August 2010
Welcome August! Welcome in the first harvest celebration, Lammas Day or Garland Sunday. Traditionally it fell on the first few days of August as a time for joyful dancing, climbing to the top of hills for thankful prayers, gathering berries and for games of all sorts. All of these are to celebrate the beginning of harvest and the weaning of spring lambs and calves. The first heads of oats, barley and wheat are ready to be ground into flour for the first loaves of bread.
Although we may have forgotten the name Lammas (or Lughnasa), Saturday night festivals this time of year throughout the mountains serve homemade ice cream to the accompaniment of old time music in celebration of late summer ---- much like our ancestors in northern Europe thousands of years ago.
Here in Harpers Ferry nearly everything in the garden is ready for harvesting. Our fat tomatoes are turning red every day, and our little cucumbers are tender right from the vine. There are peaches, plums and ears of sweet corn at the farm stands. Harvest is rolling in!
Plants outside of the garden fence are celebrating their own fruition as well. Pokeweed berries are hanging in clusters, and pink milkweed blossoms have transformed into the pump green pods that will burst open in the next few months sending out seeds on silken wings.
In the coming weeks we'll get tired of even those glorious home-grown tomatoes. We'll vow never to even look at another zucchini, but here in early August we are excited about the new harvest.
Our forebearers who lived so close to the land expressed the seasonal energies in the old festivals of Lammas (first harvest, early August); Samhain (last harvest, late October); Imbolc (first spring stirrings, early February); and Beltane (beginning of the fertile season, early May). Now even those of us who hardly stir outside of our air conditioning or away from our flickering screens can still feel those natural energies around us.
Lammas is both joyous and bittersweet. While we are at the beginning of a time of plenty, we can also just begin to sense the winding down of the growing year, the closure. In addition to the dances of thanksgiving and rollicking games, Lammas is also a time to let go, flow into the slowing down, become part of that green intake of breath in preparation for the great relaxing sigh of autumn.
If we didn't get around to planting tomatoes or sunflowers this year, it's too late now. Oh, well. If we didn't cut our lavender buds in time for their greatest fragrance this summer, it's too late now. Oh, well, instead we will dance to the slow afternoon rhythm of bees among those bright coneflowers in the garden. August (and Lammas) is the joyous celebration of now, the taste of the first fine watermelon, the vacation week with beloved family.
Here is an old spell, the Poppy-seed Spell, to find the answer to a question. Poppy is the flower of Lammas, its seed-pod ripe and rattling now.
Write your question in blue ink on tiny piece of white paper and place it inside a poppy-seed pod, saying:
“A seed-case full of wisdom and grace, Inside your head, my question I place.
Beneath my pillow through the night,
I shall dream the answer right.”
- Paddy Slade
traditional English village wise woman