Light the bale-fires, strike up the fiddles, slip off to the woods . . .
Somebody’s got to ensure the bounty of the harvest around here. Except . . . we’re not exactly an agrarian society anymore, though I think we’re making tracks back to that way of being. And about damn time, too. Farmers markets and organic farms are springing up all over. I recently had breakfast with a friend from New York who was amazed at how fresh all the food is in Iowa, and that is because most of our local restaurants, at least here in what we lovingly call the Corridor, locally source everything they possibly can to ensure safety, flavor, and freshness.
So I’m very hopeful that this movement is going to thrive and spread, and that we’re going to have many more options for feeding our bodies and our souls. There’s nothing quite like eating local; it is instantly grounding; it really feeds your roots. When you eat food from your own garden, or from a local garden source, you are eating food grown and pollinated where you live and breathe. You’re sharing oxygen and carbon dioxide with these plants, getting rained on by the same storms, putting your hands in the same dirt they are growing in. It’s an intense way of harmonizing yourself with a place.
But most of us live in cities where it is not easy to have that kind of deep relationship with the land, or to even carve out space for a kitchen garden. I’m gonna be growing some lovely container tomatoes on my deck along with a mess of herbs. We have a couple of small garden spots out in the front yard, but that’s about it, and we feel lucky to have that.
So, getting back to the topic at hand, what do these old Pagan holidays have to do with anything we are doing now?
In the Wheel of the Year we have all these opposites; Beltane and Samhain; MidSummer and MidWinter Solstices; Imbolc and Lammas; and Vernal and Autumnal Equinoxes. It is consistent with the idea of Yin and Yang, or of Guru (gu=dark, ru=light, darkness into light), and it acknowledges the perpetual cycle, some see it like a spiral, of the turning of the seasons. Within each absolute there is the acknowledgement of the opposite.
But let’s just do away with polarizing notions, because we have plenty enough of that. Instead of Light and Dark, let’s call the two halves of the year Growing and Resting. And much like the Yin and the Yang, there is a swell and a swoop, each one overlaps the other as they truly entwine. No hard lines. It’s very, very soft and loving. It acknowledges that there are between places, too, like Waking Up and Winding Down.
The year takes on a softness when you think of it this way.
The God and Goddess are also a lot more fluid than many people want to acknowledge. The Celtic sun god Lugh/Llew is a prime example. He’s a warrior, but also a healer. He’s an artist, but also an athlete. And though he is best known for his love triangle with the Beltane Goddess and her Autumnal lover, the Lord of Misrule, he and the Irish hero Cuchulain are also lovers. Many believe Brighid and Diana are lesbian Goddesses who got labeled “virgins” because they don’t do boys. Brighid is a blacksmith, a poet and a healer. She’s also a midwife, but never had any children of her own.
So we have this very flexible spectrum, this soft line that flows around the Wheel and through the pantheons, blurring the absolutes and keeping us in flow. Let’s just imagine that the spectrum is the divider between the Yin side and the Yang side; between Resting and Growing, between Night and Day, between Death and Rebirth.
Between Ending and Beginning again, which is the realm of Belief.
Between falling down and getting up; between losing it all and starting over; between winning and getting even better. We’re just entering that arc of Light that swells into the Dark now, and the world fills with sunshine and turns it verdantly green–but at the heart of Summer, the MidSummer Solstice in about six short weeks, the Lord of Misrule will be reborn. For now, though, it’s all sunshine and beauty and looking forward to the incredible bounty of our gardens, fields, orchards and vineyards. Daylight stretches out from the wee hours to bedtime, and nights pass in the blink of an eye.
But the balance will come, and before we know it we’ll be watching the growing season turn to the harvest season, and then the great winding down will begin all over again. We know the Lord of Misrule is coming, bringing the Long Dark and the cold. But that’s ages away, three blinks of the eye at least. Today, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and expectation is ascendant. We’re out of hibernation. The mittens are off. We plant things, we start projects, we birth the ideas we nurtured over the winter. We have rested and recharged, and now we rock it.
So tune up the fiddle and rosin up the bow, set some shit on fire and do-si-do, grab who you like and go chile go . . .
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