sweet flavor that seems almost unapple like. This is the tree that needs shoring up. Not a hundred percent sure how to do that. Stakes and wires are one option, but with our sandy soil I’m not confident the stakes will hold at a high enough tension. May have to support it from the front and hold it in place with stakes.
Autumn
Lugnasa New (Autumn) Moon
Paul Douglas (local weather doyen) reminds us that meteorological autumn begins September 1st. I suppose. Autumn begins for me when we have days like this one. Low 40’s when I get up. A chill rain. Nights growing cooler. Leaves changing, falling.
(West Wind. early 1900’s. Thomson influenced the Canadian Group of Seven though he died before they formed.)
Now that ancientrail begins. The one where straightening up the house, restocking the larder and then, that final touch, turning the vent system over from summer to winter mark steps of readiness.
Like a denning creature, bear or beaver say, making the place warm and comfortable for the cold months ahead we burrow into our houses. Ready for when the north wind doth blow.
Are You Trying To Start a Movement?
Lugnasa Garlic Planting Moon
Presented Homecoming: Faith of a Pagan at Groveland UU this morning. They’ve honored me by having me come regularly for over 20 years. Fewer and fewer times as I’ve moved away from the ministry, but still, each year, at least once, often twice.
There’s something about an immediate audience that makes writing fresher, harder, cleaner. During the discussion after the presentation I found myself explaining my reimagining faith project and the more I said, the more enthused I became. Strange, I know, but that’s what happened. Partly I could see connections, heads nodding. This was taking root as an idea.
“Are you trying to start a movement?” one long time Grovelander asked.
Made me stop and think. No, I’m not. But I’m trying to get clear enough to write down my thoughts, make them into a book, because I feel this reimagined faith needs to be part of everyone’s inner tool kit. I don’t mean it needs to replace your Buddhism or Christianity or Judaism or Sikhism. It can be an adjunct, a both/and. Or, like me, it can be whole deal.
An essential awareness of and responsiveness to the world in which we live, the planet on which we depend has too often been lost, especially in developed countries. Now, too, developing countries like the BRIK nations. Unfortunately, those are the very spots where this kind of earth mindfulness is most needed. These countries are the ones that make decisions large and small that effect the future of human life on this planet.
Another Grovelander, a young Macalester student, challenged my pushing off against Christianity as an example of a metaphysic that distances us from the world. She was right. This message needs to penetrate especially religious and economic ideologies, be attractive rather than repulsive. Yet still strong enough to bite. Not an easy task.
But, hey? If it was easy, someone would have already done it.
(illustration above: The Green Knight Gesso tells the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the Green Knight’s perspective. The old ways are parting for the new, yet in the ancient there is wisdom to learn and to be retained. The Green Knight is symbolic of ancient wisdom.)
These Strange Times
Lugnasa Hiroshima Moon
Pope’s butler accused of theft. Wait. The pope has a butler? Shootings yesterday at Texas A&M. The Sikh Temple in Wisconsin last week. Aurora the 20th of July. Can anyone else hear a tear in the moral fabric of the universe?
Not to mention that yesterday the stock market was down because of news from Asia. Asia? What happened to the euro? It’s true that bad news always happens and good news is not, usually, news at all. Still.
Let’s throw in the news from Europe’s Cryosat that the polar ice has begun to retreat
(at) a loss of 900 cubic kilometers of ice in the last year. That’s 50 percent more than computer models predicted would melt.
A lack of ice is good news for shipping, and oil and gas exploration, but dark ocean water warms the air above more than reflective ice, a “positive feedback” that accelerates warming. Research suggests the Arctic is warming 2-4 times faster than the rest of the Northern Hemisphere. So what? This warming is nudging the jet stream north, to the tune of 1 mile a year, 18 feet/day. (paul douglas weatherblog)
Predictions of the end times have a 100% failure rating (so far), so I’m not going there, but bizarre times? Yes.
Of all of these, the news I understand least are the three shootings. Like the man here who killed his three daughters, there may be a psychological explanation. Certainly there is a psychological explanation. Has to be. But explanation does not serve. Tracing the inner path to these crimes leaves us with the crime in the end.
I’d like to know, if anybody does know, the incidence of these or similar crimes in other cultures. Are we truly aberrant or is it a statistical phenomenon, a law of large numbers reality?
Of all these, the news that worries me the most comes from the cryosat satellite. This summer was miserable for us and horrific for much of the country. In this case I understand the cause. I drive one. So do you. I use electricity. So do you. We have treated global warming as a topic for next year. For the next generation. Guess what?
It is next year. And we’re the next generation.
Lugnasa Hiroshima Moon
The Spring Dumbledor
An August Midnight
by Thomas Hardy
I
A shaded lamp and a waving blind,
And the beat of a clock from a distant floor:
On this scene enter—winged, horned, and spined—
A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;
While ‘mid my page there idly stands
A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands…
II
Thus meet we five, in this still place,
At this point of time, at this point in space.
—My guests besmear my new-penned line,
Or bang at the lamp and fall supine.
