Imbolc Valentine Moon
Imbolc, or in-the-belly, celebrates the time in Ireland when the ewes would freshen. Their pregnancies meant milk would be available after the long fallow season that had begun at Samain, Summer’s End.
Imbolc lies halfway between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox, what the Celt’s called a cross-quarter holiday since it falls between two quarters defined by the solar year. That milk is also a promise, like the gradual lengthening of days after the longest night of the year in late December, that spring and the growing season will come.
It’s easy for us in our refrigerated, grocery stored world to gloss over these signals of the natural world. It seems like we don’t require them anymore. After all we can buy milk, cow’s milk, at any time of the day or night, 365 days a year. And the growing season particular to our latitude and longitude also seems irrelevant since it’s always the growing season somewhere on earth. The occasional gaps that even modern transportation can’t resolve can often be filled by greenhouse or hydroponically grown produce. We’re good, right?
I’m afraid not. Celebrating Imbolc or any of the Great Wheel holidays will not resolve our alienation from the sources of our sustenance, the sun and mother earth, but this ancient tradition exists to call us back home. The Great Wheel is a reminder that the cycle of life continues, even when the fields and animals are barren. The power of the sun, working in harmony with the soil, with plants, with animals that eat the plants does not disappear. It can be trusted.
It is though, that alienation, evident in so many ways, that drives climate change, that creates produce modified for harvest and storage, not human well-being, that underwrites the paving over of cropland and wetlands. We imagine that somehow the droughts in California will stop there. We hope they’ll be confined to somewhere else, somewhere where we’re not. Global agriculture means we’ll be affected wherever the damage occurs.
Right here in Colorado we have a key example of the interdependence for which the Great Wheel stands. Our snowpack, high in the Rockies where the Colorado River rises for its journey south toward its ancient destination in the Gulf of California, determines the amount of water available to nine states. Including California. Winter snowfall, melted by the increasing warmth of spring and summer, nourishes millions of people, cities like Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles.
In the age of Trump and rising nationalist, right wing populism, the need for the Great Wheel has never been more profound. It softens our in the moment, human conflicts by lifting up the long term, the cycles of life in which all humans, all life participate. The Great Wheel reminds us that there is no other when it comes to living on this planet. We’re all here and bound to one another, connected. My hope is that someday, perhaps someday soon, we’ll all realize that and adjust our politics accordingly.
And, improbably, it will be Thanksgiving next week. There is no hint of over the river and through the woods weather to stimulate that Thanksgiving feeling. We may get a storm on Thursday. That would help.
Cattails. Seen them all my life. Used them as decorations. Never knew that if you press gently on the cats tail, the seeds surge out in a July 4th snake way. It’s amazing. If you haven’t experienced it, try it. Take a cattail, a mature one, and disturb the brown outer covering. You don’t have to use much force, about as much as required to get a fingernail into an orange skin, probably less. Kate discovered this after we harvested cattails for fall decor.
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This conforms to Michaelmas as the springtime of the soul. Sadness is a way we consolidate past experiences and sort them out, learning from them and choosing which aspects of the past to embrace and which to let go. When our tears are over, we are cleansed and renewed, ready for the next phase of life. Autumn gives us an annual opportunity for self-renewal. This Great Wheel, natural cycle phenomena matches up exactly with Rosh Hashanah and its climax, Yom Kippur.
Black Mountain, which is covered in lodgepole pine and actually green as a result, has small gold flecks this morning. Those few aspen groves on its slopes have begun to turn, as have more and more aspens between here and Evergreen, but not those on our property. Too, Orion appeared in the southern sky a week or so ago, the early morning southern sky. On Shadow Mountain Orion and the changing of the aspens are true harbingers of autumn.
Palisade, Colorado has had a bumper peach harvest. There is a small area on the Western Slope that has an ideal peach growing microclimate. They have other crops, too: lavender, apples, sweet corn, strawberries and vegetables. The newspapers have carried photo spreads of workers in the orchards with peach baskets gently picking and placing the delicate fruit into baskets. Back in Andover, this time of year, the honey harvest would be in, the raspberries just beginning. I would be out planting garlic and pulling the last plantings of carrots, beets, leeks and onions. This is the peak harvest season, when the land and its workers combine to feed millions, even billions of people.
Being so far removed from farms and large truck gardens feels strange to this former Midwestern lifer. No more so than in this long harvest season. Corn pickers and combines have begun to roll through fields. The state fairs have swept up 4-H’er raised cattle, pigs, sheep, chickens. The vegetable harvest has peaked. Self pick apple orchards have hayrides and cider stations set out. Not there, though.
Labor Day does mark the winding down of one season long harvest up here: tourist dollars from Denver folks. July and August are the heaviest tourist months for our favorite mountain town, Evergreen. We’re not a winter tourist destination, at least not like the ski resorts, so the roads will have less traffic and fewer visitors in Evergreen’s restaurants.
