Friday Ramble - Lammas (Lugnasadh)

Here we are on the last day of July, and the eve of Lammas,sometimes called Lughnsadh, Lúnasa, Calan Awst, "First Harvest" or "Loaf Mass". The festival celebrates summer, farming and harvesting, particularly the gathering, milling and putting by of grains and cereals.

Humans have gathered and consumed grains and cereals since Neolithic times, and the beginning of domestic grain cultivation is an important moment in our evolution. It marks the transition from an ancient, nomadic lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of farming and settlement. Sickles, sheaves, stooks, mill wheels and grinding stones are common motifs in almost every culture on island earth.

Gods and goddesses? Oh yes, our festival has a throng of harvest gods: Lugh, Tammuz, Osiris, Adonis and Attis to name a few. Then there is Dionysus or Bacchus -  the grapey god is in a class all by himself, deity of vineyards and harvesting, wine making, drunken revelry and ritual madness.  He stands at the gate between summer and autumn, and his magical tavern with its ever turning mill wheel and rapture inducing brews is the stuff of legend. According to folk tales, its doorway can be entered from any street in the great wide world if one is in the right frame of mind and receptive to the alluring tug of the wild, the intoxicating and ecstatic.

In the ninth century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, August 1st was called "the feast of first fruits", and the occasion also marked the end of the hay gathering that had begun at Midsummer (June 21st). Loaves of bread were baked with freshly milled grain and placed on church altars. After they were blessed, the loaves were used in simple charms and rustic enchantments. 

At Lammas, tenant farmers paid an allotment of grain to their landlords as rent, and a tithe (one tenth of a farm's yield) was given to the local church. Farmers delivered their portion to parish tithe barns, and a number of the elegant timber, brick and stone structures survive today. The oldest standing tithe barn in existence is one in Essex erected by the Knights Templar in the early thirteenth century. Analysis of its timbers has yielded a date for them of circa 220. 

Tim Powers' novel The Drawing of the Dark always comes to mind around this time of year. The book is full of harvest and brewing metaphors, and it has a cast of fabulous characters including King Arthur (reborn as an Irish mercenary named Brian Duffy), the wizard Merlin and the Fisher King. Dionysus and his magical tavern put in an appearance. So do the woodland god Pan, Gambrinus (mythical brew master), Finn MacCool, the Morrigan, Guinevere, Morgan le Fay, Odin, Thor and Hercules. There's a shipload of Vikings sworn to defend the ancient brewery at the heart of the story and stave off Ragnarok, and there are other mythical creatures too numerous to mention. I usually reread the novel again around Lammas, and I am about to do so. 

The first day of August marked the beginning of the harvest for the ancients, but it also marked summer's end in some cultures, and so it is for moderns. Days are still blisteringly hot for the most part, but mornings and evenings are often cooler. Some mornings, Beau and I find fallen leaves in the birdbath when we go out, and the air is filled with the splendid whiff of herbs going to seed in the garden. There are still many warm and sunny weeks before us, and it is difficult to believe that summer is waning, but it is doing just that. Our days are growing shorter, and autumn is not far off. 

We've come a long way from our early "hunting and gathering" days, but traces of old seasonal rites remain here and there. When I arrived in Lanark county years ago, I was delighted to learn that Lammas festivities are alive and well in the eastern Ontario highlands. They are called céilidhs or "field parties", and the attendees are unaware of their origins for the most part, but all the festival trappings are there: bonfires, corn, grilled munchies and fresh baked bread, wine and beer, music, storytelling, dancing, parades by lantern light and merrymaking in abundance. Once in a while, there is even a ritual or formal harvest observance. Blessed be.

Thursday Poem - At the road's turning, a sign

Stranger, you have reached a fabulous land―
in winter the abode of swans
magnolia buds and black leaves

secretly feeding the earth―
memory snaked into tree roots.

In spring, you will feel life changes
bubble up in your blood like early wine,
and your heart will be lighter than
the flight of gossamer pollen.

Stranger, in summer, you will drink deeply
of a curious local wine,
fortified with herbs cut with a silver knife
when the moon was new.
Who knows what freedoms
will dazzle your path like fireflies?

