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The Sun-god is going into decline: though you'd never know it by the temperature out there. The days may indeed be growing shorter, the nights longer, and the sun's path across the sky becoming more and more southerly. Yet we're in the middle of a heat-wave.
One of the lessons we take from the sabbats is that there is a lag underlying (over overarching!) changes and their manifestations in the world. If I get up this morning and say I'm going to lose 25 pounds, or start weight lifting, or begin the study of Reiki/astro-physics/business admin, nobody's going to notice for quite a while. In this age of instant gratification, some things still take time.
We might also note that sometimes there's too much of a good thing. The energy of the sun pouring down on the southern U.S. and the mid-west has gone beyond warming us and growing food for winter, but is killing people and burning crops. The heat wave threatens to extend to the Northeast, which would probably include us at PFPC headquarters in Canada's capital. And it's already hot enough! Yet the agricultural year in these parts has unfolded quite well so far. An early, dry spring has, according to local farmers, resulted in an unusually light yield of hay. However, other crops are early and abundant. So much so that some farmers say it won't pay them to reap all that abundant and therefore extremely cheap corn. Nature is always in a state of balance but not some kind of static balance. Her balance is more like a see-saw or a pendulum. Usually the balance is within limits. Sometimes there is a great swing one way or the other.
It isn't always Nature who is responsible for wide swings of the pendulum. Sometimes it is we humans who are reaping what we have sown. Actually, that may not be a good metaphor, since we have done a lot more cutting-down than sowing. For instance, we have the temerity to say we "harvest" the resources of forest and sea. And our industrial activity and population growth may have sown seeds of our own (and many other species') destruction which surely is not the kind of sowing we learn from Nature.
Ah, but hold on. We, especially we of the Pagan persuasion, sometimes blame the Bible for urging us to be fruitful and multiply, and to subdue the Earth. But in fact that is a biological imperative built into our every cell. And into the cell of every species. Dandelions and deer, rats and rhinos, every kind of creature is fruitful and multiplies and, if unchecked, would cover the entire Earth, devouring everything in its path. It's checks, whether by other species or by natural forces (winter makes many of our Canadian creatures go back to the starting line annually), that keep the balance. Our achievement as humans is to have largely overcome the natural checks that once held us in line. Now we must be as creative in finding ways to change our own nature so that we will manifest differently.
Lughnasad is also known as Lammas, the first harvest, when the early grain is cut and ceremonially made into loaves of bread for ritual celebration. Nice fresh bread made of fresh flour, none of that old stuff from last year that by now is full of weevils. Or so it was in the days before preservatives. (We should talk of cakes of bread, actually. The "cakes" that Wiccans eat in ritual aren't supposed to be sweet and covered with icing as in the modern usage; rather, the word refers to round lumps of bread cooked free-standing in the oven, as opposed to loaves, either pressed into rectangular pans or formed into lengths.) As we celebrate the First Harvest of the grain on the weekend of August 1, perhaps we should think about a different kind of First Harvest in the form of depleted seas and vanishing old-growth trees. An early warning that we are cannibalizing the eco-system.
Not to be too depressing. We can celebrate a more positive kind of First Harvest, namely, the very fact that we are talking about these things. And not just us, followers of the Earth religions, but the general population. Concern about the environment, about global warming, about our over-population are part of the modern group mind. It seems, from our personal vantage-point as relatively helpless individuals, that the great engine of industry just keeps rolling on over our concerns. But one of the things we humans have going for us is the ability to change our minds, not only individually but collectively. The great engine of industry is, after all, us. Not you and me, perhaps, in our little jobs and lives, but us as humanity. And humanity is achieving consciousness and communication on a scale never before dreamed of. The screen on which you are reading these words is a window onto the future. Further it is a portal through which you are consciously linking with the interconnected, interwoven group mind of the world. Our coming together like this is another kind of First Harvest, the further unfolding of which we can only imagine.
Let us take seeds (and hope) from this, and plant a sustainable and loving future.
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