As we spiral through the cycles of the seasons on our homestead, Lughnasadh comes to us as a time of balance … between sacrifice and blessing, hard work and reward, safety and danger.
We harvest the first crops of the year, hungry for their freshness. The currants, gooseberries and loganberries hang heavy with fruit, pregnant with their gifts. Red berry blood, the blood of the land, a sacrificial offering, stains my hands. I make the berries into juice, sweet‐tart, bright scarlet and deep purple, like fine wine. The juice becomes jelly, redolent of July’s tasty bounty, summer sunshine preserved for the winter darkness. I pick bowls full of cherries, ripe, succulent, rich with flavor … the first big crop from a tree we planted five years ago. Early season vegetables, peas and beans, zucchini and kale, now grace our table from a garden that has grown from spring seeds and careful tending. I work hard to preserve our excess for the dark season to come.
Mornings are gardening time. In the refreshing coolness of the early hours of the day, I sometimes still find dew on the leaves, tiny droplets of life‐giving water refracting the warming sunlight into rainbows, but only too soon dried. I must give water to the plants under my care … water collected during the early spring rains and held in reserve in tanks on the hillside to carry us through this period of summer dryness. As I distribute this reviving elixir, I am forced to make choices, selecting those which will survive and those which must die for the greater good of the garden, weeding out the weak and the unproductive. My gardens are never neat, always full of clover and dandelion and sorrel, plants which most people consider undesirable, but which I cannot remove heartlessly. I run my hands through leaves, touching, giving thanks to those plants which are yielding food for us, sending out thoughts of encouragement for those which are struggling.
Lughnasadh is a time of endings … the death of the summer king, the end of the growing season. Simultaneously, if is a time of beginnings … newly fledged birds, fish eggs laid in streams, plants releasing seeds to start next year’s generation. Earlier this summer, the dawn chorus at four in the morning was incredible … hundreds of birds ‐ thrushes, sparrows, flycatchers, warblers, and many more ‐ singing joyously, competitively, lustfully, territorially to the rising of the sun. Now that their broods have been reared and their nests are empty, the chorus is quiet. Only a handful of residents who will remain with us for a while longer still sing. The rest are heading up the mountain, in search of late summer berries and fresh water. Silver salmon jump in the Inlet, returning to spawn in the rivers. Their lives will end soon, but they are part of a cycle of rebirth and renewal. Their eggs will hatch into tiny fry in the spring and begin their journey back to the sea. Even in their deaths, the salmon return nutrients back to the land, enriching the soil for the plants and trees of the coastal ecosystem. No wonder our ancestors saw them as wise, creatures of great knowledge … they travel immense distances and yet always return home, enriching the place of their birth, linking land and sea. A pod of Pacific white‐sided dolphins swim in graceful plunges up the Inlet. They are following the salmon, feeding on the oil‐rich fish, playing their role in the cycle of life and death. The water swirls in spiralling eddies when the pod submerges to chase their prey.
Most afternoons, the katabatic winds, known locally as williwaws, roar down out of the northern mountains behind our home, compressed, hot and dry. They shake our cabin on its pilings, wither the leaves on the trees. The summer drought is fully upon us, this year worse than ever before, the grasses turning brown already. Alder trees shed yellow leaves onto the paths. The sharp smell of fall is in the air, the odor of dying and decaying plants. The dog days of summer are here. A few rare days are still, breathless, waiting, like time holding her breath. Then the Inlet is glassy calm, sea reflecting land and sky perfectly.
Lughnasadh is fire time, burning man time. Sometimes there is smoke in the air, glowering sunrises and crimson sunsets. The dense atmosphere hangs heavy over the land. Nature does her best, trying to rebalance the chaos we have created. I can smell a storm in the air, feel the hope for rain, but there is lightning in the forecast, and the taste of worry and fear is strong on my tongue.
Rain, when it comes, is a kiss from the goddess, gentle and kind. Like milk from the Earth Mother’s breasts, it sustains all of Nature. But these days, the Mother’s breasts are dry. She teases us with only a few drops, not enough to end the drought, water the dry land, or douse the fires.
We balance in the tension between opposites, giving praise for the blessings that our land has given us, savoring the bountiful fresh harvest, while praying for the rains to come and the drought to end, hoping that the burning times will leave us untouched this year.
Article written by Barb Faggetter (Föalen) for the Lughnasadh 2023 edition of the Òran Mór Celtic E‐Zine. Photographs by Kennard D. Hall, Tir Ceòlmhor, Port Neville Inlet, BC.