And I promise you, in the fall

you will give up the search and know peace
in the fragrance of apple wood burning.
You will learn how to accept love
in all its masks, and the universe
will sing here more sweetly than any other place.

Dolores Stewart (Riccio) from The Nature of Things

Wordless Wednesday - Going Gold

 

The Music of a Summer Night

I lean against the railing on the deck with an iced coffee in hand and watch fireflies frolicking through the shrubbery in the garden.

Midsummer has come and gone, and Lammas is only a few days away, but I think of a watercolour (1908) by Robert Edward Hughes called Midsummer Eve. Hughes was acquainted with members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and their influence on his work shows. In his painting, a young woman stands in a forest clearing, surrounded by a circle of fairies holding softly glowing lanterns. It is night, and the forest behind her is alight with fireflies. There is magic in the air.

In our darkening garden, there are the last cicada raspings of the day and a few crickets are doing their thing - I say "our garden" because it is Beau's garden too, and he loves it. Classical guitar wafts from the speakers on my neighbor's veranda, and a hound around the corner is singing soulfully to the waxing moon. Bats describe perfect circles over our heads, and a light wind blows through the old trees. There is an occasional crackle from the lantern burning on the deck. By rights, a Pan flute or harp should be playing. Perhaps something by the Breton harper, Alain Stivell?

On nights like this, I feel ancient and young at the same time, and I know right down to my blood and bones that there is wild, elemental magic at work in the great wide world. I can almost reach out and touch it, and it gladdens this wild old heart.

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Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

You really don't have to lose everything and travel to a remote valley to discover that the world is always rushing forward to teach us, and that the greatest thing we can do is stand there, open and available, and be taught by it. There is no limit to what this cracked and broken and achingly beautiful world can offer, and there is equally no limit to our ability to meet it.

Each day, the sun rises and we get out of bed. Another day has begun and bravely, almost recklessly, we stagger into it not knowing what it will bring to us. How will we meet this unpredictable, untamable human life? How will we answer its many questions and challenges and delights? What will we do when we find ourselves, stumble over ourselves, encounter ourselves, once again, in the kitchen?

Dana Velden, Finding Yourself in the Kitchen:

Kitchen Meditations and Inspired Recipes

Nectar and Light

 Eastern Tiger Swallowtail and Bergamot (Bee Balm)

Friday Ramble - Following the Sun

In summer, young sunflowers follow the sun around the sky all day long. When they grow up, they face the rising sun, and they no longer move in what is, to me anyway, summer's most engaging dance. When I drove by a field of sunflowers recently and saw they had turned their backs and were all facing east, I tried not to take it personally, but I was wistful. The kids were all grown up and ready to leave home.

It's all a matter of circadian rhythms (or the circadian clock), the internal 24 hour cycle that regulates our gnarly metabolisms and keeps us tune with the natural world according to the hours of daylight and darkness in our environment. The word circadian comes from the Latin circa (about) plus diem (a day), and most living things have circadian clocks of some kind. Circadian protocols tell us when we should sleep, and when we should awaken. They prompt bears, bats and squirrels to go into hibernation, advise trees to lose their leaves and withdraw into themselves for the winter, let birds and butterflies know it is time to migrate. The science of circadian rhythms is called chronobiology, and it is lovely stuff indeed.

Young sunflowers drink the sun's warmth to fuel their journey to maturity, and they turn their heads to follow it. As they mature, they take in more light, heating up early in the day and releasing a heady fragrance that attracts legions of pollinating insects like butterflies and bees and ensures future generations of sunflowers. Grownup sunflowers have fulfilled their prime motivation (dynamic purpose), and they have attained their highest and most complete expression. They have done what they were put here on earth to do, and they no longer need to follow the sun.

Members of the helianthus family are amazing. What seems at first glance to be a single sunflower is actually a whole community of flowers, thousands of tiny florets arranged in a perfect spiraling sequence. Each floret is inclined toward the next floret by approximately 137.5°, a measurement known in mathematics as the golden angle. The arrangement creates an elegant series of interconnecting spirals in which the number of left oriented spirals and the number of right oriented spirals are successive Fibonacci numbers. It's arty, scientific and just plain beautiful, stunning in fact.

