The Harvest Moon is full today at 10:34pm. This moon nearest the autumnal equinox, this period of rapidly shortening days, gets its name because it appears full for several days and therefore gives evening light to those who are harvesting the fields, racing against the sunset. However true this might be, at this time of the year, the daily difference in time of moonrise is at its yearly minimum. So at the full, when the moon rises opposite the sun, the moon rises very near sunset for several days. This actually started last night and will continue through tomorrow. Even Thursday’s moonrise, still less than 48 hours from the full, will only be a half hour after sunset. So we have many days of moonlight to light our garden tasks. If we are inclined to garden by moonlight…
I’m really not. I have enough trouble seeing what I am doing in the daylight. But it’s more the bugs that I can’t abide. And there seems to be more concern with the equine encephalitis virus this year. They are telling us to keep covered up or put on other nastier forms of protection from mosquitos. I think I’ll just watch the moon from my bedroom window. I don’t deal well with insect bites without viral infection included in the bite. And, anyway, I am far enough along with my harvesting that I don’t have to risk nerve damage or death to pick a few more cucumbers.
Tonight’s moon however does come with a partial lunar eclipse. This is very subtle. There is no obvious change in color, nor shape. It is merely a dimming of the normally very bright light of the full moon. It will look like it never reaches full, which is interesting, I suppose… but also a bit sad. So I think I won’t worry too much about watching this one. Though for once I can actually see the night sky. It has been clear for days now. There is dense fog every morning, but it burns off by midday, giving us spangled skies nearly all night long. So moonrise at sunset will be lovely! I might even go find an eastern horizon that isn’t hidden by hills… something of a challenge, but aren’t beautiful moments like this what life is for?
Today is also the Feast Day of Hildegard of Bingen, one of the greatest influencers in medieval Europe. Her works were read and promulgated by bishops, kings, and popes. She led the western world in matters ranging from medicine to music, and her unique philosophy of life is still fresh and inspirational.
Hildegard believed in greenness, viriditas, the juicy and interconnected vitality of all living things. She saw her world as a glowing embodiment of life-force, of god, and she wrote volumes on her visions, always feeling the need — possibly a vital need — to apologize away her sight as that of a weak and silly woman. But her music makes no apology, and her herb craft could only have come from a mind that firmly believed in a holistic nature.
Recently, Hildegard has had a renaissance of sorts, almost a thousand years after her death. Her music is interpreted and recorded by groups such as Anonymous 4 and the Gothic Voices. Matthew Fox has written several books on Hildegard. She forms something of a cornerstone of his writing and thinking. Hildegard’s own books, such as Physica and Scivias, are readily available in many editions; and there are also many editions of her collected works for those who would rather read the highlights of her voluminous output. Her writing on herbalism is still used as reference material for those practicing herbal medicine or growing herbs. And she is a popular subject for the creative output of others, inspiring and being featured in plays, novels, music, film, documentaries and art. She even has a seat at Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party.
Hildegard also invented her own language and alphabet. Some believe that she might have used her language, which she named Lingua Ignota (“unknown language”), as a sort of secret code among the nuns of her abbey, a way to foster solidarity among women who had few protections in the world. Others think this was just her shorthand. Hildegard’s writings are largely inspired by visions. Her descriptions of these visions have led Oliver Sacks to conclude that she was suffering migraines. She does seem to have been violently sick with each vision. But whatever the debilitation, she was recording these visions as she had them. I suffered migraines up until menopause. I can’t imagine writing through that. But if I were to write, I would definitely use symbols and codewords rather than try to capture the details of what is largely indeterminate imagery and sound. Her language is a list of mostly nouns, and mostly nouns related to sacred ideas, though she did have a word for “sparkling” — chorzta. So it would have been a very useful way to scribble things down quickly while in the possibly painful throes of a manifestation. Still, it is fun to imagine her nuns sending each other secret letters, especially when we remember that Hildegard herself probably had reason to write letters in code to her dearest friend and mentor, Jutta.
