Happy Lammas

How swiftly summer days pass.  Here we are again at the end of July and the eve of Lammas, sometimes called Lughnsadh, Lúnasa, Calan Awst, "First Harvest" or "Loaf Mass". Tomorrow's festival celebrates summer, farming and harvesting, particularly the gathering, milling and putting by of grains and cereals.

Humans have gathered and consumed wild grains 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 veritable throng of harvest (dying and rising) gods: Lugh, Llew Llaw Gyffes, Tammuz, Osiris, Adonis and Attis to name a few. John Barleycorn is the corn king god who sacrifices himself for the Land and next year's harvest. Then there is Dionysus or Bacchus—the grapey god is in a class all by himself as deity of vineyards and the grape harvest, patron of wine making, drunken revelry and ritual madness.  His magical tavern with its ever turning mill wheel and rapture inducing brews is the stuff of legend, and 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 idea.

According to Irish mythology, the festival was created by Lugh as a funeral feast and athletic competition in honor of his foster mother Tailtiu, a Fir Bolg earth goddess who perished from exhaustion after clearing the plains of Ireland for cultivation. August 1 is associated with other harvest goddesses like Demeter, Persephone, Ceres, Bridget, the Cailleach, Selu, Nokomis (the Corn Mother) and Freya, who is sometimes known as the Lady of the Loaf.

In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the first day of August is called "the feast of first fruits". During the middle ages, loaves were baked with grain from the first harvest and placed on church altars to be blessed and later used in simple charms and rustic enchantments.  Tenant farmers presented freshly harvested grain to their landlords, and a tithe (one tenth of a farm's yield) was given to the local church at the same time. Farmers delivered their portion to designated tithe barns, and a surprising number of the elegant stone structures survive today.

A book that always comes to mind around this time of the year is Tim Powers' fabulous The Drawing of the Dark. The novel is chock full of mythic metaphors related to grain harvesting and the brewing of beer, and it's a rollicking good read.  The main characters are King Arthur (reborn as an aging Irish mercenary named Brian Duffy), a sorcerer called Aurelius Aurelianus (actually the legendary Merlin himself), and the Fisher King.  Dionysus and his magical tavern put in an appearance, and they're in good  company - the woodland god Pan, Gambrinus (medieval King of Beer), Finn MacCool, Guinevere, Morgan le Fay, Odin, Thor and Hercules also show up. 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 mythical creatures too numerous to mention. For years the only available edition of the book was paperback, and I've owned at least three copies, but a hardcover edition was finally published a few years ago, and I treated myself to a copy.

The first day of August marked the beginning of the harvest season for the ancients, but it also marked summer's end, and so it is for moderns. 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.  It's time to give some thought to pickling and preserving the contents of our orchards and gardens for the darker times to come. 

We've come a long way since our early days as a hunting and gathering species, but traces of old seasonal rites remain here and there. When I arrived in Lanark county years ago, I learned that Lughnasadh festivities are alive and well in the eastern Ontario highlands.  They may be called céilidhs or "field parties", and the attendees are unaware of the 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 and merrymaking in abundance, once in a while even a formal observance.

 Blessings of the harvest to you, happy August!

Golden Children of the Sun

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

We sleep, allowing gravity to hold us, allowing Earth — our larger Body — to recalibrate our neurons, composting the keen encounters of our waking hours (the tensions and terrors of our individual days), stirring them back, as dreams, into the sleeping substance of our muscles. We give ourselves over to the influence of the breathing earth. Sleep, we might say, is a habit born in our bodies as the earth comes between our bodies and the sun. Sleep is the shadow of the earth as it falls across our awareness. Yes. To the human animal, sleep is the shadow of the earth as it seeps into our skin and spreads throughout our limbs, dissolving our individual will into the thousand and one selves that compose it—cells, tissues, and organs taking their prime directives now from gravity and the wind—as residual bits of sunlight, caught in the long tangle of nerves, wander the drifting landscape of our earth-borne bodies like deer moving across the forested valleys.
David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

The Buck Moon of July

July's full moon is the second of the four "gathering" moons that grace the interval between June and September. The Summer Solstice has passed and daylight hours north of the equator are already waning.  It is still summer by any definition we can come up with, and it's a festive time - skies (hopefully) vividly blue and flooded with sunshine by day, deep violet and star spangled by night.