“God’s humblest, they!” I muse. Yet why?
They know Earth-secrets that know not I.
Lughnasa 2012
Lughnasa Hiroshima Moon
Lughnasa (Lugnasa, Lugnasadh) falls between the Summer Solstice and the Fall Equinox. The cross-quarter holidays, in the Celtic calendar, came before the solar holidays. Originally, the year divided only in half: May 1st, Beltane-Summer to October 31st Samhain-Summer’s End. After the solar holidays became part of the calender, two more cross-quarter holidays, Imbolc and Lugnasa, got established.
This is a time of joy, the harvest has well begun. Our neighbor brought us a colander filled with vegetables from his garden, a first fruits gathering. We gave him some honey. Our garden is a bit behind his because he has a wonderful open spot for his and we have woods around all of ours, limiting sunlight. Still, we harvested onions this week and garlic a month ago. Kate has also put up several pounds of beet greens, chard and kale with more to come.
The workload, too, changes, as the garden begins to die back after its summer of growth.
Lughnasa is the first of three harvest holidays, coming later are the Mabon, the fall equinox and Samhain, summers end, which marks the end of the harvest season and the beginning of the fallow season.
You could almost call this a fifth season, Harvest, with three holidays. Imagine how important this time of year was to agrarian societies where it determined the quality of the long fallow season. No wonder there are so many traditions, fairs, queens of this and that associated with it.
It might be a good time for you to check your life. What’s had a long growing season and is ready for harvest? Today I began work on the revision of Missing, its first draft finished in May and now ready for revision. I will also begin, at some point in the next week or so, Missing’s sequel, Loki’s Children. These represent the fruits, the harvest of much work and thought over the last couple of years.
Sewing projects? Home renovations? Jon and Jen have the plumber coming tomorrow to connect their two new bathrooms, their sinks and their stove. Overnight they’ll go from a one bathroom to a three bathroom home and a home with a remodeled kitchen and dining area, a new deck, new landscaping in the back and new bedrooms for all. But it took all the last year to get to this point. Harvest.
In fact, the whole summer olympics, coming as the calendar turns over to Lugnasa, are a harvest festival. Thinks of the hours, the weeks, the months, even the years most of these competitors have trained, just for this moment. A growing season perhaps begun in their youth, or, for some like the gymnasts, realized in their youth.
The state fair celebrates the agrarian culture that feeds us and its celebration comes during the Lugnasa season. Cattle, chickens, pigs, rabbits, honey, cakes, political campaigns, art all come to the fair. These fairs are the outgrowth of village markets that sprang up around the cross-quarter and solar holidays. Usually a week or so long, they gathered in the larger community, shared music and food, brokered deals, signed labor contracts or fulfilled them with payment, sanctioned marriages, sometimes handfast marriages for a year and a day.
It’s a festive time of year. Celebrate, celebrate, dance to the music.
The Growing Season Begins to Wind Down
Summer Hiroshima Moon
On Wednesday we move from the growing season emphasis of early summer to the harvest emphasis of late summer. The Celtic calendar marks that change on August 1st which begins the season of Lughnasa, a first fruits time. Yes, harvesting has happened before this, but now the inflection is on crops for sale, trade or preservation.
[ in precipitation in during the growing season (after Meehan et al. 2004 and Bowen et al. 2005)]
If any of you saw the opening ceremony of the Olympics, the first, agrarian phase of Great Britain before the industrial revolution is the time the Celtic calendar marks. It is not a calendar for an industrialized or a technological society though it has an important place in both. Industrialization and technology both move us away from direct experience of the
natural world and especially from the source of our food. The Celtic calendar gets its seasons from the botanical and meteorological rhythms, not the work day or the academic year or the never asleep world of the internet.
Those other rhythms, the Taylorized day or the instantaneous cyber world, lead us away from natural rhythms into a cultural space dominated by rationality, science and human control. In the Celtic calendar the natural world rules, just as it does yet today, though we hide ourselves from it with thermostats, electric lights and high speed broadband.
This is not an either/or situation; there is a dialectic between the world of human artifice and the world which brings the thunder and the lightning and the rain, which grows the food, which gives us night and day. Yet. So many of us, in our air conditioned, wired, well-lit by electricity homes, obscure or forget or ignore that our food grows in the soil, the flesh of mother earth. That it depends on water either from rain or from irrigation, this dependent of rain and replenishment of hidden aquifers. That the sun which gives food the energy we need does so without human intervention or assistance.
All of our civilization has as its foundation, its literal without which nothing support, the vegetative world. And we do not control it. We can help it, nurture it, bless it, curse it, but we cannot make plants grow. We can only provide or protect the conditions under which they do so. In our amnesia about this simple, stark fact we pave over farmland, alter the chemical conditions under which plants grow, change their genetic patterns trying to extend our control, but all this begs the question. How did the vegetative world get along without us?
The answer? Just fine. This is not a rant, this is a reflection of our current reality. It is the hope of ancientrails that it can serve as one reminder. One reminder of the essential, unique and healing power of the world beyond our control.