With any luck you’ve discovered the wisdom and sanity to be found in relating to the natural world in some way: you mess around in a garden or pay attention to the plants and birds & squirrels & such around your house or out there in the greater world, or maybe you relate in a personal way to a dog or cat or mynah bird whom you personally named and who is your intimate companion. Perhaps even your mynah bird has named you, in which case one hopes the name is complimentary or at least hilarious. Any means of putting a little distance between yourself and the overwhelming influence of your homo sapiens origins is a good idea, at least sometimes if not more often than that, for the universe and the natural world preceded us and it will prevail long after we’re gone, and that should make us all a little sad. On the other hand it might also generate a more cosmic perspective on things, whereby matter and the universe – or universes, whose numbers might be infinite according to quantum physics – comprise, indeed, a world without end.
If this world is not eternal – for it too will have an ending someday and did you know that? – it at least feels that way in one’s puny lifetime, and one of the never-changing aspects of this is the inexorable travel of our planet around its sun and the constant change of the seasons and of the light that comes with that, one year followed by the next and then the one after that and so forth. We have specific measures for this passage of time, first the many arbitrary human calendars with their religious and political and agricultural beginnings (which nowadays, depending on your persuasion, has devolved into month-long views of pictures of animals or nature scenes or classic Chevies or heroes of women’s liberation and oh so much more) or that other more eternal and cosmic measure: the milestones that denote specific moments in the changing of the light and thereby the weather and seasons that result.
As you likely know by now, the popular calendar-of-choice (the one on our wall shows sloths) tells us we just passed from the month of July into that of August. That calendar, you should realize, was bequeathed to us all by a 16th century Pope and his team of papal day-counters for reasons that will not be discussed here. July and August commemorate a couple of Roman emperors of ancient times. What you might not know is that this week also presents us with a true cosmic measure of the current stage of the passing year, where it’s all about the eternal changing light that once shone upon Julius and Augustus and Pope Gregory and which might be shining on you right as I write this. What follows is a somewhat technical breakdown of the whole process that strives for clarity (there are diagrams) but if it makes your head hurt, skip what you need to skip, and my apologies.
In the northern hemisphere there is that moment when the 23º tilt of the earth puts the sun directly overhead down below the equator, above the 23.5º south latitude known as the Tropic of Capricorn. From our northern perspective, the sun never gets too high in the sky in December and even then it’s not up there for too long, giving us our shortest amount of daylight, as well as lots of cold weather and all that winter fun and misery for several months to come. The season also offers those cherished winter holidays, just which ones depending on your culture and personal persuasions. That southernmost day of the sun’s position overhead is known as the winter solstice, around the 20th of December as measured by human calendars but the solstice is actually an exact moment in time that could occur on the 19th or 21st you never know, as human time and astronomical/cosmic time are not measured quite the same.
From there, the location of the sun directly overhead moves north a bit every day. When it reaches a point directly above the equator, that moment is known as the spring equinox, and the day’s duration equals the night’s. This happens the third week of March, in just Spring(!) when the world is mud luscious and puddle wonderful and many birds start migrating north and gardeners get their seed catalogues and dream…
After that the one we all know is the summer solstice, when the hot days are just beginning to accumulate in June only to get hotter and more frequent after that, and on that June day the sun overhead sits above 23.5º north latitude which is known as the Tropic of Cancer. At which point it reverses course back south, and the days are already getting shorter even though summer and the heat and school vacation are just beginning. It’s a funny little paradox to which most never give a thought. The sun overhead crosses the equator again in September, the fall equinox, and from there it proceeds right up until Christmas and Kwanzaa and Chanukah and all that to finish up the cycle.