A lifelong admirer of spirals, golden angles and Fibonacci sequences whenever and wherever they turn up, I'm always delighted to come across another one in my rambles. Finding a few sunflowers in someone's garden is a happy thing, and discovering a whole flowering field along a quiet country road is dazzling. I adore them, and it boggles my mind to think of such glorious creatures blooming without anyone around to admire them.

In autumn, faded sunflowers are wondrous in their imposing stature, earthy coloration, spikiness and sculptural complexity. Determined to engender legions of progeny and perpetuate their particular genetic brew, they birth thousands of seeds every autumn, mothering whole dynasties of towering stalks, fuzzy leaves and beaming golden faces that will appear when summer rolls around next time. In the depths of winter I try to remember that somewhere, legions of tiny, unborn sunflowers are sleeping and dreaming under Himalayan heaps of snow.

In "Enriching the Earth", Wendell Berry describes the earth's cycling as "slowly falling into the fund of things", and I am fond of the notion. Going to seed is a good thing, a fine thing, a natural and necessary thing. Every coin in nature's wild unruly banking is kin, whatever its size, shape or denomination.

Thursday Poem - Remember

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this

universe is you.

Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

Joy Harjo 

Wordless Wednesday - After the Rain

How the Trees Love Summer Light

Morning light and trees, smoke from the wildfires burning out west and up north.

Breathing is difficult in such conditions, and visibility in any direction is limited. We are all going about with dry coughs, headaches, watery eyes and sniffles. When we are outside, there is the taste of embers and charred wood in the back of our throats, and sometimes, there is also the acrid taste of burning rubber.

Several northern communities have been rendered homeless by fires this summer. Vast numbers of wildlife have died, and three million hectares of magnificent forest have already been wiped out. There are heavy rains in the forecast for the next few days, and we cling to the hope they will quench the fires and end the destruction. 

There were ash particles on the deck and floating in the birdbaths when we went out to the garden a few minutes ago. One of the day's appointed activities will be checking the receptacles regularly and replacing the tainted water in them with fresh stuff for the bird people to drink and splash about in. 

For all that, the great trees in the park seem to be reaching for the light.

Sequestered, 362 (CCCLXII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

What we need, all of us who go on two legs, is to reimagine our place in creation. We need to enlarge our conscience so as to bear, moment by moment, a regard for the integrity and bounty of the earth. There can be no sanctuaries unless we regain a deep sense of the sacred, no refuges unless we feel a reverence for the land, for soil and stone, water and air, and for all that lives. We must find the desire, the courage, the vision to live sanely, to live considerately, and we can only do that together, calling out and listening, listening and calling out.

Scott Russell Sanders, Writing from the Center

Cooler on the Rocks

Friday Ramble - Summer's Ticking Clock

Somewhere in the dusty recesses of my noggin, the passage of these sultry summer days is being marked, and wistfully. The clock of the seasons is ticking away in the background, and I find myself pondering the lessons held out by this golden interval that is passing away all too swiftly. The other three seasons of a northern calendar year are splendid of course, and there are other fine summers ahead, but this summer is waning, and its days are numbered. The summer solstice has come and gone, and we are sliding gently down the hill toward autumn, shorter days and longer nights.

Thoughts of coming and going are inevitably inscribed on summer's middling pages, and they're unsettling notions, making for restlessness and vague discontent, a gentle melancholy concerning the nature of time, what is falling away and the transience of all earthly things. A heightened awareness of suchness (or tathata) is a middle-of-the-summer thing for sure. For the most part, one goes gently along with the flow, breathing in and out, trying to rest in the moment and just do the garden things that need doing. Oher times, pensive feelings take over. 

Old garden roses are a perfect metaphor for the season. Most bloom once in a calendar year, but what a show they put on when they do. Their unruly tangles of wickedly thorny canes and blue-green leaves wear delicate pink (for the most part) blooms with crinkled petals and golden hearts. Each rose is unique, and each is exquisite from budding until its faded petals flutter to earth like snowflakes. For several weeks after Midsummer, fragrance lingers in every corner of the garden, and every year I fall in love with old roses all over again. It is nothing short of a miracle that creatures so beautiful and fragile thrive this far north.

