Harvesting The Fruits of Our labor on the Festival of Lughnasadh
Today is the delicious festival of Lughnasadh in the Northern Hemisphere (pronounced loo-na-sah), signaling the peak of summer and the start of harvest season. Today is one of my favorite festivals on the Wheel of the Year, the ancient Celtic/Germanic seasonal calendar. Observing the start of harvest season invites us to do something extremely important - to harvest all the juicy, abundant fruits of our labor and truly relish them! This festival and even this season reminds us to come back to the present and savor the sweetness of life.
what is lughnasadh?
Quite simply, Lughnasadh is an ancient Celtic festival that celebrates the commencement of harvest season and it’s observed on 1st August - the peak of the summer season and the halfway point between the Summer Solstice and the Autumn Equinox. After today, the days in the Northern Hemisphere will remain long but we’ll notice the hours of daylight diminishing slightly more and more each day as the earth shifts its tilt. The Southern Hemisphere, which celebrates the start of lambing season today at the winter festival of Imbolc, is preparing for a Rebirth cycle as the Northern Hemisphere enjoys the last dregs of its Life cycle in preparation for the upcoming Death cycle.
While each culture has its own way of honoring the harvest season, Lughnasadh, as well as the other seven festivals on the Wheel of the Year, has seen a modern revival as so many of us return to the old ways in search of more alignment to nature. Lughnasadh takes its name from the Celtic Sun god, Lugh, who, according to legend, liberated the people of Ireland from being forced to give their harvests to the king. Since then, the festival has been celebrated by feasting on the best of the season’s crops alongside friends and community.
“The first harvest is a time of prosperity and feasting…Lughnasadh is a time to come together, either to reap and share bounty, or to lend a hand in times of need.”
-Fiona Cook, The Wheel of the Year
Enhancing our Wellbeing by Flowing with Nature
Centuries before the Gregorian calendar became the default timeline on which the world operated, our ancestors lived according to lunar or solar cycles, which is nature’s rhythm. In fact, many cultures still do including those in Asia and the Levant. For those of us who come from a Christian lineage, we’ll notice that many of the sacred feast days align with the pagan festivals on the Wheel of the Year. Lughnasadh is one such festival. Ironically, people often interchange the Gaelic name Lughnasadh with the Anglo-Saxon Lammas (mostly because they’re too disinterested to learn how to spell Lughnasadh) but actually, Lammas is the Anglo-Christian appropriation of Lughnasadh; it’s Loaf Mass Day! Personally, I think it’s great to observe the holidays or festivals according to whichever tradition resonates, because either way we’re shifting our attention from daily distractions to the bigger picture of what’s going on with the earth.
Modern life tends to work against the flow of nature, and unfortunately our mental and physical health pays the price. Lughnasadh is a good example of where we’ve gone awry. Humans aren’t designed to work our hardest during the winter months and take it easy during the summer; quite the opposite in fact. This paradigm evolved from schools and commerce picking up in September, after people finished harvesting the fields. Harvests are times of hard labor, times during which the earth is bountiful and its produce must be plucked from the vines before it overripens and rots. It’s not coincidental that there are so many more hours of daylight during the harvest season (daylight savings was a way to extend hours of labor after all). Whereas summer should be a period of productivity, winter is a period of hibernation! It’s when our bodies and minds rest and recover. Is this how we operate though? Generally, no.
Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) seems to be diagnosed about as often as autism and ADHD does nowadays. The symptoms of SAD can make life feel challenging, but should we be surprised that forcing ourselves to live against the flow of nature has a significant effect on mental health? Of course not. People who experience SAD notice themselves feeling depressed, sluggish, eating more, sleeping more, and being less productive during seasons with less daylight. Disorder? Sounds like hibernation to me; even the British Psychological Society agrees:
“Researchers have likened SAD to animal hibernation and argued that the core symptoms can be viewed as energy-conserving.”
But how can we counteract the detriments of modern life when we still have to work for a living? Major lifestyle changes aren’t always necessary; there are so many small adjustments we can make to enhance our wellbeing. In fact, there are two powerful resources available to all of us which, if taken advantage of, make a marked improvement in how we feel. They are:
1) The lunch hour! Be radical and reclaim it (most of us aren’t even paid for our lunch hour anyway...) If you’re working from the dark hours of the morning to the dark hours of the evening in the winter months, take at least half an hour to get outside and be in the daylight. If you’re working in air conditioned offices all summer, go bask in the sun like a lizard.