Images captured on full moon nights sometimes resemble paintings when they are uploaded into the computer, and no matter how often that happens, it always comes as a surprise.  There is something about the velvety dome of a fine summer night that lends itself to lofty thoughts of journeying and adventures, to broad and sweeping brush strokes, to sky sailing galleons, airborne dragon boats and hot air balloons.  Being out under a summer moon conveys a sense of wonder, grandeur and connection with the universe that is hard to describe in words - as the late Carl Sagan wrote so eloquently:

"The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore, we've learned most of what we know. Recently, we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."

Not long ago, I scribbled a note to myself, a sticky mauve reminder to remember Carl Sagan's words and the star stuff within.  They are comforting on days when health concerns seize the upper hand and leave me feeling somewhat fragile, crotchety and despondent.  The other uplifting thing to do (of course) is to mount a macro lens on the camera, grab notebook and pencil and go out to the woods. Cassie and Spencer are still with us in spirit, but now it is Beau who is rambling along with us and learning to love the Two Hundred Acre Wood.

We also know this magical moon as the: Blackberry Moon, Blessing Moon, Blueberry Moon, Claim Song Moon, Corn Moon, Crane Moon, Daisy Moon, Fallow Moon, Feather Moulting Moon, Flying Moon, Grass Cutter Moon, Ground Burning Moon, Hay Moon, Heat Moon, Horse Moon, Humpback Salmon Return to Earth Moon, Hungry Ghost Moon, Index Finger Moon, Larkspur Moon, Lightning Moon, Little Harvest Moon, Little Moon of Deer Horns Dropping off, Little Ripening Moon, Loaf Moon, Lotus Flower Moon, Meadow Moon, Manzanita Ripens Moon, Mead Moon, Midsummer Moon, Middle Moon, Middle of Summer Moon, Moon Before Lammas, Moon of Claiming, Moon of the Young Corn, Moon of Fledgling Hawk, Moon of Much Ripening, Moon of the Home Dance, Moon of the Middle Summer, Moon of Ripeness, Moon When Cherries Are Ripe, Moon When the Buffalo Bellow, Moon When People Move Camp Together, Moon When Limbs of Are Trees Broken by Fruit, Moon When Squash Are Ripe and Indian Beans Begin to Be Edible, Moon When Ducks Begin to Malt, Mountain Clover Moon, Peaches Moon, Raspberry Moon, Red Berries Moon, Red looming Lilies Moon, Return from Harvest Moon, Ripe Corn Moon, Ripening Moon, Rose Moon, Salmon Go up the Rivers in a Group Moon, Seventh Moon, Smokey Moon, Strong Sun Moon, Summer Moon, Sun House Moon, Warming Sun Moon, Water Lily Moon, Wattle Moon, Wort Moon.

As names go, I am fond of Blessing Moon, Blackberry Moon and Meadow Moon, but this year, Heat Moon says it best.

Friday Ramble - Season

This week's word comes to us from the Middle English sesoun through the Old French seson and the Vulger Latin satio, meaning time of sowing or planting, all arising from the Latin serere, meaning to sow. Season shares its origins with the word seed, and both entities are concerned with fertility, fruitfulness and nourishment. The noun describes four divisions of the calender year as defined by designated differences in temperature, rainfall, daylight and the growth of vegetation: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter.

In earlier times, a season simply marked the interval within which an important hunting and/or agricultural activity was undertaken and completed i.e. the planting season, the harvest season, the hunting season, the dormant season. Each season is complete within itself whether viewed through the lens of the calendar year or the loving eyes of a crone and her camera rambling in the Great Round. Each season is a cycle with its beginning (sowing), its center or middle (cultivation and nurturing) and its completion (harvest or reaping).

