I was thinking about the symbols of Lughnasadh and how to short-hand the description of time and seasonal energy. The idea set that best works is that of the elements, but I’m reluctant to use that language because it carries such woo-woo magickal baggage that it puts up walls in the mind of any practical thinker. But then I thought “Why is that?” This is a helpful ideological toolkit for relating to the world. It is not inherently woo… It is physical, like talking about the weather or the balance between growth and senescence, birth and death, expansion and contraction, breathing in and breathing out, building up and unraveling organic structures…

The elements are handy symbols that our symbolical languages can latch on to and use to word the world, to translate reality into abstract thinking, so that we can talk about our practical experiences. Wording the world does tend to over-simplify things, discarding quite a lot of data from our senses… But it is the only tool we have for discussion, for talking about things with other people, for comparison and for pattern building. That simplicity allows us to focus on essences, what is most important in the continual sense data flow for any given time and place. Because, while the entire experience of a body is unique, there are patterns, there is echoing repetition and return to the beginning over and over and over…

So symbols broadly work even though the details fluctuate wildly. That’s what symbols are for, after all, for giving our brains the pattern it requires to process experiential data. We exist day to day without that process though, just doing existence, life, sensing, being. But if we want to think about it, to relate this moment to other moments, this life to other lives, if we want to talk at all, never mind finding continuity — and for whatever reason, humans do require continuity, it’s physiological, we require some surety of continuance for emotional health — then we need symbols, ideas, patterns that make sense of our sense data, that can describe what it is to be. Which… when you really consider everything, is indescribable chaos. Even the apparently solid fact of being breaks down in the face of all the information we receive from the world.

Language, symbols, ideas — these are how we resolve that chaos into the comfort of “Yes, I do exist”… even if maybe we don’t. Probably we don’t…

Some thinkers are fine with discarding that need for solidity and pattern and continuity, though I have not yet run across anyone who does not use the first person in talking about the world… But that is not how we exist in the world. We feel that we are, that other things are, that there are relational ways of interacting, and that some relationships are preferable to others because more benefit, more pleasure, more health is experienced when we are in those relational situations — and to describe those ways of being that are happily experienced and label what we see as commonality. So that we can work to reproduce these comforting ways of being for our selves and for that which forms our relationships…. No, not “that”, “Who”… because all the existing universe is just as alive to this whole process of relationship as we are.

Other being states have other ways of managing the lived data stream, how to decide what is relevant, how to decide what to do next, but make no mistake that if there is any actual decision-making anywhere — like, in our heads — then there is decision-making everywhere — from the tiniest subatomic particle to the entire sum of the universe… and beyond. Because it is all the same process of being in relationship. This and that. Here and there. Now and then. And how to make all that best for all, healthiest for all, happy… these are human words, symbolic representations of relationships, for things that do not fit in words… but we know what we mean when we use them… mostly… (until we stop thinking about meaning and let the baggage of our self-centeredness get in the way.)

Happy is a state of good relationships, in which there is general benefit across the relationships in place and time. But we twist it to mean bodily pleasure within our own small organism, not a general state of being. We transform happy from a relationship with others, to a situation for our own bodies, often with elements of conflict, or perceived conflict anyway. I benefit because others do not. Which is not a true statement, but it’s how we have twisted a useful word toolkit into something that is not so useful… But that makes our particular organism feel satisfaction.

This is mostly enculturated, not biologically programmed… We have to learn to be happy at the expense of the happiness of others. We begin Being as children who want happiness everywhere. We must learn to be satisfied with the puny electrochemical impulses in our own individual bodies. In fact, we have to learn to name those impulses, interpret them in terms of satisfaction. Those impulses do not mean anything in and of themselves. Most of those impulses don’t even exist in a young child’s body. The body has to learn many of those electrochemical responses to stimuli. Isn’t that bizarre?