Once in a while, I catch a glimpse of the Great Mystery while I am wobbling about in the garden, and that is surely what this old life is all about. I wish I did a better job of remembering that and keeping everything in perspective, but forgetting now and then is quite all right - the roses remind me.

Thursday Poem - Daily

These T-shirts we fold into

perfect white squares

These tortillas we slice and fry to crisp strips

This rich egg scrambled in a gray clay bowl

This bed whose covers I straighten

smoothing edges till blue quilt fits brown blanket

and nothing hangs out

This envelope I address

so the name balances like a cloud

in the center of sky

This page I type and retype

This table I dust till the scarred wood shines

This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again

like flags we share, a country so close

no one needs to name it

The days are nouns: touch them

The hands are churches that worship the world.

Naomi Shihab Nye,
(from The Words Under the Words: Selected Poems)

Wordless Wednesday - Hazy Days

Golden Daughters of the Sun

Jerusalem Artichoke (Earth Apple or Sunchoke)

(Helianthus tuberosus)

Jerusalem artichokes are a species of wild sunflower native to the northern part of the continent, and there is a fine, tall stand of them growing along a village hydro easement that runs down to the river.

Golden daughters of the sun, the artichokes are a treat for the eyes when they are flowering. In places our stand is almost eight feet high and it is covered with golden blooms at the moment. The bees and bumbles are ecstatic. Beau and I admire both the flowers and the bees whenever our walks take us in their direction.

The tubers (roots) of Jerusalem artichokes are edible and taste like water chestnuts, delicious when lightly sauteed or thinly sliced (raw) in a salad. I've eaten them once or twice and liked them so I occasionally consider digging up a few, but I just can't bring myself to do it. I would rather look at them than eat them.

Having such splendid, towering creatures living nearby is a fine thing, and it affords us much pleasure. Digging them up would be shameful.

Sequestered, 361 (CCCLXI)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us.

Ben Okri, The Famished Road

Little Sister in the Daisies

Friday Ramble - On the Edge of an Inland Sea

The lake is a wild and elemental place at sunset, mist floating on the water and draping the shoreline, the call of loons across the water, the susurrus of a heron striding the reedy shallows, the languid ripple of pike or perch rising to the surface and then falling back into the depths in slow motion. A fabulous place, time out of time, wonders beyond mere words. Apprentices of wonder are we, and it is good to be here at this time of day.

Old boats, bridges and wooden jetties, rafts, pylons and buoys—they are all human creations, and most of the time, they are anything but mysterious. At the end of day though, they are transformed by the fey trappings that always seem to cling to the entities along an inland sea as the sun goes down. Magical? Oh, yes. If the stuff could be bottled, it would retail for a small fortune. Such things, however, cannot be captured, consigned to arty little glass bottles, purchased or sold. 

When Beau and I arrive home, we are still dazzled by our sojourn on the shore, and we are, ourselves, a bit fey. Sundown dances behind our eyelids, and the light is votive in its shimmering intensity. The sound of the waves lapping the shore lingers in my thoughts, and the sound is as peaceful as a bell calling the faithful to church or temple or zendo. What Beau hears I am not sure, but his expression is thoughtful.

How long have we been coming here at this hour of the day? It's a transcendent experience, each and every time. Everything we need, almost everything in the world that matters, is right here on the shore of our inland sea, and we return whenever we can. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, we are always coming home.

Thursday Poem - Epiphany

Lynn Schmidt says

she saw You once as prairie grass,

Nebraska prairie grass,

she climbed out of her car on a hot highway,
leaned her butt on the nose of her car,
looked out over one great flowing field,
stretching beyond her sight until the horizon

came: vastness, she says,

responsive to the slightest shift of wind,

full of infinite change,

all One.

She says when she can't pray

She calls up Prairie Grass.

Pem Kremer

Wordless Wednesday - A Glass of Green

Lilies of the Day

 Daylily (Hemerocallis spp.)