In much the same way, to season a broth or stew is to undertake a savory sowing of foodstuff with the seeds of taste and ambrosial fragrance. Be it the sowing, tending and reaping of one's vegetable garden or the careful addition of herbs and spices to a casserole, it's all about nurture and enjoyment.

On morning walks, buttery maple leaves drift into our path and come to rest at our feet, their early transition and swooping airborne dance set in motion by one of the hottest summers in recent memory. The sound is a pleasing susurrus that lingers after we have rounded a corner and are turning toward home. Shallow puddles along our way hold the fallen leaves in blithe fellowship with the sky and clouds reflected from above. When we pause, we are standing in boundless sky.

August is about to begin, and there is no doubt about it, autumn is not far away. If you live in the north, the coming season is about apples, rain and falling leaves, and the words form a lovely rustling mantra (or litany) as we ramble around the village and through the Lanark highlands. It's all good. With sweet and spicy things we will season the autumn days to come.

Thursday Poem - When I Am Wise

When I am wise in the speech of grass,
I forget the sound of words
and walk into the bottomland
and lie with my head on the ground
and listen to what grass tells me
about small places for wind to sing,
about the labor of insects,
about shadows dank with spice,
and the friendliness of weeds.

When I am wise in the dance of grass,
I forget the name and run
into the rippling bottomland
and lean against the silence which flows
out of the crumpled mountains
and rises through slick blades, pods,
wheat stems, and curly shoots,
and is carried by wind for miles
from my outstretched hands.

Mary Gray
from Wild Song: Poems of the Natural World

Wordless Wednesday - Summer's Cup

The Measure of Our Days

Trees on the Two Hundred Acre Wood are gloriously leafed out, and vast swaths of woodland are as dark as night - the shadowed alcoves are several degrees cooler than the sunlit fields skirting them. Winding strands of wild clematis wrap around the old cedar rail fence by the main gate, and the silvery posts and rails give off a fine dry perfume.

Orange and yellow hawkweed, buttercups and clovers, daisies, tall rosy grasses and ripening milkweed, several species of goldenrod, trefoils and prickly violet bugloss - all are moved by the arid July wind and swaying in place. Open areas are seas of waving greenery, and they have an oceanic aspect - I wouldn't be surprised to see the masts of tall ships poking up here and there.

Birds are everywhere, red-tailed hawks circling overhead, swallows and kingfishers over the river, bluebirds on the fence, grosbeaks dancing from branch to branch in the overstory and caroling their pleasure in the day and the season. I can't see them for the trees, but mourning doves are cooing somewhere nearby.

Fritillaries and swallowtails flutter among the cottonwoods, never pausing in their exuberant flight or coming down to have their pictures taken.  Dragonflies (mostly skimmers, clubtails and darners) spiral and swoop through the air, a few corporals among them for good measure.

I began this morning with the words "It is high summer". Then I remembered that August is only a few days away, so I went back and started again.  And so it goes in the great round of time and the seasons. There are many golden days to come, but we have stepped into the languid waters that flow downhill to autumn.

How the Trees Love Summer Light

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

Our efforts to honor human differences cannot succeed apart from our effort to honor the buzzing, blooming, bewildering variety of life of earth. All life rises from the same source, and so does all fellow feeling, whether the fellow moves on two legs or four, on scaly bellies or feathered wings. If we care only for human needs, we betray the land; if we care only for the earth and its wild offspring, we betray our own kind. The profusion of creatures and cultures is the most remarkable fact about our planet, and the study and stewardship of that profusion seems to me our fundamental task.
Scott Russell Sanders

The Visitation

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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. Then there is the guy around the corner who 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. He is not growing anything else, and his enthusiasm for hot peppers is admirable; he plans to pickle each and every one.

Tomatoes are always a marvel.  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 to complete both the scene and today's lunch.