We have to learn to be selfish, even on a biological basis… This is not our nature. Certainly not the fault in our “selfish genes”. It is the fault of modern culture. Unfortunately, this fault confers superficial and short-term benefit on a few creatures, those who created and do the most to maintain this culture. So this fault has been perpetuated for generations, despite not being in our genes. Happiness in this paradigm, this short-term and superficial benefit for a few creatures, is not real happiness, even for those that benefit. Because true happiness does not allow for privilege of benefit, ranking of who gets and who does not. Happiness is a state of general benefit. Once beneficial relationships are restricted so that some do not benefit, then the entire system is harmed. Benefit is diminished in the entire system. Harm comes from the imbalance. And eventually, because everything is a system and connected, that harm affects even those who nominally benefit. So no body does…

When you say “I deserve more”, then you are falling into erroneous thought and labeling. Nothing ever deserves anything. There is no relative merit. There is no merit at all, as everything is based on relationship. Merit creates an unbalanced relationship, which will eventually fail because imbalance will always be corrected. Merit is simply our word for privilege based on a false interpretation of a bodily experience that has been conditioned to respond favorably to self-preference and elevation of what we name will, intent, desire, want in the self-organism, to prefer this state over the well-being and good functioning and will of the entire system… of which each self is a part. Hence the error. If the entire system in which we are embedded is in an unhealthy, imbalanced, unhappy relationship, then we, as parts of that relationship, are also unhealthy, imbalanced and unhappy.

We have let a few creatures determine our words, and therefore our responses, for relationship, based on their unhealthy and incorrect interpretation of sensory experience. We have submitted because these creatures were violently insistent. It was easier, at first, to pretend we agreed even if our own experience contradicted what they said, what they told us to believe, what they told us to do so that they could feed their burgeoning self-aggrandizement. We still feel the inherent wrongness in our culture. Recently, we’ve named that feeling “cognitive dissonance”. But it’s not a fault in our cognition. It’s the fault in our enculturation. (Though, yes, based on the fault in thinking of those few that created and maintain this system.)

However, we can, when left to our own devices, think around that dissonance, create relationships that bring true health and well-being. We can create and do and be happiness and goodness. Even with our grossly abused word toolkit that has undergone thousands of years of distortion, the last few hundred of which have nearly obliterated all connection between words and real-world meaning. We can still think, even though words say one thing in our enculturated minds yet mean the opposite in real-world application. We routinely claw our way out of this dissonant “fun-house”… which is definitely an example of symbological distortion. This word is neither a house – comforting shelter for a being – nor fun…

In fact, that might be the best and most revealing word in our culture. It names as desirable a fleeting moment of titillation, a brief chemical stimulation of one body, with words that are supposed to convey broad happiness, something that lasts and extends outwards. Perhaps with the intent of creating self-contentment but with that intent bounded by the knowledge that there is no boundary on the self. Every body must be happy for this body to be happy, for this body to have “fun” or be “home”. Our culture reverses that… it is a “fun-house”. Not a fun house. This is confusing.

So to claw out of the fun-house, to escape the distorted words and short-term rewards, to find right relationship that breeds true happiness, true benefit, true good living, we need to first allow ourselves to feel the dissonance. We are not harmonizing. We are braying loudly in the horn section and breaking the music. And we can’t even hear that because our culture filters all our perceptions, discouraging, disparaging and eliminating every idea that would allow us to understand how bad all this is for us. Because, of course, when we understand that, we will leave and it all will fall apart. So to get out, we need to force ourselves to feel how wrong it all is, how wrong all our words are.

Which comes back to thought and philosophy and symbolism and pattern making. Take magic… Magic is the inherent state of the roiling chaos that is existence. Being is completely inexplicable. It is wonderful, mysterious, and, despite all our hubristic posturing, quite beyond our grasp. It is magic. That we are at all is un-word-able. Our ancestors understood that and created this symbol for all that is and yet is beyond our comprehension – magic. They gave us many such words, but I like magic best because it sparkles and I feel happiest when I imagine a world filled with happy brightness. You might prefer mystery… Or ineffable (which probably is the closest word, though not at all easy to imagine… meaning something like “utterly incomprehensible”…)

Magic is not something we do. It is a process of relationship where we can’t see the relationship… yet… In any case, it does not involve our input. Magic is not our will made manifest. It is not about power or control. Magic simply is. Magic is everything. We do not make it. Our relationship to this relationship is simply to submit to it, sink into the wonder, ride that dazzling bafflement through our lives.

A child knows this… But adults see that word and hear all the distorted meanings applied by our culture. We learn to misunderstand. And how enormous is that misunderstanding! Magic has been manipulated to mean power over, to be a tool for private gain within this culture. Spells and enchantments. Note that we label this toolkit with words that refer to words, not to the real world. We’ve made it seem that our words make the world… or at least have ineffable effects on the world… neither of which is true.

