Lughnasadh, harvests and back to reality

We spent Lughnasadh week in Anglesey on our annual family holiday. The quiet, wild cove was now thrumming with people, the car park rammed, the watersports in full flow. Boats tacking across the bay, sails full, avoiding paddleboards and kite surfers. Cricket, sandcastles, coolboxes and camping chairs filled the sand. Land Rovers inching down the tight lane, meeting tractors on blind bends, figuring out logistics and passing places. Amongst this, we swam in freezing seas, trading jokes with those whizzing past, floating on the tide, gazing at the skies and fighter jets above, a small bubble amongst it all. Amongst all the noise and busyness, this place holds me. Something in my bones, in soul and cells. The ancient rock is solid beneath my feet, no matter the transience of life on the surface. The whip of wind through reeds, the cry of buzzards circling above, the quiet splosh as small waves tip over into breakers along the sand. The silence in between the noise. The settling into familiar days.

We visited standing stones and listened, the deep time pulse, the footsteps of thousands passing through. Exchanging smiles with those visiting for the same reasons, for a wisdom beyond us all, some feeling the pull to step through the doorway between, to whatever greets us on the other side. To let go, to start fresh, to weave time. On Lughnasadh eve, we stood in silence deep in Bryn Celli Ddu, as every year, hands on the stone and souls with those older than us. Earth in our lungs, roots from our feet, damp on our skin. The wheel inches ever forward.

And forward indeed, it has turned. We returned to brown, crispy teasels where just a week ago they were green, purple and full of bees. Leaves overtaken by powder mildew, the dry weather taking its toll. Brown edges creeping in with a sense of heaviness in the garden. A dullness, a long fatigue. Leaves pull down branches, apples ripening, blackberries glistening in the hedges. The red glow of haws, the deep black of sloes, the promise of a fruitfulness to gather and preserve for the long months on the horizon. I’m tired, at this time. The long exhale of summer is almost over. It is time to rest a little, before the harvest.

I wonder to myself what I am harvesting this year. Last year, I felt slowness, acceptance, seeds of understanding starting to ripen. This year, I feel it’s a second-year crop, building on those first tentative harvests, getting stronger, adapting. I haven’t tried to work on anything this year. I realised there is a constant push for ‘improvement’, or linear progress, like we should always be striving for something, striving to change ourselves, always working on a thing that shows that we are never quite enough, whatever that means. I finally stopped, and I’m just floating for a while, like in the salt water. I wanted to feel enough. I wanted to start to hear myself, for the first time. I didn’t know what I would learn, if anything, but I know earth is below, and sky is above, and it all holds me gently. I know wind brings whispers and water flows from source to sea, changing form, in multiple states. I know silence brings answers, tiny, quiet, but there, if we learn how to listen. So my harvest isn’t a field of corn, or a bushel of apples. It’s one or two plump blackberries, plucked from the hedgerow. A nut, brown and crunchy, ripening amongst others on hazel or walnut. A quiet harvest. A just-enough harvest. A forager’s harvest, not a farmer’s.

I’ve felt as though I’m waiting for something, but now I realise it isn’t quite that. Is waiting linear? To expand into non-linearity is something different, more of a curiosity, rather than the expectation of something coming to pull us ever forwards. Multiple layers, simultaneously forwards and backwards and left and right. There’s comfort in that, myself and my undefined blob of space-time, floating for now, circling in an eddy. Maybe soon, I’ll catch the river flow again, but for now, it’s enough. It’s a quiet time, and I realise now I need this to process, to catch up with myself, to let myself sift through the experiences of the last few weeks. I feel the need to be at home, tidying, doing easy tasks, with that processing going on in the background. Then it’ll be time again to dive in. Like the tide, ever changing but still continuous.