Fall Hunter Moon
We had two ribeye steaks last night. After Kate and Ruth lit the shabbos candles, I said my piece about the cattle we knew from the meadow. The primary point was to say thank you to the animal who gave his or her life. The words felt clumsy and anachronistic in my mouth, but right. It was a simple moment, not long, but placing us, as brother Mark pointed out, among others from Jain to Native Americans who stop to honor their food.
It particularly felt right juxtaposed against the familiar Midwestern grace, Bless this food to the use of our bodies. The food is all about us. We can safely ignore the real animals, the real vegetables because God made them for us to eat. This is another way in which traditional Christian values deflect believers from the world around them to the world beyond or at least to a source beyond.
This was a pagan ceremony, one that directs us toward the vital and necessary web of interdependence that sustains us all. This particular cow was not a sacrifice to an abstract principle. In fact there was nothing abstract about it at all. This meat came from an animal that lived this year, ate grass that grew this year, nourished by rain that fell this year, breathed oxygen this year. And her essence did not reach the gods through an altar fire, rather it entered into the truest and most significant transubstantiation, the same transubstantiation that occurred when the grass entered her four stomachs, a transubstantiation facilitated by water falling from the mountain skies of Colorado and the true and astounding miracle of photosynthesis. 
Ultimately our meal, not only the beef, but the green beans, the baked potatoes, the pasta and pineapple, the bacon bits and sour cream, was on the table, hecatombs for humans, by the power of nuclear fusion. The sun projects light and warmth into the solar system it holds in its gravitational thrall. On this earth the also miracle of evolution, began among the deep sea vents billowing out sulfur and heat from earth’s own interior, has found a way to embrace Sol, our sacred source of life and light.
(eatsunshine) We eat sunshine. Reimagining faith then must embrace astronomy, evolution, plant biology, animal science, human culture. This embrace occurs most intimately each time we sit down to eat, no matter the culture or religious beliefs represented. We live and move and have our being thanks to the elemental forces driving our local star and the astonishing fact that our planet has shaped its own elements into hands and leaves and hearts and minds able to receive those forces into our own bodies. Quite amazing.
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.