We have taken the mystery at the core of existence and turned it into a self-help toolkit, in which position it does nothing but delude our ailing senses. We eliminate all that doesn’t fit the spell – the words we uttered. We then ardently and intentionally believe that we have changed. We even believe that these spells have created change in the world, have had effects outside our mind. The world does not submit to our wordings… However, we are able to persuade ourselves of this magical change because words do change how we perceive the world. Words cloud what is… unless those words are rigorously tested against reality.

Why do we do this? Why take magic and turn it into a word? For that matter, why did we create a culture that turns meaning on its head? Why did we ever find pleasure in this “fun-house”?

Because sometimes organisms go wrong… some systems, once tried, do not work. Those bad systems are not necessarily evil, just a failed trial that is quickly abandoned. Modernity is a very brief failed experiment in the vast crucible that is life. One of many billions. And not one of the worst. Humans like to be at the top of any list… but we’re really rather average in the geologic record… And, for the record, other failures have eventually found balance again, so Modernity probably will not wipe out humanity. Look at trees. When green things first multiplied on the  land, the entire globe was remade, after a few million years of ice. Further back, when photosynthesis was trialed, nearly every existing life-form was wiped away. Little of planetary physics or chemistry was unchanged after chloroplasts took over. But that painful disruption ushered in a world that has abundant capacity to create and organize and maintain good relationships. Maybe humans can pull off such a trick… But not within this distorted culture.

The wrongness will be eliminated. But not us. We are not our culture. It is not our nature. This culture is an aberration, a delusion that we must work very hard to maintain, that we must learn, that we constantly fight against. We could easily go back to being the intelligent species, the ones that name things, perhaps, but the ones that normally spread happiness, not curtail it and poison the very name we gave it. We are, after all, the children of Earth. With our clever hands and active curiosity and sheer appreciation of life, our nature is to make happy, slather it all over the place with song and dance and imagination.

This must be remembered, re-membered, reintegrated into our body. Shed the slimy taint of this cultural veneer and re-be who we are when we are healthy. In bodily relationship… Which makes a healthy mind. Which makes a healthy culture. Which might make a future for humanity. Be like trees. Whatever they were doing at first didn’t work out too well, so they changed and were changed, in turn, by the changing system. And now they are central to the system, keynote species most of them, spreading care, joy, health wherever they go. Be like trees is a good metaphor for what we need to do to escape the fun-house.

Too often we, who perceive the lack of fun and home and benefit, tend to focus on what needs to be eliminated. That is the culture talking. That is how we are conditioned to think. But we can’t impose our will on anything and have that work out well. Power does, in fact, in body, corrupt. Power over, that is… because even that word, within this culture, does not mean what it is. Power is the ability to be, to do, to manage this body so that it spreads happiness and right relationship. It is not imposition or control. It is also not ideological. It is doing and being, not thinking and wording. Power is a verb… And it has nothing to do with manipulating others. It is self-management. Self-efficacy. Being the best possible self in the best possible relationship to all other selves, which helps those others be their best possible selves.

So if I decide that you need to be culled from the system because you, with your fuel-guzzling SUVs and time-shares in Tahiti, are breaking the world, then I am doing wrong, no matter how right the motives. There is no justification in means, because means are the expression of the verb that is doing and being. No, our job is not to yammer on about elimination, to impose our ideas on the bodies of what we believe to be the source of dis-ease. Our job is to bring those bodies back into balance by drawing out their infection. Reveal the error and dissonance. Find the happiness and spread it around so that, by comparison, the dubious rewards of remaining in this culture are pale and stupid…

Which brings me back to the elements… This idea was not originally woo. No ideas are. All ideas originate in the context of embodied experience, reality, sensed and shared relationship. The woo is added so that some bodies can claim superiority, creating hierarchy rather than the balance needed in the world. Much of philosophy and “mysticism” is claiming superiority through obfuscation, creating a need for an expert to mediate between reality and most people. Said expert gaining cushy rewards in the process of mediating — within the terms of this culture. Mostly status.

As I said, all being is mystery. Nobody can understand it better than anyone else because it is inherently incomprehensible. The most that these specialists can claim is their personal opinion. To claim hidden insight is just silly. We are all alive in this world of magic. We are all beings, magical and mysterious and equally aware of that essential weirdness. The original task in philosophy and religion was to word the weird world as best we could. But our ancestors understood that interpretations are never universal or final, are always open to debate, to challenge and change from reality and other bodies living that reality. And back in those beginning days, every body participated in wording. And, despite this culture of status-seeking experts, we still do that work every lived moment, if less consciously. We are essentially wording beings, nature’s experiment in naming things.

