Celebrating Lammas in Troubled Times by Nan Lundeen

Lammas, that Celtic Earth-based spiritual tradition, has long been dear to me. Having grown up on an Iowa farm in the 1950s, I am accustomed to living close to the rhythms of the land. Gratitude for Earth’s first fruits comes naturally. The tradition calls for ritually baking a loaf from the first-harvested grain of the season, usually corn, and blessing it. It is a harvest festival and a time of gratitude and joy.

With a thankful heart I harvest a gracious plenty green beans from our son’s organic garden and take the first crunchy bite of a fresh cucumber. I already have harvested fragrant spearmint and spread it out on a towel in my writing room to dry and be crumbled for tea. We live in southwestern Michigan’s fruit belt now. Today I ventured out to local growers and came home with fresh cherries, apricots, blueberries, and cantaloupe.

My husband Ron and I recently reveled in a walk through tallgrass prairie acreage at Fernwood Botanical Garden (https://www.fernwoodbotanical.org/). We soaked in the ripeness and glory of white, purple, lavender, and yellow wildflowers standing at attention in the late July sun, bravely blooming despite the air quality alert that had hit the upper midwestern U.S.

But just as Laura Shannon wrote in this space on August 1, 2020, when Lammas was celebrated in the shadow of the grief and suffering of the covid-19 pandemic, so we face a Lammas this year under skies darkened by Canada’s heartbreaking wildfires.

Shannon harvested hope that the pandemic losses would help us find new and better ways of living. I, too, widen my vision. I am grateful for the many beings who share Earth with us and who make first fruits possible: The gentle earthworm toiling in the soil, the black snake parting green grass into a here-and-gone-again path, the ladybug chomping aphids.

This Lammas, more than ever, I dwell on how beholden we are to all Earth’s beings for life itself. Instead of gratitude, we have returned to them and our children and grandchildren a planet fouled by pesticides, herbicides, plastics, and fossil fuels.

We are waking up, though. A new generation may see with open eyes and hear the cries of those cursed by the rotting fruits of our greed and arrogance.

As our climate deteriorates, my imagination consoles me. My mind settles on those we are shoving toward extinction, and I bless all those who work diligently to save them, such as the Center for Biological Diversity https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/ and the World Wildlife Fund, Inc. https://www.worldwildlife.org. Among their goals is clear, clean water.

Imagine a place for our fellow earthlings where Guanyin, the Goddess of Compassion, welcomes them. This sonnet is dedicated to all those whose lives are threatened:

Clear Water
Guanyin at the gates of compassion welcoming home Earth’s lost

Emerald dragonfly lights on Her shoulder,
exuberant to find free-flowing streams
bubbling pure. On the third day she drinks
her fill and rests hidden in hills of green
where free from plunder, elephants trumpet
word of clear cool water to their sisters,
stirred by Creation’s guttural thunder
theirs is a future of new strong daughters.
The great matriarch’s trunk swings, spraying krill-
swirled sea foam, delighting the humpback whale,
with what is naturally hers or was until
greed and arrogance killed all that was good.
On the sixth day, she pauses, then trembles
with bliss. Her slap-happy fluke remembers!

BIO: Nan Lundeen’s books include Gaia’s Cry, The Pantyhose Declarations, Moo of Writing, and a memoir, Black Dirt Days. The last two were finalists in national indie publishing awards. Her poetry has appeared in The RavensPerch, Atlanta Review, Connecticut River Review, Steam Ticket, Illuminations, Yemassee, The Petigru Review, inkpantry.com, her fiction in Evening Street Review, nonfiction in patheos.com, U.K.’s Writing Magazine, The Paddock Review, SC Writers’ Workshop’s The Quill, and numerous newspapers. The retired award-winning journalist holds an M.A. from Western Michigan University. Visit her at www.nanlundeen.com.