Embracing Autumn: A Harvest of Beauty
In this season of harvest, make it your daily practice to harvest the beauty around you and store it in your heart to feed and nourish you through the hard times. Try it now - find three beautiful things in your surroundings. List them to yourself as a sacred prayer, hold them in your heart. Now find some more. Repeat. At the end of the day, just before you sleep, list all the beauties your day has held. Sweet dreams.
 |
| https://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Perseid-UT-over-Sunset-Crater-Jeremy-Perez-1-768x527.jpg |
There's something quite magical about seeing a shooting star. Perhaps it's because they're so ephemeral - blink and you could quite literally miss it. Or perhaps you are the only one of the group of friends you are with who sees it. It feels like a little spark of magic from the Universe that's just for you. One year at WitchCamp, a shooting star shot across the sky just as the Goddess was invoked, and we all ooh-ed and aah-ed at the synchronicity.
The Perseids Meteor Shower happens every year between 17th July and 24th August, so you have a chance of spotting a shooting star streaking across the night sky at any time over that period. However, the shower peaks between 9th-13th August, so tonight and tomorrow night are an excellent opportunity to engage in a bit of stargazing. At its height, the Perseids Meteor Shower can reward watchers with as many as 100 meteors per hour, so you should be lucky if the weather is favourable.
Embracing Autumn: Meteor Watching
With so many meteors per hour, you could just pop outside for 5-10 minutes and strike lucky, but why not make an event of it? Make yourself comfortable in the garden on your favourite sun-lounger with extra cushions and blankets to ensure a cosy experience. Or make a cosy nest on a dune at the beach, or in your favourite green space. Bring snacks and something delicious to drink. Enjoy the sounds of the night around you - the breeze in the trees, owls calling to each other or the flutter of moths. Or bring your i-Pod with some suitable music! And of course, remember to make a wish when you spy a shooting star...
The best part? Even if the weather isn't co-operating over the next couple of nights, the Perseids will continue until 24th August, so remember to keep watching the sky!
Note: I originally intended to begin this series of posts about Embracing Autumn at Lughnasadh, but due to IB's elderly mother unexpectedly moving in with us at the end of July, I have not had time until now to begin. Please accept my apologies for a late start and a correspondingly slightly shorter series of posts than I'd expected to produce!
Yes, I know. Embracing Autumn - in August? What am I thinking? And yet - bear with me. There's method in my madness.
Remember how we explored the Blessings and Beauties of Winter from November through to early February? I timed that series of posts to begin then because our Celtic ancestors saw Samhain as the onset of winter, and Imbolc as the beginning of spring. They saw Beltane as the start of summer, and in their calendar Lughnasadh/Lammas marked the beginning of autumn. This makes perfect sense when you realise that Autumn used to be called 'Harvest' by our ancestors. According to Wikipedia: "Before the 16th century, harvest was the term usually used to refer to the season, as it is common in other West Germanic languages to this day (cf. Dutch herfst, German Herbst and Scots hairst). However, as more people gradually moved from working the land to living in towns, the word harvest lost its reference to the time of year and came to refer only to the actual activity of reaping, and autumn, as well as fall, began to replace it as a reference to the season." Lughnasadh or Lammas is of course the first of the three harvest festivals, marking the start of the grain harvest (the next harvest festival is the Autumn Equinox/Mabon, and Samhain is the third).
For an agricultural society, it makes sense to divide the seasons according to what is observable in the natural world. Spring begins when the days are noticeably longer after the Winter Solstice, the first snowdrops appear and the first lambs are born. Summer comes when the days warm, the trees are all in leaf and summer migrants such as swallows reappear. Autumn - or Harvest - starts as the land, ripened by the summer Sun produces Her harvest. And winter returns as the trees become bare-limbed, the cold begins to bite and life retreats from the land.
So even if to our modern minds, August is summer holiday time, let's also be aware of the changes in the world around us that let us know Autumn is coming in. Along the lanes around me the long, uncut seed-heads of grasses are beginning to dry and brown, mirroring the ripening of their cultivated descendants wheat, oats and barley in the fields. The first blackberries, bilberries and green hazelnuts are appearing in the hedgerows, along with the scarlet splashes of rosehips and clustered rowan berries. In the garden, the early summer flowers have mostly gone to seed, while the late-blooming buddleia, Japanese anemones and crocosmia herald the changing season. Already the days are noticeably shorter than when the sun was at its height back in late June. Autumn is not yet fully arrived, but it is on its way. This year, won't you join me in fully immersing ourselves in the experience, experiencing and enjoying all the unique pleasures of the season?