The elements are a great wording toolkit that has been mangled by this culture of hierarchy. The elements were named in the process of living and discovering real things that “needed” naming, not in a process of abstractly imagining names. This contrast is well illustrated in the difference between how experts from EuroWestern cultures view the Dreamtime and how Aboriginal peoples live that wording of the world. What they actually do as embodied, relational wording beings compared to what outsiders talk about — which talk contains copious woo…

The EuroWestern perspective, conditioned to our system of dismissing most of the world as inferior things, not living processes, only sees the titillating bits of Dreamtime, the weird songs and crazy walkabouts. What we talk about when we talk of the Dreamtime is a grossly anthropomorphized body of “irrational” folk tales. What Aboriginals are talking about is a lived relationship with the land, the rocks, the stars, the rivers, other animals, the green world, even time itself. They are simply relating the facts of their embedded relationship with their place and time, describing the acts that produce the most healthy and happy ways of being.

For us… songlines have been infected with woo… because this infection is everywhere… because it does confer those ephemeral rewards within systems of dominance like ours… and this system has tainted everything. So Dreamtime, even within the cultures that embody it, has been corrupted, infected by our perspective, made less actual and more imagined. We don’t need to eliminate that baggage. Nor do the people who live with Dreamtime. That load of waffle will be gladly dropped, being too heavy to carry in our travels through life. We just need to see that it is waffle and look for the truth instead.

Same for elements… What did they originally mean in related, embodied terms?

To begin with, as lived wording, this toolkit means different things to different bodies, different places, different times, because it is defined in fluctuating relationship. It is not a thing in itself. Ideas are not things. They are words for being states, and words function best when they are broad categories, vague on the messy details. I believe words carry meaning even though the details vary substantially. I believe that is the whole point of words, to create meaning out of chaos of detail.

I also think it is entirely possible to tease out the meaning from all the baggage. Because we, as Earth beings living for the last couple million years, share common traits and experiences. Those commonalities are what makes us human, what makes us an Us. We are because we are similar. And even our culture of ranked individuals can’t hide the fact that we are broadly the same, with no distinguishing features. (This is one of the chief dissonances… that this is a culture of hierarchy and yet we live in bodies that can’t be logically ranked…) We live in commonality. We are the same in essence… that is why words, names for embodied experience, work. That is why meaning exists.

So there is a kernel of meaning behind the words we use for elements, and I think it is pretty darned useful for wording the world, for wording time and place.

Let’s start with the names. These are symbols, not things — Earth, Air, Fire, Water, not earth, air, fire, water. Only I like to arrange them so that they better represent the real world — Earth, Water, Air, Fire. Solid and enduring and seemingly immutable. Flowing and inexorable, yet a bit more malleable and changeful. Thin and omnipresent, in constant flux. And then the bright, brief cataclysmic transformation of pure energy (not that there is pure energy… but still…)

These are physical states, energy states, activity states — solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. But they are also ideas (because all our words are ideas, not things… there are no things when it comes right down to it…)

Earth is enduring. It is dependable. It is tangible. It may also be coldly indifferent, or at least perceived as such because it is slow and deep, existing on scales far beyond our perceptions. Earth has presence and stability. It may be resistant to needed change. It may be grumbly and obstinate. But it is unfailing and constant.

Water is a bit more active on shorter timescales. It is mutable and will adapt itself while molding its surroundings. It is capable of constancy, mostly behaving within expected and fairly durable rules. But it can surprise you with capriciousness. It can be deep and still and hidden from plain sight, but it is not quite as impenetrable as Earth.

Still we, as human bodies, do not do well inside these states. We are do not live within earth or water, though we are composed of earth and water. So we tend to have uneasiness with the interiority of stone or rivers. We don’t quite completely trust either… because we shouldn’t… we are not adapted to being within a mountain or an ocean.

We live in Air. Which is evanescent and whimsical. Powerful and ubiquitous, but diffuse and imperceptible. Air rushes through being. Air supports us and moves us, inspires us, whispers and sings to us of all that lies just over the horizon to which it carries us. Air is the music in our veins, the harmony we seek. However, Air is ephemeral, erratic. It is impossible to hold. Its tempers are sudden. We can hardly relate to the changes before they have passed us by.

