Wheel of the Year: Lughnasadh

Also known as Lammas (or Loaf Mass Day) by some Christians, Lughnasadh falls between the summer solstice and the fall equinox. Because it is the first of the three harvest festivals, celebrants typically bake bread with the year’s first grain harvest. In her book on the Wheel of the Year, Judy Ann Nock says that Lughnasadh is a time of both hope and fear as folk begin to bring in the harvest before blight or other natural disasters strike.

Nock says that Lughnasadh was/is an ideal time for handfasting. Handfasting is a trail marriage, lasting a year and a day. Beginning a handfasting in harvest season would allow a couple to have a chance to work together and overwinter together in close quarters. It’s fitting that this time of year, a time of hope and fear, is connected to romantic love. Aren’t all relationships—any time we open ourselves to love and be loved—a time of hope and fear? We are laid bare, made vulnerable. For what other emotional state can bring us to our knees—falling headfirst, leaping without looking, with hope for true intimacy and fear of disappointment.

How we rest in the space between hope and fear may reveal whether we will experience true intimacy or disappointment.

Recently I came across Terri Windling’s post on Myth and Moor where she writes about creative burnout as a time of fallowness, a time of the Underworld. Whether we are on the cusp of beginning a new creative endeavor or in the flush of falling in love, which is a descent to the Underworld if ever there was one, we stand at the edge in a dizzying trance. We are still in the Land of Summer but feel the call to something Other—though we don’t know yet what it is or how it will all go. And so we pause in uncertainty before making our descent. We pause in the space between hope and fear.

Residing in the space between hope and fear is pain. My own pain. Your pain. The pain of the world. All those traumas, little and big. It is a hard thing to sit in that space. To lie fallow. To heal. 

Sitting with pain has been the biggest challenge of my life—both in my creative life and in maintaining close relationships. I’ve always been fascinated by the story of Persephone, but when the time came for me to journey to my own Underworld, to confront my shadows, I did everything possible to distract myself from the pain. I drank too much, smoked too much, worked too much, and “loved” too much. It took me a long, long time to acknowledge the ways in which pain and the avoidance of pain shaped my relationships and affected my creative life.

And it’s still a work in progress. But now when I feel that anxiety, now when I’m able to recognize that I’m living in the space between hope and fear, I take time to sit with the pain, to sit with both the hope and the fear. To hold myself and others with compassion. I’m not always very good at it to tell you the truth, but that’s my promise to myself. One that I will make every year at Lughnasadh—a year and a day of committing to not only to love and growth, but also to the dark winter ahead.

Blazing Star (purple wildflower )