Early Fall: September 16-20, 2026
This is the time of year when our vegetive relations who we have been feeding with our love (and our compost) for months, whose seeds I have carried for decades, turn their love back toward us, burgeoning with fruits to sustain us through the long cold months to come.
The Harvest is a miracle every year. While farming seems solid and reliable, ask any plant farmer and they will tell you “it is not”. So many things can go wrong. A whole culture has to come together in a magical way for it to work. For this to happen you generally have to be there, present with the plants in the garden in a very cultured way. And for growers out at the edge of the wilderness like me, I also have to attend to my relations of that wild world (because of predation). And if any of the things don’t come together then the fecundity of the farmed ecology is lost. And while we can easily make more than one mistake a year, you only get one chance each year to practice this ancient art. So it takes many teaching and many years to claim gardening wisdom.
Working with the sacred masculine in ceremony at this harvest and storage time of year, at the end of the growing season, seems appropriate to me because it has to do with decisive and deliberate planning, involved in growing, harvesting, processing and storing food. While we practice our cultured arts like agriculture we can dwell in the ‘present’ and ‘horizontal’ sphere of the feminine. But the planning and decisiveness of “the big harvest” feels very masculine to me. As the spring, the time of birthing, feels feminine to me.
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