Water may be moody and Earth may be broody, but Air is flighty and excitable, never still enough to comprehend.

And then there’s Fire, pure change. The transformation at the end and the beginning. It is all rage and power and destruction of form, but it is also source and fuel and food for all bodies. It is warm and nurturing when it is not blazing and callously meting out death. And yet…

Earth is the body. Water is the blood. Air is the inspirited breath. But Fire is life, raw and undiluted and almost, almost, completely without form, independent of time and matter. We want to be Fire. All our heroes are hotheads. But we miss truth at the center of all that potency. Fire is constrained… by the presence of bonds that can be broken to burn, by the absence of fluids that contain those bonds and keep them from burning, by the presence of diffuse space that can receive those bonds and inspire the breakage. Fire is nothing without Earth and Air and it fails utterly in Water. We, in this rank culture, do not recognize the essential balance between equals, and we have made a world of uncontrolled fire.

That is what the elements are… as far as I can tell… But how does this toolkit relate to Lughnasadh? Or time, more generally?

Well, I believe this toolkit is a direct and literal expression of the wheel (or maybe spiraling helix) of time. All four are expressed at all time and in all things. But the nature of life on this planet is to circle through time and space — because it is actually traversing circles through time and space — and those changes tend to emphasize one or more of the physical expressions of time and material, of the elements that seem to be in ascendence.

Winter is cold and broody and stony. Inactive. Sometimes seen as lifeless relative to our brief lifetimes because it is so slow and solid. Winter is Earthy. Spring is liquid. It is thaw and rousing. It is flowing and shifting and percolating. It can be sluggish, but it is moving forward (or energetically downhill, anyway…) It is Watery. Summer is exuberant. It is active. It is constantly in motion. It is expansive and abundant and inspiriting. It is the Airy warmth of fast-moving matter… but that warmth speaks to the Fire of autumn, the transformation of energetic expansion to ashen contraction, the dazzling catalyst from growth to death, which is also the seed-stock of life. Fire is the regenerative flame that burns out the old so that life can rest and then germinate anew.

See how brilliant our ancestors were! This is a perfectly apt metaphor for a year round. (It was created to be so, of course…) We have since lost some of the brilliance with our insistence on cultural interpolation. For example, the common representation of the wheel and the elements in Wicca — a notably unbased “nature faith” — is that autumn is watery, summer is fire, and spring is air. I suppose that might work, but it’s not so obvious.

Then they try to hang the elemental year on the directional and locational wheel, which is gibberish taken out of context… The Navajo wheel, upon which the Wiccan wheel is based, is rooted in actual mountains and weathers and rivers and changes, not abstract directions, but actual paths on the land… but I digress into cultural appropriation…

In my part of the world, winter is north. It is cold and solid and earthy. It is the actual place of earth. If I walk north, I might cross rivers and move through cold airs under the curtains of rainbow fire in the northern skies. But my feet will tread the earth for a long time, longer than I can walk. This is also true of the west and south, but north is where it feels most solid and unchanging. It is actually composed of continental shield rocks that are older and more constant than land almost everywhere else on the planet. (Australia is the planet’s eldest land… giving new insight into Dreamtime, no…) North is the least active, most solid to my embodied experience.

However, if I walk east, I soon come to water…

If I were to hang a directional wheel on time and the elements, north is Earth, Winter. East is Water, Spring. East is also the direction of sunrise, the beginning of expansion and movement, the awakening and new flow. East of here geographically is also actually more springlike in climate, even in winter, because the ocean moderates air temperature, warmer in winter, cooler in summer. It becomes several growing zones more tropical as I make my way east.

Moving further through time and elements and space, summer is where I am now. Summer is the sun rolling up the horizon from the south to bring activity and growth. South, to my perspective, seems like the place of perpetual growth, perpetual summer. If I walk south, I leave solid winter behind for the buzzing insects and nodding green leaves in southern breezes. (My body is confused by the south… in many ways… I was born in January, after all…)

Summer may not be quite as airy as I think it ought to be to make the metaphor seamless, but that only serves to reveal the metaphor… which is important to remember… Air may not feel summery warm, but it is in motion, which is perhaps a better image of summery growth. Air is energetic and active and has no time to sit and think. Likewise, the season of growth is not as carefree and leisurely as we think of summer. It is too busy flowing along. All that growth needs to get done before the sun waddles off to southern climes. That is how I experience summer anyway… so south is summer and airy activity.