Why give such gorgeous creatures names like ditch lily, railroad lily, roadside lily, outhouse lily, and wash-house lily? Outhouse lily? For heaven's lofty sake, such magnificent blooms deserve a little respect and more elegant monikers, names redolent of summer, sunlight and warmth.

Daylilies are sun worshipers of the highest order, and they don't open in cloudy weather, remaining tightly furled until the clouds roll away and the sun comes out. The flowers last for only a day, but what a show they put on in the garden, their spires rising from cool spinneys of arching green leaves, each crowned by gracefully swaying blooms with expansive golden hearts.

At first light, it is not uncommon for the daylilies in the garden to be wearing dragonflies - the little dears are waiting for the sun to warm their wings and grant them the power of unfettered, swooping flight. Could there be there a better place to warm up than a lily in bloom? I think not.

Sequestered, 360 (CCCLX)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and nonliving beings flourishing according to their own sorts of order. In ecology we speak of "wild systems." When an ecosystem is fully functioning, all the members are present at the assembly. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness. Human beings came out of that wholeness, and to consider the possibility of reactivating membership in the Assembly of All Beings is in no way regressive.

Gary Snyder

There is no better metaphor for this morning's offering than a weathered cedar stump way back in the woods. Robed in lichens and mosses, it is a living thing, a community nurturing throngs of tiny trees and plant spores reaching for the light.

In the Pink

Friday Ramble - Abundance

I awaken early and trot out to the garden wearing a faded cotton caftan, straw hat and sandals, and carrying a mug of Earl Grey. It's already wickedly hot out there, and the sky is obscured by a high gossamer heat haze.

The only sentient beings happy about this July heat are the blissfully foraging bees, flowering herbs and the ripening vegetables in village veggie patches: beans, peppers, tomatoes, garlic, chards and emerging gourds. Most vegetables show a little restraint, but the zucchini vines (as always) are on the march and threatening to take over entire gardens, if not the whole wide world. Are veggies sentient, and do they have Buddha nature? You bet they do, and I suspect they have long mindful conversations when we are not listening.

Villagers are an eccentric bunch when it comes to gardening. One neighbor is growing squash on her veranda, and another has planted cabbages and corn in her flower beds. A guy around the corner is cultivating every known variety of hot pepper in reclaimed plastic storage bins. The tubs are lined up along the sidewalk and driveway in front of his house, and the place looks like a jungle. (His back yard is too shady for a veggie garden.) He is not growing anything but hot peppers, and his enthusiasm for them is admirable; he plans to pickle each and every one.

Tomatoes are a marvel when they ripen. Scarlet or gold, occasionally purpled or striped, they come in all sizes and some surprising shapes. The first juicy heirloom "toms" of the season are the essence of feasting and celebration as they rest on the sideboard: fresh-from-the-garden jewels, rosy and flushed and beaded with early morning dew. A wedge of Brie or Camembert, gluten-free crackers, a sprinkling of sea salt and a few fresh basil leaves from the garden are all that is needed.

Oh honey sweet and hazy summer abundance . . . That luscious word made its first appearance in the fourteenth century, making its way down to us through the years through Middle English and Old French from the Latin abundāns, meaning overflowing. The adjective form is abundant, and synonyms for it include: ample, generous, lavish, plentiful; copious; plenteous; exuberant; overflowing; rich; teeming; profuse; prolific, replete, teeming, bountiful and liberal.

Abundant is the exactly the right word for these days of ripeness and plenty, as we weed and water and gather in, chuck things in jars, pickle up a storm and store summer's bounty to consume somewhere way up the road. Like bees and squirrels, we scurry about, preserving the contents of our gardens to nourish body and soul when temperatures fall and nights grow long. For all the sweetness and abundance held out in offering, there is a subtle ache to such times with their dews and hazes and ripening vegetables. These days are all too fleeting.

Thursday Poem - Evening

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat

held for it by a row of ancient trees;

you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,

one journeying to heaven and one that falls;

and leave you not at home in either one,

not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,

not calling to eternity with the passion

of what becomes a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)

your life, with its immensity and fear,

so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,

it is alternately stone in you and star.

Rainer Maria Rilke

(translation by Stephen Mitchell)