Summer \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Hiroshima Moon<\/p>\n
On Wednesday we move from the growing season emphasis of early summer to the harvest emphasis of late summer. \u00a0The Celtic calendar marks that change on August 1st which begins the season of Lughnasa, a first fruits time. \u00a0Yes, harvesting has happened before this, but now the inflection is on crops for sale, trade or preservation.<\/p>\n
[ in precipitation in during the growing season (after Meehan et al. 2004 and Bowen et al. 2005)]<\/p>\n
If any of you saw the opening ceremony of the Olympics, the first, agrarian phase of Great Britain before the industrial revolution is the time the Celtic calendar marks. \u00a0It is not a calendar for an industrialized or a technological society though it has an important place in both. \u00a0Industrialization and technology both move us away from direct experience of the
\nnatural world and especially from the source of our food. \u00a0The Celtic calendar gets its seasons from the botanical and meteorological rhythms, not the work day or the academic year or the never asleep world of the internet.<\/p>\n
Those other rhythms, the Taylorized day or the instantaneous cyber world, lead us away from natural rhythms into a cultural space dominated by rationality, science and human control. \u00a0In the Celtic calendar the natural world rules, just as it does yet today, though we hide ourselves from it with thermostats, electric lights and high speed broadband.<\/p>\n
This is not an either\/or situation; there is a dialectic between the world of human artifice and the world which brings the thunder and the lightning and the rain, which grows the food, which gives us night and day. \u00a0Yet. \u00a0So many of us, in our air conditioned, wired, well-lit by electricity homes, obscure or forget or ignore that our food grows in the soil, the flesh of mother earth. \u00a0That it depends on water either from rain or from irrigation, this dependent of rain and replenishment of hidden aquifers. \u00a0That the sun which gives food the energy we need does so without human intervention or assistance.<\/p>\n
All of our civilization has as its foundation, its literal without which nothing support, the vegetative world. \u00a0And we do not control it. \u00a0We can help it, nurture it, bless it, curse it, but we cannot make plants grow. \u00a0We can only provide or protect the conditions under which they do so. \u00a0In our amnesia about this simple, stark fact we pave over farmland, alter the chemical conditions under which plants grow, change their genetic patterns trying to extend our control, but all this begs the question. \u00a0How did the vegetative world get along without us?<\/p>\n
The answer? \u00a0Just fine. \u00a0This is not a rant, this is a reflection of our current reality. \u00a0It is the hope of ancientrails that it can serve as one reminder. \u00a0One reminder of the essential, unique and healing power of the world beyond our control.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summer \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Hiroshima Moon On Wednesday we move from the growing season emphasis of early summer to the harvest emphasis of late summer. \u00a0The Celtic calendar … Continue reading The Growing Season Begins to Wind Down<\/span>