But then there’s the sunset, the autumn, the path to transformation, sleep. The burning leaves of autumn under western skies. The pageantry of endings and gathering in. The harvest of all. The west is a long walk on the earth for me and it may not always be fiery. But it is, for me, the direction of autumn. (It is interesting that in the Celtic culture of my ancestors, west is the direction travelled in the transformation from living body to the Land of the Dead. But that isn’t as important to me…) The Southwest is the actual locus of fire for me. It is autumn. It is blazing color and amazing energy, all in obvious preparation for rest, for death. It is the land of enchantment, which I believe is synonymous with that magical transformation of regeneration in the midst of breakdown. There are even volcanoes just to emphasize the connection with Fire’s transformative creative destruction.

But there are also granite mountains and rushing rivers and dancing winds. Just like everywhere else. Though the framework of the wheel shifts as I walk in any direction.

And that too is the brilliance of this toolkit. It can be adapted to place. Any place. And it should be adapted to place or it doesn’t make sense, a constant reminder to look to the land before developing any ideas. In my part of the world that looking to the land, to the Earth, to the deep abiding stasis of truth, is literally named “finding north”. In many local languages. That brings me no end of intellectual merriment… and a sort of reassurance that I might be on the right path relative to the meanings given these words by actual grounded and embodied and experienced living people — my ancestors. And so I follow that path.

Which brings me to Lughnasadh. It is a celebration of autumn, a harvest festival. It is also a funeral. A mad raucous wake for the end of the growing season and the beginning of death. It is still warm. It is summery, but it no longer the inspiring airy growth of Midsummer. It is not casual abundance. It is determined, rather grim in its purpose. Feral gardens and terrifying storms and, under it all, the dying of the light. (Or at least the sun waddling off south.) There is rot under the cornucopia. There is ash piling up under the blazing bonfire. And there is the decided turn to face the sunset.

Lughnasadh is the beginning of the sunset of the year, the autumn. It is still summery excitable weather, because the beginning is never the full strength of a thing. That comes later. But though it is stormy cacophony at times, summer’s ascendence is over. Growth and expansion are over. Lughnasadh is the beginning, the subtle switch, to fall.

Here in Vermont, it actually is often the beginning of the breaking of summer. Maples begin to color. Nights begin to cool. Days are notably shorter — which of course intensifies the mad dash to preserve summer’s abundance. For me Lughnasadh is the end of the haying season, the beginning of the blueberry harvest and the first flush of sweet apples. There is usually too much zucchini. Too many tomatoes. Too much weedy growth. By now, I have composted the pea vines and frozen all the raspberries. I am moving toward planting a bit of cool season veg to grace the early winter revelries. It is exhausting. But it’s also invigorating, a clarion call… because I can see the end of the busy, buzzing summer from here, beckoning with all its cold, calm indifference and introspection.

Lughnasadh expresses itself as a sheaf of wheat in my mind both culturally and materially. It is golden and rich in color. It is bountiful, but underlain by that nagging uncertainty about the ability to survive the season of dearth — because that sheaf is all we get for months… there will be no harvest for another year. I don’t tend to be sad at the passing of growth though. I don’t mourn the loss of leaves or the migration of birds. That is how time works. I welcome the approaching winter… because I can finally sit down. (Or I should be able to if not for this damned economy of imagined perpetual growth…)

Lughnasadh is a celebration of in-gathering. As such it is a turning to the home, to family, to tribe, to the comfort and nurturing care of being in community. In Vermont, there are celebratory gatherings everywhere. Fairs and music and festivals. Harvest days at the orchard. There are contests and games. Who can grow the biggest pumpkin, produce the finest cider, win the trivia night at the pub by holding the most useless information in our collective head. School starts, with all the pageantry and excitement of that transformative change to a new grade level, a new school for many.

But Lughnasadh is not yet fully fall. It is the beginning. The Fire is still building. Lughnsadh is the end of airy exuberance, the end of summer, but fall and fiery transformation are not yet begun in earnest. And so the transformations are subtle. Just a wash of orange on the tops of the maples, not a blaze. Just a hint of warm red on the apple trees. Just the first fruits, not the full frenzied bounty of the harvest. Life is no longer expanding, but it is not yet dying.

