Skip to main content

The Great Outbreath of Summer

This past weekend, sitting out on my porch in the long twilight of a summer's night, I noticed how, where a few weeks past, our lawn was spangled with fireflies, their lights have almost all gone dark.  I noticed, too, all around me in the night were the songs of crickets.  It was not so many weeks ago that there were no crickets to be heard, and now their songs of love and death fill the days and evenings both.

It must be Lammas-tide.

The long, slow gathered breath of of summer's beginning is over; the wave crests, and the outbreath is beginning.

Tomatoes are ripening in the garden we scurried to plant at the end of May.  Zucchinis mature in such numbers and size that I am challenged to put them all to use; the early lettuce has bolted in the heat, the raspberries are done, and the blueberries are blushing at the end of the garden.  Summer's end is coming, and anything that can bear fruit or give birth is hurrying to do so while it lasts.

This is not the summer I thought I would be having.

I had thought that this summer would be a lot like last summer: lots of writing, lots of hiking, lots of "quality Quaker time."

Instead, it's been lots of gardening, lots of canning and preserving food, and unexpected Pagan time: Peter and I were lucky enough to have surprise guests this past weekend, so we celebrated a pick-up Lammas out by our raised bed gardens.

The Pick-up Lammas ritual begins
We did a symbolic sacrifice and corn "harvest" (with farm-stand corn, as that is not one of the crops we grow) and roasted it on the grill, did a quick "wine" blessing with the homebrew, and feasted on an almost entirely locally-grown meal.  (The flour and barley for the bread and beer were not local.  But since I made them both in my own kitchen, they felt appropriately tied to the local land.)

We brought a share of the bounty out to the woods for the land spirits to share. The next day, everything but a few cherry tomatoes had disappeared.  (A good omen, surely.)

So it has been a satisfying summer.  And--despite the disappointing berry crop this year--a fruitful one.

But I'm not living much in my words.  I'm not writing very much.  I'm making pickles, getting dirt between my toes, or reclining in the shade of a favorite tree, its leaves rustling in the great outbreath of summer.



Comments

Ali said…
It was lovely seeing you and Peter, and thank you so much for celebrating Lammas with us despite us being woefully non-Wiccan Druids! ;) I can't tell you how much our short visit was a respite from busyness and stress!

Also, hope at least some of the pictures I took came out alright, and don't forget to send at least a few of them our way so I can scrapbook them. :D
cubbie said…
sounds good to me.
kevin roberts said…
sometimes it's more important to just live the days and let them go at evening, rather than to try to catch them and hold them tightly to you forever.

i've been living, and not writing hardly at all, ever since the snow began to melt. for me though, the time has been one of a lot of reflections, and i'm not now who i was then.

and i've started writing again.

ciao, hot shot

Popular posts from this blog

Fame

(Note: there were so many thought provoking comments in response to this post that it generated a second-round of ideas. You can read the follow-up post here .) I have a confession to make. I want to be famous. Well, sort of. I don't want to be famous, famous, and ride around in a limousine and have to hire security and that sort of thing. I just want to write a book, have it published by somebody other than my mother, and bought and read by somebody other than my mother, and maybe even sign a couple of autographs along the way. Mom can have one autographed, too, if she wants. It has to be a spiritual book. A really moving and truthful book, that makes people want to look deep inside themselves, and then they come up to me and say something like, "It was all because of that book you wrote! It changed my life!" And I would say, no, no, really, you did all that, you and God/the gods --I'm a little fuzzy on whether the life-changing book is for Pagans or for Quake

Peter on Grief and Communities

Well, that was unexpected. For the last year, ever since my mom's health took a sharp downturn, I've been my dad's ride to Florence Congregational Church on Sundays. That community has been important for my dad and the weekly outing with me was something he always looked forward to and enjoyed, so I didn't mind taking him there. It meant giving up attending my own Quaker meeting for the duration, but I had already been questioning whether silent waiting worship was working for me. I was ready for a sabbatical. A month ago, my dad was Section-Twelved into a geriatric psych hospital when his dementia started to make him emotionally volatile. I had been visiting him every day at his assisted living facility which was right on my way home from work, but the hospital was almost an hour away. I didn't see him at all for three weeks, and when I did visit him there, it actually took me a couple of seconds to recognize him. He was slumped forward in a wheel chair, lo

There is a Spirit Which I Feel

I was always a "rational use of force" gal. For most of my life I believed that the use of force--by which I meant human beings taking up arms and going off to war to try to kill one another--was a regrettable necessity. Sometimes I liked to imagine that Paganism held an alternative to that, particularly back in the day when I believed in that mythical past era of the peaceful, goddess-worshipping matriarchal societies . (I really liked that version of history, and was sorry when I stopped believing in it as factual.) But that way of seeing reality changed for me, in the time between one footfall and the next, on a sunny fall morning: September 11, 2001. I was already running late for work that day when the phone rang; my friend Abby was calling, to give me the news that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center in New York. So? I thought to myself, picturing a small private aircraft. Abby tried to convey some of what she was hearing--terrorists, fire--but the mag