• Tag Archives fall

  • Picking Grapes With Hilo

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                       Waxing Blood Moon

    As the sun went down this evening, I picked grapes.  Picking grapes reaches back in time, especially wild grapes, as these are.  It reaches back to our hunter-gatherer past, a past much longer than our post neo-lithic, agricultural and urban  world.  This vine grows here because it can.  Maybe someone planted grapes long ago here, but these small grapes, almost like miniatures, offer themselves in the eons old rhythm of plant reproduction.

    To get at the clusters, all smaller than the palm of my hand, I found it easier if I first removed a covering of vines and leaves that obscured the grapes.  Do these leaves shade the grapes, keep them from desiccating too soon?  Is there some part of the grape’s maturation that requires a cooler, shadier environment?  I don’t know, but the layering of leaves, then grapes up near the main vine, where it crawled across the top of the six foot fence we have toward the road, appears intentional, at least intentional in the way that evolution works through its blind selection of more adaptive characteristics.

    Hilo, our smallest whippet, accompanies me when I work outside.  She hangs around and watches me, wanders off and finds something smelly to rub on her shoulder, watches other animals go by on the road.  Her companionship also reaches back into the  paleolithic when humans and shy wolves began to keep company, fellow predators brought together by the similarity in the game they hunted and the also similar method of hunting in packs.

    This time of year, the early fall, would have been good then too.  The food grows on vines and on trees, on shrubs and certain flowering plants.  Game eats the same food and becomes fat, a rich source of nutrient.  My guess is that there was a certain amount of anxiety, at least in these temperate latitudes, for the older ones in clan would know that winter comes after this time of plenty and that somehow food had to be preserved.

    Kate takes the grapes and turns then into jelly and apple-grape butter.  The act of preservation, though now more sophisticated technologically, was essential back in the days prior to horticulture and agriculture.

    The resonance among these fall related acts and our distant past adds a poignancy mixed with hope to them.  We have done it, we do it, others will do it in the future.  As the wheel turns.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Cooking Dogs Great Wheel Great Work 📎and tagged

  • Mabon (Fall) 2009

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                               Waxing Blood Moon

    Equinox.  Today is the fall equinox.  In spring we celebrate the shift towards yet more light and warmth as the trend toward lengthened days sees daylight overtaking the night.   Now the shift has a different, more somber direction.  At the Summer Solstice the hours of daylight began to shrink in relation to the hours of darkness.  At this equinox the night begins to predominate, an acceleration that will reach its peak at the Winter Solstice.

    Contemporary Wiccans (some at least) call this equinox Mabon and see it as the final harvest festival.  My own understanding and practice sees Mabon as the second of three harvest festivals:  Lughnasa (ended yesterday), Mabon and Samhain (Summer’s End).  Here on the 45th latitude the gardening year does begin to wind down now.

    On farms, however, the corn harvest lasts well into October and even in our garden we have carrots, parsnip, garlic and potatoes still in the ground.   In the ancient British Isles the end of summer meant deciding how much livestock you could feed through the winter.   If there was too little food for your herd, a certain number of animals would be slaughtered and their meat prepared to sustain the family over the winter.

    In either case though the fall equinox is the moment when the Great Wheel takes a decisive turn toward darkness.  That shift, along with the senescence in the garden and in the trees and fields, makes this an appropriate time for taking stock.  Kate and I are in the midst of preserving through canning, drying and storing the fruits of our summer’s work.  Grain and corn gets driven to the cathedrals of the plains in open trucks filled to the brim with yellow or golden seeds.  The elevators fill up as does our newly built store room.

    On a personal level this turn of the Great Wheel offers us a similar opportunity, that is, a time to take stock of the summer, the last year, even the course of our life.   Experience the joy of taking in to yourself the fruits you have harvested as a result of your own hard work.  Yes, money may be a part of that, but it is not the most important.  How have you increased in wisdom?  Have you and a significant other grown in your relationship?  Has a relationship that needed to come to an end done so and allowed you to move into a new phase of life?

    This is a wonderful festival for gratitude.  In fact, if you do nothing else to acknowledge this transition, take a moment to make a list of people and things for which you are grateful.  You could take this one step further and make others in your life aware of your gratitude.

    Finally, on a life level, the Great Wheel’s turn at Mabon symbolizes the autumn of our lives.  If this is where you are on your ancient trail, Mabon prompts you to consider the gifts and lessons we have embraced along the way.  The Great Wheel turns toward the final harvest, that day when we will be gathered up into the abundance from which we came and to which we return.  Present to us now that the years ahead are fewer than the ones behind this knowledge can enrich these autumnal days.  Life becomes more precious, an experience to be savored, lingered over, greeted with joy hour by hour, day by day.

    In the end the Wild Hunt comes for all of us, the just and the unjust.  The Great Wheel teaches us that even after it comes, life will go on and that, in some fashion, we will all be part of it.  Come to think of it, this may be my best answer to the question about the after life.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Great Wheel Myth and Story 📎and tagged

  • Down in the Trenches

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                             Waxing Harvest Moon

    Kate’s pain continues.  “I don’t even  feel guilty about not going into work today,” she said.  Whoa.  That says it all.

    Her condition creates  a moving target, how to balance therapies and activity with the pain and newly emerging symptoms.  We’ll find a place for her to be, at least until we have to find another one.

    The gradual slide toward fall, now most noticeable in the changed angle of the sun and the decreasing average highs, has energized me.   The trench for the electrical wiring linking the honey house (in process) to the grandkids playhouse has soil over the wiring now.  The trench had to be redug where Vega and Rigel had prematurely pushed soil back into the trench.  That was work for an adze, work done while kneeling spread wide over the trench.  A wide stance, I guess you could say.

    I checked the bees this morning, too, sending them love as Queen Latifah suggested in the Secret Life of Bees.  Though I love them and they seem happy, that is plentiful and busy, there is not much honey, maybe a frame and a half at most.  Why this is, I don’t know.  It seems the learning curve here will be long, but that’s ok.  I’ve got time to learn the way of the beekeeper.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Garden Our Land and Home 📎and tagged