There is a twist to the metaphor. Because there is always balance, when one element is in ascendance, it’s opposite in character and in time is usually strongly manifest also.

Picture the wheel of the year. The solar festivals, as the middle of each season, the peak of strength of each season, the strongest expression of each season, are placed at the cardinal positions. Midwinter is the middle of Winter. After Midwinter, Winter is on the wane… though the worst of winter weather has yet to come. It is the depth of the season of cold solidity. So Midwinter is North. It is Earth. Yet it contains within itself the birth of summer, the beginning of the lengthening of days. There is a stirring of activity. There is an actual expansion of the light, a lengthening of days. In the middle of repose there is a new buzzing energy. So the solidity of Earth is counterbalanced by the effervescence of Air, Winter by Summer, North by South. We experience this as the breathless bustle of Yule, perhaps best symbolized by evergreen trees in the midst of a frozen landscape.

The rest of the wheel flows clockwise around the year. It is very easy to see the polar opposites in this configuration. Midwinter at the north, Midsummer at the south. Vernal equinox at the east, autumnal equinox at the west. Then, the cross quarter days, the beginnings of each season (though usually the peak strength of typical seasonal weather, the thermistices and equitherms) fall to the blending point between each direction. Imbolg falls on the wheel where North gives way to East, Winter, gives way to Spring, Earth begins to melt into Water.

And you will notice that across from Imbolg is Lughnasadh.

Where Imbolg is moving from Earth to Water with Water in ascendance, Lughnasadh is moving from Air to Fire, with Fire in ascendance. Imbolg is northeast on the wheel. Lughnasadh is southwest. Imbolg is the beginning of spring, the opening of the season of growth; Lughnasadh is the beginning of autumn, the end of growth.

How are all these wordings expressed? How does balance manifest apart from our tidy illustrations? The directions are easy to see. The time is easy to see. But the elements?

This is where we need to disassociate, a little, the elemental meanings from the common meanings, Fire from fire. Fire is not about flame; it is an energy level, a measure of material activity. The warmer something is, the more active it is. So we perceive fire as hot. But Fire is not necessarily heat; it is the catalysis of creative destruction. It is the author of change.

When we talk about Fire in autumn, we’re not talking about a season of heat. We’re talking about an explosion that transforms summer into winter. The most visible representation of that explosion where I live is the changes undergone by deciduous trees as they prepare for winter’s rest. A riot of flaming color, transforming the juicy green of summer into barren grey branches and leaf mould. But it also is expressed in the storms of early autumn, hurricane season. And this is where it is easy to see the balance of the elements.

A hurricane is Fire. It is pure energy, writhing and spitting and terrifying. But it carries its own tempering balm — Water. As the storm churns warm, moist air into rain, it cools the air. It uses up and loses its energy. Water quenches the Fire. As autumn deepens, the energy of storms is lessened. And soon the frantic fiery storms give way to quiet mist which deepens to frost — and we’re back around to Earth again.

In my home, I have no hurricanes. I represent the energy of the season with symbols of harvest, of the myriad deaths that fuel life, and symbols of ocean, of the deep well that nurtures new life. I may talk about the Tribe and its preoccupations at this time of year, but I surround myself with what I see in the Land.

Which is completely compatible… because the most enduring traditions of the Tribe were forged in relationship to the Land. Even fairs and festivals are an expression of the explosive abundance of autumn. This is how the Tribe honors the Land, by mirroring the lavish generosity found in every corner of the world, particularly in autumn.

So the symbols of Lughnasadh, the fiery colors and first fruits, are not mere Idea. These are the material expressions of this time of year. The symbols of Lughnasadh are those of elemental Fire, which is, in turn, an expression of the physical energy level of this time of year.

I look to the sheaf of wheat on the mantle and am reminded of all these things. This is how I word the world, as well as how I see what is.

See? What a useful toolkit!

Now, it’s your turn… How do you word your actual world? How do you see what is and use that perception to spread happy? What does Lughnasadh, or autumn, or harvest, or Fire mean to you? And how do you express that meaning? Wording is your own life task… We are the creature that names things… So take out your tools and get busy.

Teaser image credit: By Alan James, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14568043. Pilgrims climbing Croagh Patrick on Reek Sunday. It is believed that climbing hills and mountains has formed a major part of the festival since ancient times, and the Reek Sunday pilgrimage is likely a continuation of this tradition.