Oh honey sweet and hazy summer abundance....... That luscious word made its first appearance in the fourteenth century, coming down the years to us 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 - Flying at Night

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

Ted Kooser,
(From Flying at Night)

Wordless Wednesday - Swimming in Summer Sky

By Brush and Lens, We Become

A few thoughts from one of my favorite artists this morning. Robert Genn captured the essence of Canadian wild places so beautifully that I often thought I might be able to walk right into one of his paintings.  The thoughtful newsletters he sent out from The Painters Keys are still being sent out by his daughter, Sara Genn, also a fine artist, and I am always happy when one arrives in my inbox. I miss Bob, and these are fine words to live by.

. . . creative evils are beaten with the power of knowledge and understanding. By taking pains. By not tolerating mediocrity and mediocre thinking in ourselves. By treating ourselves to the exhilaration of our honest and elevated desires. By honoring craftsmanship and attention to detail. By patience and perseverance. By appreciating the prior and current light of others. By the realization of the responsibility of it all. And the epiphany that even through the act of art we can be our brother’s keepers.

There is always something eating away at what we could be. But the real termites of our studios are the ones that eat away at the clarity of our love.

Robert Genn
(1936 - 2014)

Catching the Sun

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

Magic doesn't sweep you away; it gathers you up into the body of the present moment so thoroughly that all your explanations fall away: the ordinary, in all its plain and simple outrageousness, begins to shine -- to become luminously, impossibly so. Every facet of the world is awake, and you within it.

David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

The Gold in My Summer Garden

Friday Ramble - Sticky

Sticky is a fine word for late July and early August, for summer's puckish "toing and froing" between sunshine and rain, steamy heat and pleasantly cool temperatures, weather moderate and weather extreme. This summer is turning out to be a glue pot or "sticky wicket" at the best of times.

This week’s mucilaginous word offering hails from the Old English stician  meaning “to pierce, stab, transfix”" as well as “to adhere, be embedded, stay fixed or be fastened”. Then there are the Proto-Germanic stik, Old Saxon stekan, Dutch stecken, Old High German stehhan and German stechen all meaning much the same thing.  Most of this week's word kin are rooted in the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) form steig meaning "to affix, point or be pointed".  The Latin instigare (to goad) and stinguere (to incite or impel), the Greek stizein (to prick or puncture) and Old Persian tigra (sharp or pointed) are cognates, and for some strange reason, so is the Russian stegati (to quilt).

Early mornings here are lovely times for walks or hanging out in the garden.  By ten, we three (Himself, Beau and I) are happy to be indoors and looking out, rather than actually being out. At twilight, off we go again, and we potter around the village, peering into trees for little green acorns, ripening plums and flowers blooming unseen in leafy depths like late summer jewels.

On early walks, hedgerows are festooned with spider webs, and the strands of silk are strung with beads of pearly dew, looking for all the world like fabulous neck ornaments. The webs are, for the most part, the work of an orb weaver known as the writing spider, corn spider or common garden spider (Argiope aurantia). Artfully spun from twig to twig, the spider's creations are sublime.  No two are the same, and they are often several feet from one edge to the other.

Peering at a web one morning this week, I remembered the friend (now moved away) who used to "do" web walks with me and occasionally rang the doorbell at sunrise when she discovered a real whopper and just had to share it. I thought too of the metaphor of Indra's jeweled web and how we are all connected in the greater scheme of things. Emaho! Sticky or not, it's all good.

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)

Wordless Wednesday - What Falls Away

Stained Glass Wings and Summer Musics

Monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus)

There have not been many Monarch butterflies about this year so far, and I did a spirited, wobbly dance a few days ago when a single glorious specimen flew past my freckled nose and alighted in a stand of milkweed along the trail into the woods - in my excitement, I almost dropped the camera.