Hildegard is endlessly fascinating, but what I find most inspirational is her idea that god is in everything, that god is life. Or maybe that Life is God. And she found life quite “juicy”. I love that particular word! We don’t often equate the flowing, fluid, sticky sweetness of juice with the sacred. God is normally encased in dry dusty pages, so brittle they crumble under your fingers. Not Hildegard’s god! Her god is mutable and vibrant and squishy, a continual fountain of life’s nourishment. Her god is a sensual, embodied delight. Her god is uncontained, oozing through cracks, dribbling through pores, and gushing through every living being. I like a juicy god. A juicy god reveals herself, no words necessary.
Though I do like chorzta…
I started to write a new harvest story, but the more I wrote, the more it sounded like this Winifred Mumbles tale I’ve already written… and I like Winnie better than any character I’ve invented. So, I scrapped the new one and went with the already completed (which completion is also an attractive feature… given time and all…)
Here is “Of Beans and Eternal Fancies” again for the Harvest Moon’s Full Moon Tale.
Of Beans and Eternal Fancies: 15 Winifred Mumbles
Nine quarts of dried black beans stored in the pantry. Translates into something like thirty-six pots of soup each lasting me a week. There’s corn enough for tortillas through March. Then, I guess, it’s wheat flour. Where from? No idea. Not my part of the world. Always appears when needed though. Wheat is magical that way.
Suppose it’s not that magical. Nor is it actual wheat, from all I can tell. Some perennial grass they grow upriver between the higher mountains. Tastes just fine, but doesn’t have the elasticity of real wheat. Sometimes, I put a bucketful of einkorn into the winter paddock to get that rise out of bread. Sometimes, that’s the only way to bake apple cake in the fall.
These blue equinoctial skies make one thoughtful. Here we are, confronted with time and decay and finitude all laid out in its bright array. Can’t hide from a mountain covered in the orange and gold preparations for winter sleep. Though it has been tried. What led to here, I suppose.
There once were balloons in these blue autumnal skies, skirting the valley mists like so many soap bubbles. Thin envelopes of air carrying those ancient people of rust and waste up and above the fall and all its temporality. Never mind that they all came back down. No doubt, some with abrupt finality. Thus erasing the escape entirely.
Never understood that rusty need to travel and then just return to where you started. Go places, yes, but stay there. Don’t negate all the time spent in moving just to return to start. But even going is a nuisance in the harvest season. Or any other part of the growing season, I suppose. Must be, there were those who had no bonds to body or land, and so they could just up and wander off with the tumbleweeds. But tumbleweeds are dead. And a pain in the ass.
And they never come back.
Can’t see how they found joy in all that. But then there isn’t much apparent happiness in most of their stories. Always running away, they were. Escaping from their own and only lives. Sad state. Did they not notice that there is nothing to escape to?
There was that book of the dead written in the autumn of rusty culture, when all that was made was crumbling and burning.
…and, lo, they built sprawling box markets in which to buy the garbage that in time choked the mighty oceans, and they covered the lands in concrete so that they might spend these few hours in transit between here and not here, and they hung screens to occlude vision so that the people would always be nursed on a proper pabulum and might never entertain a thought for themselves — for if they did, then woe betide those few who praised the synthetic moonlight.
So some noticed. At least when the center failed to hold. Most story-tellers were never so observant. Tales of space colonies erupting when the planet could not contain their fear of dying. Hm… And again, even a blind chicken could see that there wasn’t a shred of reality in these stories. So why build? Why spend effort and thought and resources and lives on these empty fantasies? Fireside epics are nice for winter storms, but you leave them there in the dark gloaming. You don’t go building bridges to elf-land. Even if you could breathe those airs and eat fairy food, you don’t survive in the places that don’t know your body, that your body doesn’t know and trust for sustenance.
How could people be satiated or happy if they never learned to be earthly and bound up in the mystery and enchantment of living in this web of beautiful reciprocity? Churro fleece on my back. Grass in churro bellies. Sunlight and rain transmuted into sweet grass. Sun the engine of all this life. And me? I just attend to it all here in my space, gaping in sheer amazement that it all exists in this particular brief time just to nourish me. Why would I want to escape! What better could there be! And if I escape, then the ring is broken.
