When I began exploring and practicing Paganism as a teenager, Lammas was a season I just got. Nestled squarely between the beginning and ultimate end of the growing season, this time of year feels like when we should start thinking about the harvest. Tomatoes, peppers, and zucchini are coming on in full force. Apples, pears, and walnuts continue to visibly ripen. We’ve cleared the early summer harvests of cherries and berries. It’s a turning point that feels very visible to me, in a way that the other “cross-quarter days” don’t. A switch seems to flip, and the world changes from growing to ripening.
The beginning of the harvest season also meant beginning to put food by. The weeks sloping to the end of summer were full of enjoying fruits and vegetables as they were, but also full of canning, freezing, drying, and fermenting. While we could enjoy many fruits from our garden and orchard as-is, this quickly becomes unsustainable. Putting food by allows people to enjoy them later on after the days shorten and the temperature drops. Indeed, few of the products we enjoyed then or later on were fresh and un-processed in some way. Transformation is a necessary part of reaping anything we’ve sown.
This is the heart of the metaphorical side of this season. Many people take this time of year to check in on the progress of workings, practices, and disciplines that they’ve started earlier in the year. This is a time of literal harvests, an in sync with this it is a time for figurative harvests as well. It’s a time to reflect on how the metaphorical seeds we’ve planted are coming to fruition. To think about how we’re transforming those harvests, and in turn how they are transforming us. These are the themes I want to reflect on with you today.
For many witches and Pagans who celebrate it, Lammas is the first of three festivals in the Wheel of the Year that focus on the harvest, followed by the Autumnal Equinox and All Hallows. It’s a juncture in the year that shifts focus on the way that things come to fruit. For magical practitioners, it can be a time to see the early outcomes of intention-setting, and a time to check-in on the development of new practices. Whether we’re magical practitioners or not, many of us at different points have started new endeavors, and have put enough investment into them to keep track of our progress. Some of this metaphorical sowing can look like setting New Year’s Resolutions, such as starting a new hobby or discipline. Maybe you’ve committed time to walking or meditating regularly. Maybe you’ve taken up drawing, or reading tarot, or playing an instrument. Maybe you’ve put out job applications after a period of unemployment. Now might be the time to reflect on those projects. Have they come easily? Have they provided the comfort or outlet you hoped they would? Did you hear back from any of those prospects?
In literal as well as metaphorical gardening, not every seed takes root. Now might also be the time to inspect what didn’t take off. Can you learn anything from the failures you encountered? Sometimes things don’t go the way we hoped, or don’t yield the result we were striving for. The learning opportunities these experiences provide can be just as important as the ones provided by success. You can ask what you might change next time. Or what did you actually need in hindsight? Maybe the answer lies in different seeds, different soil, more rain, less sun. Maybe the goal, maybe the process, wasn’t what you needed at all.
I’m a big fan of introspection, and spend a lot of time in my own head asking these sorts of questions, sifting and weighing the outcomes of what I’ve started. Maybe some of you are the same. It’s really easy for me to say, “That’s it! That’s the harvest, there’s nothing else to do here”. And sometimes there isn’t. Enjoying the process for itself has a lot of its own merit. We don’t all need to be book-reviewers, or chefs, or virtuosos to enjoy reading, cooking, or making art. And in a world where I see more and more of my friends and peers thinking about how they can market and commercialize their hobbies and interests, I think we do well to enjoy the fruits of our labors as they are, for themselves. This said, we might find ourselves asking, now what do I want to do with this new skill, or perspective, or life development? Where do I want to go with it? How do I want to transform it?
While you were cultivating this new thing in your life, maybe it reminded you of something else you want to do. Maybe you saw something else that it could lead you to if you adjust it just a bit (or adjust it drastically). Or perhaps cultivating this new skill or hobby or area of interest was a means to some other end. You might have learned a new skill to get a new job, or advance in the one you have. Maybe you learned some woodworking for a bigger home-improvement project. Transforming this skill or interest into something else entirely might have been the goal all along. And this too is a process that has merit in its own right.
Far-out as it might sound, I think fermentation is a good way to illustrate this literal and figurative process. In the literal sense, traditionally it’s been a way of putting food by, along with drying, smoking, and other processes. This cabbage we’ve grown won’t last forever, but we can enjoy it longer as sauerkraut or kimchi. Milk might not have a long shelf-life, but we can extend it by turning it into cheese or yogurt. In many times and many places it’s been a way to plan for the future and preserve excess. And just as much it’s been an end of itself. We can make bread fluffier by fermenting it. We can make beer and wine and mead by fermenting grain, fruit, and honey. Some things, like coffee, tea, or chocolate, are better or at least distinctly enjoyable because of the transformations they’ve gone through.
