How is it already just a few short hours from August? Time is like a slow leak from a large urn or bowl or some other vessel. Those itty bitty drips? Meaningless. They can't quench your thirst, or put out a raging fire, but eventually, when you run out of water, you'll wish you had them back.
And so here we are, at the start of harvest season. This might mean very little to most of us now, who can walk into any number of supermarkets and grocery chains and convenience stores and walk out with a bag of oranges in the dead of winter without a second thought about where they came from. Bread, all day every day, of all different types. Most people alive today have never needed to worry about storing away for the winter or failed crops but for thousands upon thousands of years, this is how our species has survived. Lughnasadh, Lammas, whatever you might call it, was and still is an important part of our culture, our ancestry, our heritage, and our future. Even if you don't give a second thought to where your bread or oranges or even Dr. Pepper comes from because they're always just magically available, rest assured that those some processes our forebearers relied upon a thousand years ago are the very same you rely upon today. Try not to take it for granted.
Writing about it makes me realize just how much of my spiritual practices/beliefs I owe to Japan. Throughout my blog I've mentioned several times that I grew up in a pagan household, but being in the American Deep South, the biblical god finds a way of infiltrating its way into your psyche. My god might have been a goddess, but that power structure - the all knowing, all seeing, ever presentness of it - spills over into your own thought processes. Like, remember in Disney's Pocahontas when the natives could speak english as their default language just because they sorta had to for the sake of simplicity? The abrahamic god is a bit like that. Default. You see it all the time in pagan spaces. Remove the name "jesus" and replace it with just about any other deity - "I think Aphrodite is calling me to be her high priestess!" - "I saw a black cat yesterday, is this a sign from Bastet?" So on and so forth. These poor children and some adults have no structure to their beliefs, so they default to the only one(s) they know. I'm not funning on them, because I get it. To make a long story short, I highly, HIGHLY, suggest anyone looking to expand their practice look into animism, and Shinto in particular. The practice is so varied and diverse and often comes down to regional and personal influences, so it's not really centralized the way most other religions are. The rivers may be gods. The trees may be spirits. There is a divine presence in the light of the sun and each drop of morning dew. There is a life in the remains of your broken coffee mug. Nothing demands worship, although you may seek the favor of - and give thanks to - any particular object or land or emotion or event as you see fit. Existence itself is divinity, whether it's a thought or a really nice rock.
So tomorrow, for Lughnasadh, I'm baking a loaf of bread. The embodiment of the harvest, the culmination of thousands of years of agriculture and civilization, everything that has led you to there here and now and paves the way for every tomorrow we'll ever know. I love you, bread. I love the divine that exists within you and loans itself to me with its nourishment. I love the earth that grew the grain, the sun that gave its light, the rain that invigorated, the season that allowed these to come together.
The world is so beautiful.
Blessed Be.
ššš