Embracing Autumn: Looking Forward
You can use your regular journal for this, or you may like to begin a special 'Embracing Autumn' journal in which to record your observations and explorations of the season. To start with, make a list of all the things you're looking forward to experiencing this Autumn. This will help you feel positively about the change from Summer to Autumn and provide a delicious sense of anticipation regarding the coming months. Here are some ideas to get you started
 |
| "I am a divine mosaic of everyone who has ever touched my heart." - Tumblr user drowhsy |
When I was growing up, my Nanna and Granddad lived in the house next door to us. Nanna was a great cook, and every week she produced a selection of cakes for both households - including her famous fruitcake. To Nanna's eternal chagrin, it always sunk in the middle. She tried tweaking the recipe - adjusting the proportions of ingredients, experimenting with oven temperatures and trying 'hacks' such as tossing the dried fruit in flour before stirring it into the cake mix. Nothing worked - the fruitcakes continued to sink in the middle no matter what she did. But perversely, it was precisely this characteristic that made her fruitcake so beloved by everyone who tried it - the sunken middle made the cake scrumptiously moist and more-ish. Isn't it strange that it's often the perceived imperfections which make a person or a thing so unique and beloved?
Since I've been doing a lot more baking recently, I decided I'd like to make one of Nanna's fruitcakes myself and asked Mum for the recipe. She has lent me two books full of handwritten recipes, one which she began keeping when she married my Dad in 1960, and one that belonged to my Grandmother. I am so enjoying leafing through the pages re-discovering favourite recipes from my childhood. I particularly love the pages with lots of splashes and smudges - clearly the most popular, frequently made dishes. I pass my fingers over the familiar handwriting, imagining the family gatherings, dinner parties, birthdays and anniversaries - and the accumulated hours of peeling, chopping, stirring, mixing and baking that went into creating them. I think of the love for us all that was that was poured into each dish. What powerful magic!
Family recipes are just one of the many small but precious legacies that we receive from our loved ones - and that we ourselves can think about passing on to those who will follow on after us. Food, songs, stories, arts, crafts, lore, skills, culture, knowledge. What precious legacies have you inherited? And what treasures do you have to pass on?
 |
| Cherry Blossom |
In Wales lockdown measures have recently been relaxed, so that we are now easing back into some kind of semi-normality. On Monday 12th April I returned to work for the first time since just before Christmas 2020 when it was announced that all non-essential retail in Wales would close. I vividly remember returning home from work on December 19th after a long hard day and hearing the news literally as I pulled into the driveway. At the time I imagined I'd be resuming work some time in mid-January, yet it has taken until now, mid-April for that to happen.
Being back at work this week has been a strange mixture of the familiar and the strange. The environment and the work is well-known and yet there's an odd sense of unreality that I don't recall feeling on my return to work after the first lockdown last spring.
I suspect I'm not alone in feeling this sense of confusion and dislocation. The long months suspended from our normal routines have been followed by a supposed return to normality which is anything but normal. I may be back working one of the several part time jobs I had before the first lockdown, but most of my other jobs have fallen casualty to the pandemic for one reason or another and ceased. I may be back in familiar surroundings fulfilling a familiar role, but I am doing it while wearing a mask and observing social distancing, and I still can't hug a workmate, invite friends into my home, or teach a workshop. Looking back, so much and so little has happened.
Seeing (separately) two friends for the first time in months this week highlighted this strangeness for me. It was lovely to see them and reconnect after being separated from them for such a long time. And yet I found myself floundering when they both asked me the simple question, 'So how have you been?'
How have I been? What have I been doing during the long months of lockdown? What has life been like, what has changed, where will life go from here?
All the answers that I could give are too deep or too shallow. How can I convey the spikes of fear and the blur of boredom; the endless anxiety about my elderly parents and my friend with COPD; the unaccustomed luxury of time to sleep in late and garden and cook and write and immerse myself in a good book; the stupefying lack of focus; the slow accretion of outstanding tasks which keep me awake at night, while I instantly forget the goals reached and accomplishments achieved during the same time frame?
When one friend asked me 'What have you been up to?' I found myself giving the slightly surreal, completely inadequate and not even wholly accurate response, 'Well, I grew a lot of carrots,'. At the time it was all my mind could pluck from the nebulous swirl of 'my life during lockdown'.
Looking back over the last year, it all seems rather like a fever dream - simultaneously vivid and vague, surreal, epic, confusing and impossible to convey precisely. Which is all quite understandable. We have all - the entire world - undergone a dislocation from our normal lives, experienced a trauma. Everyone experiences upheavals in life, times of pain and fear and loss, but we don't usually all experience them simultaneously so that the whole world is jolted from its tracks. And this trauma has not been a single short-lived shock, but a long, drawn-out upheaval which has left people exhausted.
And yet... I wonder what will come from this in the long run? I am hopeful that we as a species will move forward from this having learned some useful lessons, and thinking hard about what it is we want to 'go back to'.
