Strawberry Moon

Hello volks,

What to say... things are growing at an amazing rate (weeds included), we are harvesting lettuce (loads of it), parsley, chives, dill, kohlrabi, broccoli, and yesterday for the first time strawberries! How amazing to have them as the first fresh fruit of the year. Interestingly this coming full moon is known by Algonquin tribes as the strawberry moon (link). These last days we have had our first proper rain since Mayday, (all this time it has been hot and sunny, hot and sunny, hot and sunny...) nonetheless the irrigation remains in operation 24/7. Hayfever is quite a challenge, this next week I think will be the peak time for grass pollen, must remember to keep taking homeopathic tablets. Something will be going down here at Midsummer, not yet quite sure what, can hopefully infuse whatever happens with some pagan spirit, Anthro festivals can be so dull... anyway here are some photos, including our wicker man from the Beltane fire:


Over and out (in the cosmos),

A.

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“And now these peoples were pressed by urgent necessity to settle down in one place forever and to eat their bread from a tilled earth! Long they resisted. For it was one of their most fundamental beliefs that free, uncontrolled nature was more than man; and that it was sinful to impose great changes upon the earth. Yet large scale farming—plowing and sowing—was that not the greatest compulsion, the most dire control, men could exert over nature?…When the new nations tilled the soil, they did so with a bad conscience. The thousand customs that surrounded every act of plowing, sowing, harvesting, and baking were spells calculated to ward off the vengeance of the offended spirits of the earth.

“…the Germans considered the tempest the creator and changer of the world. They would have shaken their heads at the civilized, rationalistic explanation of Hippocrates (460-359 B.C.) : ‘Anemos rheuma kai scheuma aeros [wind is a flowing and pouring of air].’ The power that broke forest and rocks; the force that heaved the waves of the North Sea—this could not merely be ‘air’!

“It was necessary to pay close attention to the figures the wind stirred up in the waving fields of grain. The spirits of vegetation, foreseeing that their death was near, were bent on mischief.

“The yellow fields of waving grain—to modern man a symbol of peace—in those times concealed terrors. In the waving of the ears, in the low hissing of the tufts, dwelt offended spirits.…The northern peoples heard ‘riders hunting thru the corn’ or ‘a witch twisting.’ But above all animals seemed to be at home in the grainfield, animals with a cap of invisibility. The effect of their motion could always be felt.…When the wind descended a sharp curve, people said ‘the hares have run thru there.’ And when the ears, pack upon pack, with yellow hind quarters and flanks, pressed panting against the ground, it was said; ‘Now the wolves are running.’

“These grain fields had come from Asia and Africa. Only two or three hundred years before sacred forest had stood in this place, cool and richly watered. The murmur of the twigs had been familiar, not uncanny like this silence of the grain. The forest had always been been the friend of the Teutons; it had been hostile only for the Romans when the Germans slaughtered them in the Teutoburger Forest. The brightness of the noonday sun upon the fields was again the ’corn mother,’ going about her field and searing the Germans' hearts with her fiery breath.

“Shouting, he ran amid the grain, cutting and slaughtering the ears. He had no feeling of this as peaceful work; it was an act of war that he performed when the tufted stalks of rye sank before his blade. Thinner and thinner grew the ranks of his foe, and finally the entire strength of the field fled into the ‘last sheaf.’ The last sheaf was the subject of many rituals—rituals that were a compound of fear and triumph. Among some tribes it was not cut, but ‘taken prisoner,’ placed upon a wagon, dressed in clothes, and the women danced around it, mocking it. Among other tribes it was honored: it was brought to a barn, but not threshed like the others. A traveling stranger must be given it to take along—perhaps this wanderer was odin?—or the sheaf was untied and then strewn over the field to placate the earth.”

~ exerpted from Six Thousand Years of Bread; Its Holy and Unholy History by H.E. Jacob