Lammas, or Lughnasad, is the first and greatest of the Sabbats honoring the harvest, for it is now that in most places in the northern hemisphere life\u2019s abundance most overflows in flowers and fruit, grain and root.\u00a0 In our urban and industrial times Lammas also has come to celebrate the abundance that can come from our hard work and creativity. And for each of us personally, there is hopefully a Lammas of our lives, when we make our first big harvest of our life\u2019s work in family, career and calling.<\/p>\n
In traditional accounts Lammas was also accompanied by sacrifice, a giving something valuable back to the powers that produced the abundance that blesses us.\u00a0 Lammas celebrates the gifts of the earth and of life, but at its core it also recognizes reciprocity.\u00a0 In recognizing reciprocity Lammas recognizes and sanctifies relationship.<\/p>\n
But how should we relate to our personal harvests of life\u2019s abundance?\u00a0 Most of us give back in our relationships with friends and family, but what about the Earth in bth its secular and sacred guises?<\/p>\n
I am reminded of two contrasting images.\u00a0 When Europeans first arrived to the North Pacific coast, the salmon runs were beyond anyone\u2019s experience or even imagination. Settlers wrote they could harvest salmon with pitchforks. And when canning was perfected salmon canneries sprung up across the area, millions of fish were caught, and incredible numbers rotted because their numbers exceeded the canneries\u2019 capacity to use.\u00a0 Salmon were for taking, and nothing was ever given back.\u00a0 In a few decades the runs were gone, reduced to ghosts of their former magnificence, or extinguished entirely.<\/p>\n
The harvesters worked from two deeply flawed beliefs, first that the Earth is simply a storehouse of resources and second that we human beings were somehow distinct from the Earth. We had souls and the earth did not, nor did anything else within it.<\/p>\n
The Indians of the region had more wisdom in these matters and better ecological insight as well.\u00a0 Stories of what would happen when salmon were not respected were widespread, and the stories were largely the same.\u00a0 Without respect the salmon would leave. As they did.<\/p>\n
In addition, harvesting salmon for these tribes was deeply enmeshed within a ritualized context. It was not just \u201ceconomics\u201d the science of rational sociopaths. It was a highly ethical and spiritual activity where day to day living was placed within a deeper context. The first salmon caught for the season was ritually distributed to the tribe as a whole, and its bones ritually returned to the water.\u00a0 Only certain days were allowed for fishing, and at the end of the prescribed season, the weirs were dismantled.<\/p>\n
Those tribes harvested annually as many salmon as Americans did in all but a very few years, but they accomplished this over thousands of years.\u00a0 Those tribes recognized the importance of relationship in deed as well as word.<\/p>\n
Today the world\u2019s wild systems are being systematically dismantled by corporation greed and shortsighted overpopulation.\u00a0 Increasingly more than the salmon will not be coming back.\u00a0 The price humanity will likely pay will be a high one, but the hidden price in a poverty of spirit is already visible in this country where cruelty, arrogance, and greed, and the sociopathic pathologies of Ayn Rand, are given recognition rather than the revulsion and pity they and their practitioners merit.<\/p>\n
In many ways I think modern NeoPaganism offers the contemporary West a final chance to reconnect with a deeper and more appropriate appreciation of\u00a0 \u201call our relations.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 In my interfaith work and in that of friends, repeatedly we encounter interest by practitioners of other faiths in how they might relate better with all that surrounds us.\u00a0 For the most part we are the only readily reachable spiritual community that has given these questions much thought. We are influential beyond our numbers, and I think our Sabbats provide an annual meditation on how to relate with the cycles of physical existence as sacred.<\/p>\n
We can give back in part by helping others better practice what many are seeking to do now.\u00a0 And in art, in our rituals, we can ask ourselves as individuals and as covens and groves and other communities, what we can do in the year to come to enter into stronger relations with the Earth.<\/p>\n
To receive appropriately requires giving if the gift is to be truly honored.\u00a0 We can give to the giver, or keep the circle flowing outwards by giving to another.\u00a0 In this respect Lammas is an echo of the old gift economy that once sustained so many of the world\u2019s people and has to some extent been reinvigorated with the rise of the net.<\/p>\n
There are two problems with making taking the foundation of our approach to our earth.\u00a0 First it is stupid.\u00a0 The earth is enormously complex, and our knowledge is only a fragmentary glimpse of the whole.\u00a0 Taking with ignorance is a way to undermine our own well-being.\u00a0 As we look at the long hot summer most of our country is experiencing after its unusually snowy winter, with crops withering across entire states, we can mull over the possibility that far more than salmon may not come back.<\/p>\n
But there is perhaps an even worse dimension to taking. A person who treats everything and everyone as a tool for their use is ultimately a person who thinks of him or herself as alone.\u00a0 But this solitude is of their own creation.\u00a0 They can be surrounded by others and still feel isolated, as in the old adage that big cities are places of loneliness.\u00a0 When we see masses of people we do not know and who do not know us, we can feel lonely.\u00a0 We do not see the networks of friendship and love that bind those \u201canonymous masses\u201d into intricate social networks very much as plants and animals are invisibly bund together into ecological networks and the whole into a Spiritual network.<\/p>\n
If we never enter into those networks cities are places of extreme loneliness.\u00a0 If we never enter into and value those ecological networks we ultimately harvest ashes.\u00a0 And if w never enter into the Spiritual networks that encompass all of these, our earth remains alien and we brief and lonely sojourners upon it.<\/p>\n
As culture after culture has learned to its sorrow, when nothing is given in return, when the order of the day is just to take, the harvest eventually withers.\u00a0 The person who takes from friends ultimately is left alone, friendless.\u00a0 It is the same with the world, only She moves more slowly.\u00a0 As we enjoy nature\u2019s abundance what can we give in return?\u00a0 How might we provide a kind of harvest to our world, as our world provides its harvest to us?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lammas, or Lughnasad, is the first and greatest of the Sabbats honoring the harvest, for it is now that in most places in the northern hemisphere life\u2019s abundance most overflows in flowers and fruit, grain and root.\u00a0 In our urban and industrial times Lammas also has come to celebrate the abundance that can come from…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112,106,4],"tags":[45],"class_list":["post-1074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nature","category-pagan-culture","category-pagan-holidays-and-sabbats","tag-lughnasad"],"yoast_head":"\n