Daily Archives: August 1, 2013

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.

Cooking, Garden, Our Land and Home

Putting Food By

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Lughnasa                                                        Moon of the First Harvests

Finished turning much of our garlic crop and all of three boxes of farmer’s market garlic into thin shavings, put them in the dryer and turned it on.  We discovered last year that a very effective way to keep garlic is to dry it, thin.  The crop this year itself was thin necessitating purchase of some to get up to a quantity that we think will sustain us through the winter.  We like garlic.

Picked carrots, tomatillos and the first roma tomatoes.  Kate’s made pico de gallo and corn relish today and will make pickled carrots and daikon radish tomorrow.  This is the time when summer’s profligacy gets pickled or canned or dried or frozen since the plant world has little care for the distribution of its fruits beyond the spreading of seed.  Humans have had to overcome the plants long established plans for propagation in order to benefit optimally from the growing season.  It came in fits and starts, I’m sure, this storing of calories and nutrition, but the basics are the same now as they have been for a very long time.

When doing this work, blowing snow, howling winds and fire in the fireplace are ever present, the time when this work will make sense.  Right now it just leaves a pain in my already sore left shoulder.  That will pass.

Art and Culture, Friends

Nude Summer Camp

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Lughnasa                                                            Moon of the First Harvests

Went into Minneapolis today, to the Black Forest, for Nude Summer Camp.  This was actually a reunion of Nude Summer Campers from 2008.  The campers were, with one exception, from the docent class of 2005.  Today the topic was the contemporary nude.  The conversation rolled and rocked from issue 0 of Playboy, thank you Tom Byfield, to relational aesthetics, Joy, the ecstasy of Bernini’s St. Teresa and the general question of why nudes are a topic at all.  We sat in the rear booth of the Black Forest’s outdoor dining area for a couple of hours.

Do I miss giving tours?  No.  Do I miss the continuing education at the MIA?  Wish it was of such quality that I could say yes, but no.  Do I miss driving in every week or so?  No.  But.  Do I miss my classmates and fellow docents, the conversations and the camaraderie?  Definitely yes.

I felt lighter after leaving this conversation.  In the presence of friends.  A life shared with friends is a full life.  And I’m lucky that way with the docents and the Woollys.  I’m grateful for all of them.

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.