As well, you saw this morning on the hill
Her horse is in the stable now, the men are at the mill
She thanks you for the apples by her gate
And hopes that when the moon is full you’ll join her once again to celebrate
For she knows that the harvest has begun
The autumn feast rewards our time when
All is well and done
With the blessing of the sun
~ Dar Williams
♫ (All is Come Undone) ♫
Here’s the puzzle I started on the Autumn Equinox and finished this morning. This is the second stop on my journey around the Wheel of the Year by myself. And a little trip down memory lane with some photos from past celebrations. Enjoy!
The two main things we used to do to celebrate the equinox were apple picking at Holmberg’s Orchard and picking up freshly pressed apple cider and pumpkin bread at Clyde’s Cider Mill. At home Tim used to make me a great cup of hot cider with cinnamon sugar on the rim of the cup. And although I don’t have too many pictures of leaf beds, an autumn day wouldn’t be complete without a walk through the ‘fresh, crisp, and rustling leaves‘ in the woods. 🍂
It is pleasant to walk over the beds
of these fresh, crisp, and rustling leaves.
How beautifully they go to their graves!
How gently lay themselves down
and turn to mould!
Painted of a thousand hues, and fit
to make the beds of us living.
So they troop to their last resting place,
light and frisky. They put on no weeds,
but merrily they go scampering over the earth,
selecting the spot,
choosing a lot,
ordering no iron fence…
How many flutterings
before they rest quietly in their graves!
They that soared so loftily, how contentedly
they return to dust again, and are laid low,
resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree,
and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind,
as well as to flutter on high!
They teach us how to die.
~ Henry David Thoreau
(Autumnal Tints)
🍂🍂🍂
It was during the pandemic that Tim & I started to include the First Harvest (Lughnasa, Lammas) in our celebrations of the eight festivals of the wheel of the year. Sunflowers were in full bloom at Buttonwood Farm in nearby Griswold, Connecticut and we decided to make going for a long walk through the huge field of them our tradition. Since moving to North Carolina three years ago I have been floundering, trying to figure out another way to mark the passing seasons. And now I’ve lost my companion.
For the first six months after Tim died I was in shock. As I’ve started coming out of that anesthetized state I’ve been finding ways to live with the reality of my new situation in life. He was the absolute center of my life. I won’t go on about how much I miss him but I have noticed something unique about this grief. When I lost my parents I still had my life with Tim to return to for comfort. Life returned to normal, nothing changed in my household or daily routines after they died.
It feels like “everyone” now has gone back to their own lives, in their own houses, where nothing in their daily lives, plans, and routines has changed. Not so for me. A friend pointed out to me that widows in Victorian times wore black for two and a half years and there seems to be a good reason for this. It may well take that long to adjust to this and it’s good to remind others that while they have a life to return to, mine is forever altered.
Tim expressed similar feelings to me when his brother died in our house, after living with us for the last nine months of his life. He said the grief hit him harder and longer than when his parents died. And he thought it had everything to do with the fact that his brother had been living so intimately under the same roof with him.
I’ve been making some comforting changes in my new life with myself. I went back to practicing yoga, osteoporosis be damned. I skip the spine-twisting moves and am feeling so refreshed, more grateful and at a peace. Tai chi was okay, but it just didn’t do much for me. Sometimes I realize that I am still grieving my loss of health and living by the sea, as well as missing Tim. I find comfort listening to great music on WMVY radio, streaming from Martha’s Vineyard. Doing familiar old jigsaw puzzles reduces anxiety very quickly for some reason.
There is a sunflower field down here, but the bloom time is off for Lughnasa, and it occurred to me the other day that it is in a city park. We never got there to see it and perhaps one deterrent was the idea of driving into the city just didn’t appeal, no feeling of connecting with Mother Earth the way the drive into the countryside did.
I’ve made my peace with celebrating the Wheel of the Year by myself, at least for most of them. I now have a jigsaw puzzle for each of the 8 festivals and movies for some of them. I watched Dancing at Lughnasa for the first time since 2020, when I first had the movie idea. And I plan to go ahead with my annual winter solstice gathering with family and friends.
The two things that have been the most difficult to find a way of doing without Tim are blogging and working on our family history. I hope to write about my halting progress with those endeavors in the coming months.
But for now, I’m sharing the puzzle I started on Lughnasa and finished this morning, as well as some pictures memories from past First Harvest trips to Buttonwood Farms. I will give myself this one journey around the Wheel of the Year, starting here, to celebrate with my puzzles and my memories. Then I will probably go back to simply the combining of paintings with words to mark the eight festivals.
We are the Flower — Thou the Sun!
Forgive us, if as days decline —
We nearer steal to Thee!
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #161)
Strange
how evening reverberates
through one and all…
Even the crows
have golden wings
as they fly into the sunset.
~ Hans Børli
(The Nordic Light)
Hard, hard it is, this anxious autumn,
To lift the heavy mind from its dark forebodings;
To sit at the bright feast, and with ruddy cheer,
Give thanks for the harvest of a troubled year.
From the apprehensive present, from a future packed
With unknown dangers, monstrous, terrible and new—
Let us turn for comfort to this simple fact:
We have been in trouble before . . . and we came through.
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay
(Thanksgiving…1950)
Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night; and thus he would never know the rhythms that are at the heart of life. There is a time of sprouting, a time of growth, and a time of harvest, and all are part of the greater whole. There comes the time now to savor the harvest, to pause and know another year not yet brought to full finality.
~ Hal Borland
(Sundial of the Seasons)
Lugh, the Celtic god of Sun and Light, celebrates the sun’s annual path across the sky. Each of the year’s solar events — solstices and equinoxes and the midpoints between these — marks the passing of the seasons on Earth. I have written the name of each solar holiday in Runes around the sun’s face and marked him with Celtic knots that represent this unending cycle.
~ Helen Seebold
(36th Annual Sculpture in the Garden)
Before the ice is in the pools —
Before the skaters go,
Or any cheek at nightfall
Is tarnished by the snow —
Before the fields have finished —
Before the Christmas tree,
Wonder opon wonder —
Will arrive to me!
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #46)
The Honorable Harvest asks us to give back, in reciprocity, for what we have been given. Reciprocity helps resolve the moral tension of taking a life by giving in return something of value that sustains the ones who sustain us. One of our responsibilities as human people is to find ways to enter into reciprocity with the more-than-human world. We can do it through gratitude, through ceremony, through land stewardship, science, art, and in everyday acts of practical reverence.
~ Robin Wall Kimmerer
(Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge & The Teachings of Plants)
Happy Thanksgiving!