The Mountain Summer Moon (its 1% crescent)
Shabbat gratefuls: Special Shabbat candles. A day of rest, friends, reading. The Quarry Fire. Life in the W.U.I, the wildlands urban interface. Its anxieties and its joys. Poetry. Literature. Torah. Talmud. Mussar. Midrash. Music. Ives. Copeland. Cage. Mozart. Coltrane. Parker. Monk. Bach. Telemann. Gregorian chant. Kate, always Kate. Her violinist sisters: B.J. and Sarah.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Shabbat
One brief shining: This August 3rd life in the year 2024, a hot dry life with Wildfire not far away, with the contentment of Shabbat on offer, with those fancy Shabbat candles burned down, later Irv and Marilyn on their way to Aspen Perks for a breakfast with me, while I use ever changing neuronic activity to control my fingers, spit out black words while waiting to see what I’m saying. Oh.
Kavanah: Presence Metinut (mitt-ee-NOOT) מְתִינוּת
Mindfulness, presence, intentionality (literally to “move slowly”) [חִפָּזוֹן Chipazon, chee-pah-ZONE: Hurry, rush, haste]
Lughnasa*. A first fruits holiday. A cross-quarter day on the Great Wheel lying between the Summer Solstice and the Autumnal Equinox. August 1st. Catholicism celebrates the day as Lammas or Loaf Mass when parishioners in Great Britain and Ireland would bring freshly baked bread from the season’s first Corn (Wheat in the U.S.) harvest. As their campaign of suppression and repression of native religions gathered force, Roman Catholics swept up many Jewish and pagan holidays. Lughnasa among them.
While the Roman Catholic church built churches and cathedrals over Celtic holy wells, hoovered up holidays, declared Celtic gods and goddesses heretical or chose to adopt them, St Bridgit being a notable example, Brigid being the powerful triple goddess of hearth, smithy, and healing, the Celtic Faery Faith never fully died out as W. Evans-Wentz proved by visiting late 19th century Celtic lands for his doctorate from Oxford. His dissertation, the Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, shows that it survived then in the pagan (rural) areas of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall, and the Isle of Man.
The week long market fair still held in rural Celtic lands had a religious as well as an agricultural purpose. Dancing and bonfires, sneaking off into the fields to spread fertility with the sympathetic magic of love-making, honoring the sun-god of many talents, Lugh.**
Lughnasa, remembered by Celtic immigrants to the U.S. like the Scots-Irish, spawned county and state fairs here. The Great Minnesota Get Together is a for instance. If you go, look in the bushes. There might be a few stray pagans celebrating in the old way.
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*“To this day, there is a town in Kerry that holds a fertility festival each August, where a magnificent he-goat precides like Cernunnos for three days and nights, and bacchanalian drinking, wild dancing, and varieties of sexual indescretion are the principal entertainments. It is this characteristically Irish mélange of pagan and Christian that forms the theme of Brian Friel’s magnificent play Dancing at Lughnasa—Lughnasa being the harvest feast of the god Lug, still celebrated on August 1 in parts of Ulster.” source: How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995)
**“Lugh was able to do all things well. He could forge at a smithy and ride a great horse, hold his breath under water for hours, fight without ever becoming exhausted, and throw his spear with perfect precision. He was also a harper, poet, wheelwright, headler, and genealogist, and that’s not all! Lugh managed to defeat the giant Balor of the One Eye, who could kill everyone in his range of vision simply by opening his eyelid and looking at them. Lugh whirled his sling over his head and put out Balor’s eye.”source: The Story We Carry in our Bones (2015) Irish Myths
