Lughnasadh

Art by Shelly Mooney - https://talesfromthewood.ie/

There is no Lion standing at the gate this week.

Tailtiu kneels at the edge of the cleared plain in the last hour before dawn, her forearms scored pale with bramble scratches, her hands still closed around the last of the stone she has spent the whole summer dragging out of this ground with nothing but her own two arms and the strength she has left in her. The linen at her shoulder has torn and been knotted back together more than once. Muck is packed under every nail. Exhausted from the exertion, she leaves behind her the plains of Brega. She will not rise again. Her foster son, Lúgh, will found games and will toast her name in her memory, but as all things fade to grey, it is he and not she that is remembered.

Marked by the Aonach Tailteann as far back as 1820 BCE (though some sacred sites hint at this time being honoured at least seven thousand years before now), the half-way point between the Solstice and the equinox, which falls this year on the 7^th of August, is known as Lughnasadh, a northern hemispheric festival that honours Tailtiu. She may have been forgotten and more recently replaced by a Lion and a portal, but the harvest that her toil readied is marked by the trees and brambles being heavy with late summer fruits and the days, hopefully warm, calm, and still long. It is a time of plenty and also a time of reflection.

Though the South is tilling the land ahead of planting, this cross quarter day may feel different, but it asks similar questions. If you are standing in the northern half of the world right now, you are standing in your own version of Tailtiu’s cleared field, whatever that looks like in your life, and what this week asks of you is the same thing it asked of her: an honest accounting of what the clearing cost, not just the gathering in of what it produced.

If you are standing in the southern half of the world, none of that ground is visible to you yet because you are standing at the opposite gate of the same wheel, in the part of your year where the work is still happening somewhere you cannot see it. What is being asked of you instead is faith, faith that what you are about to plant will gestate with love and patience and will grow, blossom and bloom into something that honours your toil and labour.

Underneath both questions is but one common asking. Lúgh’s name comes from a root meaning oath, and the fair founded over the grave of the woman who raised him was remembered as much for its bargains and its matchmaking as for its games, agreements struck between one living thing and the conditions it has agreed to grow inside of. Whether you are reaping or planting, ask yourself: what agreement is your life keeping right now, whether or not you can see the proof of it yet. Are you keeping it with your whole will, or only out of habit, the way anyone keeps walking a path long after they have forgotten why they started?

I would like to offer two further questions, depending on which gate of the wheel you find yourself standing at this week.

If you are gathering yours in: what did this harvest actually cost you, and have you let yourself grieve that cost as honestly as you have celebrated the yield of it?

If you are still waiting on yours: what is already moving in you that you have no proof of yet, and can you tend it with patience instead of reaching down to check whether it has taken root?

So wherever you are standing today, bring in what is actually yours to bring in, or keep faith with what is still working in the dark beneath you, and let your sOul learn what every harvesting people and every waiting people on this earth has always known, that gratitude and grief, and reaping and waiting, have never once been two separate languages at all.

And I would like to end this with a blessing, whichever gate you are standing at.

May you honour what was cleared to make room for what you are now holding, and may you let that clearing be grieved as fully as it is gathered.

May your sOul trust the labour that is still happening where you cannot see it.

May the oath your life is actually keeping right now be spoken openly and freely, whether that oath still holds your whole will or has worn down into habit without you ever noticing the day it happened, so that you can choose, again, whether to keep it.

And may gratitude and grief, reaping and waiting, be known this week for what they have always been underneath the wheel, which is one language, spoken in two different tongues depending on where you happen to be standing on the turning earth.