Lughnasdha

Lughnasdha Lammas

 Celebrating Earth And Sun 

It has been a wet and cold(ish) July here. The plants can't decide if it is Autumn or Spring (the horse-chestnut trees leaves are all on the turn but my back garden looks like a jungle).
When I "touch base" during a ritual I am not turning my back on the world. How odd that would be. Of course my practice is still based on Celtic customs and "18th century peasants" but as I grew up in Wales on a farm, that doesn't seem too odd. It doesn't seem odd that people took their beliefs with them, especially as they had had what was theirs stolen from them (their land).
While the grain harvest is a dusty (and thoroughly unpleasant job) Lammas, loaf mass, is not only celebrating the death of "John Barley-corn" but the earth that grew him. The rain that didn't fall. The storms that didn't happen. The community coming together, because in order to eat everyone needed to help. That the water is still pure and sweet.
The beer drunk, the whiskey, the bread eaten is not of this years harvest. No that is too wet and green.
In fact if you can eat bread, if you can drink beer, or whiskey, or a thousand other foods with grain in it you have a lot to be thankful for!
A thousand miracles have to happen for a harvest.
The earth that bears grain in one place may still be green and growing somewhere else.
It isn't just this years harvest we celebrate. It is last years, and all those that came before so we could be where we are.
If this years "harvest" is yet to bear fruit, that is not important. What is important is the abundance and generosity of the earth. For the wells and water ways. For the bilberries, and early blackberries. For the lush grass making milk in goats and cows. For butter and cream.
Lughnasdha might bear the Gods name but the feast and games and playful rites were in celebration of his mother. It was her wisdom and her death that brought growing and sowing to people.
At this festival we are drawn back to the ancient places, the wells and barrows, the track ways and stones. Not only because the best bilberries grow there, but many a baby was conceived under the bilberry bush, in the sunshine under our ancestors knowing gaze.
The seeds we sow, and harvest we gather are not just based on some idea Gerard Gardener wrote down. They are based on forces and miracles we rarely stop to notice.
Flour isn't some hard won prize these days, but it was. It takes a huge amount of water and nurture and care to grow. Harvesting it (even with technology) is messy, dry, dusty work. Work still subject to the weather, and earth. Still subject the the magick and miracles.
At Lughnasda I am not celebrating something I am divorced from. I am celebrating the thousand things that go right to make one loaf of bread.
Celebrating the griddle stone. The oven. The butter and cream. The bilberries and stary nights.
I remember the way corn looks like water under the wind. Sounds like the ocean when you pour it and feels like water or sand beneath the fingers.
Your miracles won't be mine. Your harvest will not be mine either but if Lughnadha sound silly, or out of season, every piece of toast, every muffin, every bottle of beer came from this spiritual place. It can trace it's lines back so far and deep into our history. Our ancestors who worked so hard, and play so hard too, who danced across mountains, sailed over seas and reshaped the world with a few grains, and plough.

Ritual is not a space to turn your back on the world, but a space to draw into the myth and symbolic to express something deep and ancient and beautiful. It is a different space but that makes it no less worthy, no less real or no less special for those within it.
It is a patriarchal dichotomy to place "doing" over "feeling", to place "real" over ritual, intellect over body. To be whole and spiritual and within the world both are needed and no more or less magickal than each other.

Bright Billberry Blessings xx

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