A few minutes later, a single cicada started to broadcast its call for a mate from somewhere higher on the ridge, then another and another and another. Again and again, their tymbal muscles contracted and relaxed, the vibrations resulting in what is, to me anyway, summer's most resonant and engaging musical score.  Time stood still as I listened to that poignant and hopeful chorus.

There are moments one remembers in the depths of winter, and this was one of them.  How sweet it was to listen to cicadas rumble and rasp in the trees over my head, to watch a small, wonder flutter and swoop through fields of waving milkweed on stained glass wings. Life simply doesn't get any better than this, and it doesn't get any wilder either.

Pennant in the Wind

Halloween Pennant (Celithemis eponina)

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, invisibly, inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Views From a Bridge on the River Tay

Friday Ramble - Earth

Earth is a good word for pondering in this shaggy season as we toil in our gardens and tend the sweet beginnings of the harvest to come.  All things, or at least most things, arise from the earth and return to it in time, us included.

The word dates from before 950 CE, and it comes to us through the good offices of the Middle English erthe, the Old English eorthe; the Germanic Erde, Old Norse jǫrth, Danosh jord and the Gothic airtha, all springing from the Ancient Saxon eard meaning soil,home, or dwelling. All forms are likely related to the Latin aro, meaning to plough or turn over.

When we say "earth", are we thinking simply of the ground under our feet, of garden plots, orchards, wooded hills, city parks, farm fields and shadowed arroyos?  Are we thinking of wild plums, oak leaves, weeping willows, seeds and sleeping roots below our feet, the granite bones of our little blue planet and its fiery heart beating way down deep in the molten core of the earth?

Skin and blood, bones and hair, the red rivers of our veins, the sinews of the planet, the air we are breathing in and out - they are all connected and part of a vast elemental process, a web. Thoughtless strands in the web that we are, we often forget that we are part of anything at all. 

Once in a while, the simple truth that we are NOT separate shows up and insists we pay attention. It can happen while we are dangling half way up a rock face or seated in a pool of sunlight under a tree in the woods, on a hill somewhere under the summer stars, or on the shore of a favorite lake at sunset. A good sunset or a starry, starry night does it for me every time, and sometimes it even happens while I am parked in the waiting room of my local cancer clinic.

There we are with our feet planted in the dirt and heads in the clouds, not a lofty thought in sight, and out of the blue a scrap of elemental knowing puts in an appearance. Suddenly we know beyond a doubt that we are part of all this and right where we should be. We belong here, our roots, branches, star stuff and every dancing particle - we belong here as much as rivers, mountains, acorns, wild salmon and sandpipers do. Dirt, clouds and stardust, it's all good.

Thursday Poem - At Dawn

a waning moon floats high in the cloudless
blue and blesses a perfect summer day,
one that will never come again in all
its sweetness and its fey perfume.

slow walkers in the early hours, we go along
together, paw and paw, through fragrant
summer yieldings of clover, grass and golden
daisies, accompanied by rhyming crickets,
by humming bees and dancing leaves

while around us, unseen but deeply felt
and loved, the world is breathing in and
out, all our voices falling together into
seamless light and tune and time.

Cate (me)

Wordless Wednesday - The Stillness of Summer Air

Lilies of the Day

 Orange Daylily (Hemerocallis fulva)

Why give such glorious creatures other names like ditch lily, railroad lily, roadside lily, outhouse lily, and wash-house lily? Such wonders deserve better monikers, names redolent of summer and warmth, sweetness and vibrant color.

Sun worshippers of the highest order, daylilies don't open at all in cloudy weather. 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.

Dragonflies love daylilies, and at first light, it is not uncommon to see every lily in our garden wearing a dragonfly -  the little dears are waiting for the sun to warm their wings and grant them the power of unfettered flight. Could there be there a better place to do such a thing than a daylily in bloom?

The Stained Glass Guest

White Admiral (Limenitis arthemis)

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of those ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? How many had been born but their light not yet come this far? If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize we were alone? I had always known the sky was full of mysteries—but not until now had I realized how full of them the earth was.
Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children