Figuratively, the process of fermentation can lead us to consider not just what we’re changing in our lives but how. In our first reading, writer and educator Sandor Katz reflects on the role that environment plays in fostering literal and metaphorical fermentation. He comments on the way that fermentation requires shaping environments to inhibit the growth of certain organisms and their characteristics to support the growth of others. He phrases this analogy in a reactive way, suggesting that we should change because our environment is changing1. While true, I think this metaphor might be put to better use proactively. Literal fermentation requires a person to focus not only on what they’re making but on the environment in which they’re making it. We put care and attention into the set up to foster the outcome we’re looking for. In a more metaphorical sense, we can work more intentionally to create the environments necessary for the change we want to see. What do we need to encourage in this transformation? Are there things we need to discourage? Maybe it’s dedicated time or dedicated space for meditation, or reading, or yoga. Maybe we need to rearrange our time or space just a little, and scale back the ambitions we had for our new project so that it fits more sustainably in our lives.
I’ve found plenty of value in the process of transformation itself. Like many people through this pandemic, I cultivated a love of fermenting things. It’s a love I’ve cultivated for many years now and one I grew up with. While I enjoy the end products, I love the process as much or sometimes even more. I find something profound and mystical in turning cabbage into kraut, fruit into wine, lead into gold. As a Pagan, seeing the beginning and final product, but not the microorganisms that make the change, helps me experience the living-ness in the world around me. As a Unitarian Universalist, I can see the interdependent web of life at work here.
I think this personal experience illustrates the two-way nature of transformation. The process of enacting change can involve some amount of change in ourselves. At another point in his interview, Katz reflects on a common take-away he’s observed regarding fermentation:
One thing I hear often from people is it’s making them more aware of invisible forces that are continually at work. When you’re focusing on your little jar of vegetables that’s fermenting and you can’t see any of the bacteria and yet you begin to see changes…It forces you to pay attention in different kinds of ways and people carry this beyond the kitchen where they’re fermenting, in terms of maybe keener sensibilities2.
After investing all of that time and attention, you pay attention to how interconnected life is. Each little thing involved participates in something bigger, seemingly miraculous. The salt and the cabbage create brine. The brine keeps aerobic bacteria and molds from growing. Anaerobic bacteria transform the whole mixture. And slowing down, checking your project every day, you see little changes add up. And seeing this, maybe you’ll wonder about the other imperceptible changes happening in the world all around us. If nothing else, you might leave the process with a little more curiosity. This example might not carry over for all of you. But it could lead you to think about how the changes and projects happening in your life are transforming you. How have they changed your outlook on life? Have they encouraged you to understand something through a new perspective? How are you different today because of the weekly walk you started months ago? What have you experienced because you started meditating, or drawing, or doing yoga? It’s all grist for the mill.
It could be that the change is still happening, and will only become apparent somewhere over the horizon. In our second reading, Greg Richardson anticipates that change is inevitable, and that whatever work we’ve put into cultivating the new things in our lives will have an eventual outcome. His emphasis here is that people create spiritual practices so that they can rely on them when it’s most necessary. When it’s hardest to be grounded, or inspired, or connected – that’s when spiritual practice pays off when we’re not expecting it to. In his words, “This is when we learn what sort of transformation is taking place in us3.”
Through all of these examples I’ve talked about projects, harvest and change on an individual level, things that in the grand scheme of things are small. But these attitudes and observations apply to bigger changes and manifestations happening in our world as well. We continue to reap the bitter harvests of climate change, xenophobia, anti-black violence and antisemitism. Of numerous other harvests. While we may dwell on how these have changed us, we can continue to focus on how we change the world around us in spite of these forces. What environments, big and small, can we change to foster truth, or justice, or healing and reconciliation? These are questions to consider too.
We change the harvest, and the harvest changes us. While change of some kind is inevitable, we maintain the power to shape how many of those changes occur. So this year over Lammas, consider how your world is changing. Consider how your harvest is coming in. See how it’s connected to other or bigger projects in your life. And consider how all of this might be changing you.
1. Emmanuel Vaughn-Lee & Sandor Katz, “Fermentation as Metaphor: An Interview with Sandor Katz”, Emergence Magazine, October 22, 2020, https://emergencemagazine.org/interview/fermentation-as-metaphor/
2. Ibid.
3. Greg Richardson, “Practices from the Inside Out: A Summer of Transformation,” Patheos: Strategic Monk, July 13, 2021, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/strategicmonk/2021/07/13/practices-from-the-inside-out-a-summer-for-transformation/