So as of this week we pass from July into August and what you need to know (or so I think and probably nobody else – waddaya wanna do about it, punk? stop reading this? go right ahead!) is that this week we’re passing through another milestone in the cosmic cycle. No it ain’t the equinox or the solstice, but come this Saturday August 7 at 8:36am EDT, the sun will pass over the exact midpoint between the Tropic of Cancer and the equator, on what we call a cross-quarter day. Time to celebrate! Or not. What is curious is that the three other cross-quarter days in February, May, and November happen to occur around the same time as Groundhog Day, May Day, and Halloween, celebrations with which you are likely familiar. Already this year there were cross-quarter days on February 3, May 5, and this November it will occur on the 7th. So this week’s eventless August must be an anomaly, right? Of course any Canadian reading this might point out their Civic Holiday, which is celebrated on August first. Civic Holiday is a truly confusing hodgepodge of unrelated traditions that differ from province to province (each of which also has a different name for it), and happens to be a fairly recent invention for most of them. It is not a statutory holiday so many workplaces ignore it. The unifying concept for Canadians seems to be “the August long weekend” and what all Canadians seem to share are the traffic jams it generates on the roads as folks travel to fun summer destinations. It has absolutely nothing to do with what is related below, but as a country with deep roots in the British Isles, perhaps some clever Canadian politician or civic group could redefine it as a day of truly cosmic significance. Anybody interested? Read on!
It turns out there is one tribal and cultural tradition that has celebrated cross-quarter days since ancient times, and that is the Gaelic of Ireland and wherever Gaelic people happened to migrate. All the cross-quarter days have ancient names: Imbolc in February, Beltane in May, Samhain in November, and this week we get Lughnasadh. So: Happy Lughnasadh! Each of these holidays have associations with various pagan deities that are rooted in the natural world, along with fire and agricultural practices appropriate to the time of year, from planting to harvesting. Lughnasadh celebrates the beginning of harvest season, and if you are facing another bumper crop of tomatoes (or basil, in our case – best year ever!) as so many are in New England right now, perhaps it is time to call up your inner pagan.
On a grander scale, we get the pagan/wiccan Wheel of the Year, which includes the cosmic/astronomical days that have been mentioned, all of them rooted in the cycle of changes happening with the light in the sky. None of it relates to popes or Roman emperors or has any connection to grander human civilization at all, really – just people and the cosmos, as it has been since our species’ very beginnings. I’ve known most of this for some time now, but a trip above the Arctic Circle a few months ago led to reflection about human cultures living in the light’s wildest extremes. As in, an excess of light when it’s light around the summer solstice, and an extreme absence of same come December. Changes like that must surely lead to a special relationship with the light in the sky, no? I am not aware of ancient Nordic cultures having anything like the Wheel of the Year (not to say they didn’t) but it is also a fact that Ireland and Scotland are a good ways north, indeed, where agriculture might’ve been a bigger deal than in the Scandinavian and Nordic countries, and being attuned to light and the short growing season made community commemorations of the year’s passing – as measured by the light in the sky – a logical development.
Here in Boston at Lugnasadh-time there are many seasonal-specific things to celebrate. So many! It is peak season for grocery store nectarines and peaches, whose quantity and quality are due to deteriorate rapidly in the coming weeks so get ‘em while they’re good. The lily season is on the wane, with a few stragglers here and there, but sunflowers and Joe Pye weed and purple loosestrife and a few others (goldenrod, anyone?) are coming on strong. Despite a hideous drought in the northeast, the late summer weeds are as abundant this year as ever, doing their best in the city’s unwelcoming streetscape. Just now the clethra alnifola (sweet pepperbush) is starting to bloom outside our basement door and in swampy places everywhere hereabouts, and you don’t so much see it as smell it; certain bicycle rides in the next month will offer the lovely fragrance as a delightful olfactory surprise and a sign that summer is on the way out.
And kids are learning to sail on Jamaica Pond, and Franklin Park just had the first Puerto Rican festival in three years and suddenly every time one visits Paul Gore Beecher Street Community Garden, there are Monarch butterflies fluttering in all corners. PGBS is full of aware plant-people and has its share of milkweed plants, no weeds are they in this place. I just heard on the radio that Monarchs start their yearly migration about the time the sun’s azimuth lies at 50º in the sky, which I guess must correlate loosely with the cross-quarter solar moment that gives us Lughnasadh. So maybe the butterflies are pagans in some way? Such a silly question, but seeing the light is crucial if you’re part of the natural world. A butterfly would never forget that, but a human sure might.