2) Create a ritual. Humans thrive on ritual. For example, in the autumn, designate weekend mornings to baking or making soup with seasonal produce and enjoy those treats during your lunch breaks! Go apple picking. Rake the leaves and mindfully notice the changing colors instead of focusing on your aching back. In the spring, choose a day a week to stop and buy fresh flowers after work, giving yourself something to look forward to. Or, maybe buy yourself a brightly colored rain jacket to liven up the rainy spring days.
I can’t emphasize enough how many benefits we stand to gain from flowing with nature’s rhythm a little more and resisting it a little less.
HARVESTING the Fruits of Our Labor
Even though Lughnasadh marks the peak of summer and we’re in the throes of a Life cycle, we are simultaneously preparing for a Death cycle at the Autumn Equinox next month by marshaling our resources now. It’s time to harvest what’s worth keeping and compost what may no longer be working. What we need to remember when taking inventory of our lives is that just because something isn’t right for us any longer does not mean that there’s an inherent problem with it, or that it was never right for us. Sometimes it’s true that certain beliefs, people, or situations have been a misfit since Day One, but not always. More often we just evolve.
Personal evolution and growth cannot happen without Life and Death, without constantly reviewing and releasing. Therefore, we are perpetually outgrowing our surroundings. We don’t try to inhibit babies from evolving out of their clothes every two weeks so why do we resist the process in our adult lives? By considering the option of composting what we’ve outgrown instead of tossing it in the bin, we’re reminded that maybe we’ve received everything that it has to offer. Or, maybe we’ve given it everything that we have to offer. Either way, we’re just no longer in alignment. And that’s okay. By composting these beliefs, patterns, identities, strategies, and relationships we’re allowing them to evolve. We’re allowing them to organically disintegrate and transmute into an iteration that might one day serve someone else.
Perhaps the job that we’ve outgrown and decide to leave is the perfect new role for another person. Maybe after doing the inner work on ourselves, our beloved partner finds themselves totally misaligned with our new perspective and behavior. They’re in a different stage on their journey and maybe they can only move to the next stage by evolving in a different direction. So we release them with love and lay them on the compost pile to do their thing.
What about those things that we choose to harvest though? The strategies we developed that have really paid off, or the new friendships filling our proverbial cups? Maybe we began a healing process and we’re starting to see shifts. By composting what we can’t devote energy to any longer we’re creating space for the things serving us so beautifully in this season of our lives. Remember that harvesting takes hard work - it takes devotion. But with every harvest comes a feast; an abundant spread and a bountiful celebration of what we’ve created through this devotion. Harvesting should be as pleasurable as it is laborious!
“A good harvest is the reward of hard work.”
-Fiona Cook, The Wheel of the Year
How to Savor Life
In 2016 I had a brush with death that was closer than most people will ever experience before their final call. In my Near Death Experience (NDE), I was given the choice of whether to return to my earthly embodiment or stay where I was (though of where I was I’m still not entirely certain…). I deliberated, it wasn’t an easy choice. I’ll be honest, I did not want to return, yet I did. Last year, my younger cousin Nathan drowned during a sunset swim in the Algarve, Portugal. I’ve never known anyone more in love with their life than Nathan was, truly. Days before his death he wrote an email to his parents telling them how free and content his soul felt living the way he wanted to. It took seeing the headlines about his accident (which were so eerily similar to the headlines about my own only a few years prior) to wake me out of my stupor that many of us call going through the motions of life. I quit my job shortly thereafter and set the intention to make every moment worth living. I wasn’t going to spend one more minute out of alignment with myself or living a small, dull life.
Although not every moment is easy, comfortable, or even enjoyable, I can say that every moment of my life is now worth living. Lughnasadh is one of my favorite festivals because it reminds me of the promise I made to myself. It’s an opportunity to not only savor the simple pleasures of my life but to reflect on how I can make it even more delicious. I’ll leave you with a short list of the moments that have made life worth living this year and I encourage you to do the same today:
Pistachio ice cream
Lighting my croissant-scented candle and making my flat smell like a French patisserie
Waking up to cheerful daffodils in my bedroom
Visiting the most beautiful historic hotel I’ve ever been to in my life, the glorious Prestonfield House
Peach season
Observing the spring festival of Beltane at the famous Beltane Fire Festival in Edinburgh
Watching the sweet peas bloom on my balcony
Eating beouf bourguignon in Paris
Golden hour
Trust me when I say that life is shorter than you think it is. Make every minute as juicy and delicious as possible.