Lughnasadh: There is still work to do

Gallardia puchella

I sat on the porch on this unseasonably cool July 31st, listening to cicada song and enjoying the still green grass, and reminisced past Lughnasadhs. On hotter, drier years the grass would already be tinged with gold and the sky might be rusty with dust or wildfire smoke. This year the summer humidity has finally broken, just today, and instead of the near 100 degrees that the days average, it will only be in the 80s. Lughnasadh is considered a Fire Festival. Here, we need no reminders that the sun has been king of summer. Having an actual fire would be uncomfortable if not banned due to high wildfire danger. One year the Grove gathered at 9am to get our celebration in before the worst heat. We celebrated a couple years at the lake so we could cool off in the water. We even once made a wicker man to burn after sunset, but only a very small one. As much as I enjoy celebrating this festival, it sure takes a little extra planning and preparation to convince myself to get out in the heat and do it.

Tiny Corn Silk

The Grove celebrates by singing John Barleycorn and telling the story of Taliesin. Lugh and Tailtiu usually get some mention, as the festival namesake. The Taliesin story forms part of the glue that hold us as an OBOD grove, so it takes center stage. Around the world, people celebrate “First fruits”, harvest preparation, and talk about the sacrifices of Tailtiu and John Barleycorn – crops cut down to become the food and seed of the future. But while our ancestors in Europe might have been preparing to cut barley now, USDA records tell me that the wheat harvest in Oklahoma is usually finished just a couple weeks after summer solstice, the corn is just silking and maturing now, and corn harvest could still be in progress at Samhain. Most of us aren’t farmers these days, anyway. The biggest activity that sets the tone for this time of year in our modern world isn’t agricultural, it is Back to School Season.

Sunflower Making Seeds

This gives a sense of beginnings to a season usually described as one of endings. It isn’t the fresh newness of Imbolc but more a leveling-up, expectations of increased maturity and new responsibilities. We are initiated into a new school year with shopping for school clothes and school supplies. Sometimes the new school year comes with new anxieties as the safety of old routines, buildings, and friends are left behind. This echoes the sense of anxiety our ancestors may have had for the harvest. Will there be enough for the winter? Will the weather cooperate? Did we do all we could? What work still must be done? Making friends and passing math may seem insignificant concerns next to surviving winter, but they are much more familiar in 21st century Oklahoma. Even though I am long past even my college years, I’m still reminded of the feelings of excitement and anxiety for the future.

I associate Lughnasadh with this sense of new responsibility and preparation. No one in my house is in school now, but I still look at sales ads and get the urge for new file organizers and pencil sets. In terms of a human life, I associate this time with that of the Statesman or Chief – between the Warrior at Summer Solstice and Retirement at Fall Equinox. During Imbolc, at the other side of the circle, we are babes in arms, supported by our community. By Lughnasadh, we support our community in turn. Physically we are no longer at our peak, but we’re not done yet. We work smarter, not harder, gathering wisdom from our elders to combine with our own experience to plan and organize. We can apply these concepts to our lives no matter what stage we’re in. As we watch the grass turn golden in the long, hot evenings of Lughnasadh season, we remember winters of the past, thinking of the projects we wished for last winter as well as those we began this last spring, and we plan. We can rest, but only for a moment. There is still work to do. 

Ripe Sumac

                                     

Happy New Cicada Moon

Cicadas are known for screaming in trees and leaving molted carcasses everywhere like creepy decorations for children to use in games of “terrorize my phobic sibling”.   Oklahoma is home to over 30 different species of cicada and although some emerge in the spring, I tend to associated them more with late summer, the Lughnasadh/Lammas season.    I’m one of the weirdoes who enjoys their sound.   One cicada screaming at rock-concert decibels next to your head might be infuriating, but when the hot summer evening fills with the drone of hundreds singing the orange sky into blackness, it can be a trance-inducing experience.

According to the Wikipedia article, cicadas are known around the world and from ancient sources.  Their bright markings and large shape have been used as decoration and even money.  They have represented music, rebirth, and nonchalance in different cultures.   Late summer is a common association, with one species, neotibicen canicularis referred to as the “dog-day cicada” and is endemic to eastern North America stretching as far west as NE Oklahoma.   Although the time of Lughnasadh is the first harvest, reaping, a time of endings and the death of John Barleycorn,  in our modern culture it has the flavor of beginnings also.  The cicada, to me, is a good representative of that part of the season. 