Some years ago at a Witchcamp, I took part in an elaborate life/death/rebirth ritual in which people were guided through a series of gateways, each representing an aspect of their lives such as their name(s), possessions, achievements, friends/family/loved ones etc. At each gateway they were instructed to leave every one of these things behind. It was a gradual stripping away of every part of identity and self. At the final gateway they were greeted by a priestess aspecting the Goddess, who blew out the tealight they carried (symbolising their life force). They were then given as much time as they needed to bathe in Her Cauldron of Rebirth (a hot tub!) while meditating on what they had left behind, what they wanted to retrieve - and what they wanted to leave behind. It was a gruelling process for most people, but deeply informative and transformative. So much of what we carry with us through life we carry through habit, or because we've been told by others we must carry it. Stripping everything away and consciously choosing to recover only those things of value is immensely freeing. When each person was ready, they left the hot tub and were given a new tealight symbolising their rebirth. They retraced their steps through each gate, picking back up the things they wished to carry into their new lives - but crucially, leaving behind those which they had decided they no longer wished to carry. So, for example I have been known by many names in my life - Susan, Moonroot, Moonie, Susie, Wallis, daughter, sister, wife, witch, aromatherapist etc. But I have also been called ginger, fat, stupid, ugly, bitch etc. Some of these names have come from other people - and some I have called myself. When I strip away these names and identities and leave them at the gate, on my return I can choose which names I wish to carry - and those I am happy to leave in the dust.
This pandemic has stripped our normal lives away from us. When we return through each gate, I hope that we will think very carefully about what it is that we wish to pick back up. My 'normal' life before all this began was actually pretty dysfunctional in many ways. Post-divorce, job insecurity and fear of poverty had led to me working 6-7 day weeks. I was permanently exhausted, short-tempered and ill, but I couldn't seem to get off that hamster wheel. Every time I was offered more work I said yes, because I was always short of money and afraid that the work I did have would dry up, leaving me penniless. Being forced to slow down and stop made me realise how joyless life had become. During months of lockdown I have started to read books again, cook from scratch again, grow vegetables again, observe the Wheel of the Year again. I have finally learned how to properly use the camera I bought several years ago and have taken reams of photographs. I have had time for the long, deep conversations that feed my soul. I have written more in the last year than I have managed in the previous three or four years. I have had time to sit and drink in the beauty surrounding me. And most importantly I have had time to reassess the way I've been leading my life and come to some important decisions about what I want to change about that.
Much of my 'normal' life was in direct contradiction to my values and beliefs. I was buying pre-packaged convenience foods because I was too damned tired to cook. I was driving miles and miles between my scattered jobs, eating junk food on the hoof. I was too tired to have much of a social life and short-tempered with my loved ones. My house was a mess. Every so often I would manage a holiday or have an enforced break caused by illness and I would resolve to do better - but immediately fall back into my old ways. My mantra seemed to always be, 'next month, when things are less busy...', but next month never was less busy, and so it went on.
All of that has been taken away from me. I have lost three of my part time jobs and of the remaining three, restrictions mean I am only able to work at one of them at the moment. When I am able to resume all three, that will be enough. I am determined to find a way to manage financially without damaging my physical and mental health further and working myself into an early grave. My petrol consumption has plummeted. I have been gradually sorting out the house and making my environment a pleasant one. I have stopped shopping at big supermarkets and now buy most of my groceries from a small local zero-waste shop. Guess what? Their prices may be higher than the supermarket, but because I am only buying what I need and not getting sucked in by special offers and convenience foods I have actually cut our food bills and food waste. I have been growing our own vegetables and cooking proper meals - I make my own hummus and veggie burgers and bread from scratch. What I have realised is that staying on the hamster wheel required me to spend more money than it brought in. My life is now more manageable, less expensive, less wasteful, greener and infinitely more satisfying.
The other great lesson I hope we can learn from the pandemic is that we are all in this together, and working collaboratively for the good of the whole is the best and fairest way to run the world. Look at the awe-inspiring collective effort that has brought us effective vaccines in the space of a year! We humans are at our most marvellous when we co-operate rather than compete.
I believe the sense of unreality I am feeling is the world re-making itself in a new and hopefully better way. We have all had much of our lives stripped away over the last year, and spent time immersed in the Cauldron of Rebirth swirling in a fever dream of possibility. Now as we prepare to leave the Cauldron and re-enter the world, let's consider very carefully the kind of 'normality' we wish to return to. What will you pick back up? What will you choose to leave behind? The great blessing of every period of difficulty in our lives is the lessons we learn from it, and the chance we are given to grow. Let's seize this unprecedented opportunity we've been given with enthusiasm and build a better 'normal'. The old world wasn't working anyway, why go back to it?
