Half Season Celebration | Lammas: Gratitude for the First Harvest
/Happy Lammas, or Lughnassadh, to you!
Today is the first day of of August, an ancient day of celebration called Lammas, or Lughnassadh. In the Celtic Wheel of the Year, this is the ancient festival of the first harvest or the first fruits. It was traditional on August 1st to make a newly baked loaf (Lammas meaning 'loaf mass'), which was presented to the local church by the village bakers. It was made from the first fruits of the early harvest. This loaf was consecrated and offered to God as thanksgiving for Divine provision and supplication for a good store for winter.
However, this ancient worldview of celebrating the harvest, offering gratitude for the gifts of the Earth, and storing up for the winter precedes the times of the Church, existed even before the Celts and Druids of the current United Kingdom, and many thousands of years before that. In this way, this half-season celebration is truly an ancient and cosmic-celebratory time which no one religion, faith or tribe can lay exclusive claim.
This day represents a collective threshold crossing, a liminal space where we cross over from a summer that was faced squarely towards greening and blooming, towards a season that is now witness to fruiting and harvest. We witness within ourselves an interconnection, a green and tendrilled mirror that invites us to look within to the season of our own life and see what is there to harvest. What is it that was planted within—what new idea, inspiration, action, desire—at the beginning of the summertime that is already fruiting, requiring the decisive action of the first harvest? We find ourselves entwined with the harvest, honoring the legacy of creating sustenance out of Summer’s gifts and giving thanks to That Which Is Larger Than Ourselves, the Great Provider.
The echoing-day of this agricultural and seasonal festival invites us to still offer gratitude, to still go out and harvest the first fruits and put up stores with a sense that this is a practice of providence. We are being given nourishment and substance from Living Earth as Summer turns towards harvest. May we give thanks!
“Oh, what a catastrophe for us when we cut ourselves off from the rhythm of the year, from our unison with the sun and the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love...cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox!”
I'll be going out in the garden today to gather up my first fruits. My "Lammas" practice won't be a loaf of bread per se; rather, today's first-fruit harvest will be my pole beans, which I will be canning as a Lammas practice, jars which I’ll be sharing with my community this winter.
What about you? What can you go harvest today as a way to celebrate this ancient festival on the wheel of the year? Reflect on the liminality of this day and the thresholds upon which you stand. What is ready to be harvested within you?
Lammas Celebration Practice
Supplies: mug/thermos, hot water, basket, clippers, an open and attuned spirt
Begin by making a tea from herbs or flowers in your garden. Place a small handful of leaves (mint, sage, or yarrow are some of my seasonal favorites) and/or flowers (lavender, borage, chamomile, sage flower) in your mug of hot water. While you allow your tea to steep, offer this prayer:
Hymn for the Harvest by Tadgh
Lord of the harvest we come to you,
we thank you for the ripened grain
(for) the circle turning year by year.
Great provider of all humankind,
we thank you for the sun and wind,
the earth and all life-giving rain.
Surely, surely, you are good,
The God of Green Hope, good to all.
The Sacred Three, The Three in One.
Nature once in vernal green enrobed,
gives up its bounty, gifts for all
(and) prepares to sleep as autumn comes.
On our table you supply our bread,
We share with all, for all to be fed,
And joy in our heart at what shall be.
Surely, surely, you are good,
The God of Green Hope, good to all.
The Sacred Three, The Three in One.
Sip your tea as an act of ceremony and gesture of readying yourself to harvest in an honorable way. Save the last sip, the dregs, of your tea.
Take your basket and clippers and mindfully harvest the first fruits in your garden-space. In a spirit of gratitude and with the intention of not taking it all (remember to save some of the first harvest for the wild ones who also need this sustenance to survive!), harvest your fruit. Be aware of how this action is taking the fruit across its own kind of threshold. They are now leaving the tree, the shrub, the plant from which they have grown and become. Now they will be processed to become something else, an act of alchemy that witnesses their form become preserved into future nourishment.
Pour the dregs of your tea into the Earth as a sign of gratitude and communion.
Before leaving your garden space, close your time of gathering with this prayer:
Spirit,
You inhabit the thresholds,
the liminal spaces of my life.
Teach me to meet You here,
in these in-between places.
May I gather the strength of past seasons,
bringing it with me as I face
the next season of my life.
by Melina Rudman
Set aside time to enjoy processing your harvested item into something you can store up for the winter. Perhaps you can make a berry cobbler, or an apple preserve. Maybe you can make a batch of nasturtium pesto, or pickled beans. You can even cut and hang herbs with the intention of saving the dried herbs for culinary salts, cooking herbs, or teas!
“The sun shines different ways in winter and summer. We shine different ways in the seasons of our lives.”