Fall is the time to begin a new year of school.  Kids return from camp, football practice begins, stores put up lists of supplies for each grade.  We buy new school clothes, presumably to replace clothes that we’ve outgrown, but there are also social meanings – more “grown up” clothes, fashion choices related to self expression or belonging to particular groups.  Cicadas also molt off their old clothes and enter a new phase of their lives.

But the excitement of a new school year also comes with a leaving behind – last year’s teachers, schedules, the skills and knowledge mastered, or not mastered, perhaps even schools and friends.  In 2020, our whole concept of school seems like it could be left behind as teachers and parents struggle to manage life inside chaotic expectations of governments and administrations.  Even within this shifting flow there is still a looming sense of long, steady work still to come.   The cooler weather will eventually arrive; there will be holiday season plans to make.   But first, we molt.  We have long days of striping off the old and building up the new while the cicadas sing and buzz the second half of the year along.

This process can’t be rushed.  Time passes at its own rate.  Tearing down and building up take as long as they take, as much work as they take.  There are no shortcuts.  The cicada can also be our reminder of this.   Depending on species, cicada larva may live one or several years underground before emerging.   Oklahoma also has some populations of periodical cicadas called Magicicada, the entire group of which cycles together:  living underground as larvae and not to be seen at all until they emerge together as a swarm after 13 or 17 years!

As we settle in to the hot dry days of late summer, dreaming of cool nights and pumpkin spice, let the song of the cicada serenade you.  Harvest is coming. There is work to do before we can let go of the summer and relax in the cool of fall.

What's an Unty?

“Unty” [un-tee] is another word for Aunt/Uncle.  I’ve chosen it as my working title for a couple of reasons: 1. I feel that this land is just as magical as any other and deserves to be recognized in its uniqueness, and 2. I feel like this type of relationship best describes how I can contribute to that recognition.   All that is a high-falutin’ way of saying that I ain’t no Granny and I sure ain’t your mama, but I’m up for adventure on this spiritual road trip so let’s go!

Most titles people use, like witch, priest, shaman, etc, describe not only a type of personal practice but also a relationship to community.  For example, the priest/ess facilitates communication between the gods and people, but you might go to a witch for more tangible solutions to problems.   I am a druid by “formal” training and am currently an Ovate grade initiate in the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids.  I do sometimes call myself a Druid.  Druidry is the foundation for much of my personal practice and I am active in druid communities.  But being a druid does not completely describe my relationship to the community and land in this place where I was born, and my parents were born, and their parents were born, and hundreds of my ancestors lie buried, with its own unique natural and human histories, ancestors, and communities.

Thus, I wanted a new word, a relationship word, a magical word.  I hope that others might want to serve community this way, too.   This is what I see as the definition and goals of an Unty:

1.        Collecting information about the plants, animals, rocks, ecosystems, weather, astronomy, natural and human history, lore, folkways, stories, and wisdom that comes from the geographical region of Oklahoma.

2.       Forming relationships with the unique spirits of place, ancestors, and whatever entities your path recognizes, in the manner of your own path and cosmological understanding.

3.       “I might know a guy” – Local Spiritual Networking: Need to find an emergency car part on the cheap, call your weird uncle.  Need to find somebody to help with recurring dreams about a nun carrying a cow skull down Turner Falls, call your weird Unty.

4.       Experimentation – “What are the correspondences of hourglass selenite?” “Is Artemisia ludoviciana a good substitute for sage, or for mugwort?”  “Where can I go in the city to safely meditate under the full moon?”  There is no book.  How else are we gonna know?

5.       Back-up spiritual advisor – Sometimes, no matter how open or cool they are, we just need to talk to someone who isn’t Mom or Dad, who isn’t responsible for holding a particular Tradition, maybe someone who is more readily available, or has a different perspective.

I don’t envision an organized collective of Unties with rules and membership cards.   I would love to have a loose network of like-minded people to share with and maybe occasionally get together with.  What would a meeting of Unties be?  A Brunch of Unties?  A Bonfire of Unties?  J  I hope to find out.