Sad that a whole society never asked themselves these sorts of questions. So sad that they did not question and so did not see the hole in the center of their collective soul. Harvest must have been truly terrifying to a people running from the ring, running from their life and its incumbent death. Look at the tales they invented. Beings that stole breath from children so that they could live forever. But in such a state! Old and bent and ugly except for glamoured skin. Could be a metaphor for their whole culture. How could they not notice that they were dying all the same?
I might pity them if they hadn’t made such a complete mess of things. Still cleaning up their undead disasters. Ironic that the waste is the only bit of their chasing eternal life that was perpetuated even a second beyond their last bodily breath. Plastic and poison and concrete and desiccated airs. And flames. Some still burning in the bogs and deep places where the canaries all died — but the digging carried on nonetheless. They told themselves stories of eternal hell to frighten the living out of people. Flames in the darkness and an eternity of dying. Well, they succeeded in making that real enough. It’s still here. Undead. Because none of it was alive to begin with.
How they couldn’t know that, I’ll never know. Just like I’ll never understand a desire to escape my only life. Yes, maybe it would be nice to not have to sweep away the sand from the front door or to clean the tumbleweeds off the fence. And I’d not say no to an escape from cleaning the chicken coop. But that’s no reason to go to the extra effort of leaving. Better to just sit down. In place. Enjoy the color on the mountain. Breathe in these blue airs. Warm these old bones by the stove. Listen to the hens and churros complacently singing themselves to sleep. Drink tea from my garden.
Not much that a hot cuppa can’t fix.
And if you really need escape, lie down in the stables and dream sheep dreams. Now, there’s a break from human reality, with no need for fuss and recovery.
But if you really need an escape, ought it not be permanent? If you dread life so that you have to run away from your days, maybe it would be better to run to something better instead.
Rusties didn’t get that, I’m sure. To much ringing logic.
It’s said there were ships like floating cities, built for nothing but escape. Inns like palaces erected in the sands just to see a different sunset on a handful of days. Books printed in the billions with nothing but the architecture of escape plans. All that to run away from their own dead souls. When all it takes to be happy is to be where you are. What you are. Who you are. In your time and place and body.
Look in the eyes of a hen. There’s nothing but contentment. And curiosity. And love. When she’s not considering how you might taste if she were bigger, that is. And even that is a kind of bond. You feed me, I’ll be you, we’ll carry on together down this path. And this path is eternal. Well, as infinite as anything a bound universe can offer anyway.
But the rusties lamented the things that fell apart and never saw that all those parts became new wholes.
Pathetic.
Things for amazement: the willful capacity for human blindness.
Things for sorrow: same.
But my harvest is here all around me. Nine quarts of black beans to build a life through the winter. And blue corn tortillas. And churro wool to keep out the cold. And the odd egg in December. Makes me angry that anyone would run from all this giving and living. Such profound ingratitude! When they never did go cold or hungry!
And they thought that was down to their own cleverness…
Where else can you find the peace of a full belly and warm bones? Not in the stars. Awfully cold and hungry out there. Not a bean to be found. Never mind a churro. Nor even a flame-kissed mountain under blue skies. No blue in space to fill up your dreams. Unlife, that is. Running away, never to…
Well, enough of that. That void can suck up all thinking. Might be a reason the rusties were so unreasonable. But not me. I’ll take my time, thank you. Time to sweep the sand and clear out the tumbleweeds and watch the skies turn blue to pink to purple to black. And then to the kitchen for black bean stew and blue corn flatbread. And a pot of lavender and honey tea while my tired feet rest in front of the cedar fire. Where in all the universe can you find such luxury?
And all I had to do for this harvest is to live… in place… and time…
Makes you think…
How much narcism can a body bear? This world has had all it can manage and more. But it will always find ways to draw the gaze away from the navel. A species that uses up all the oxygen will die. And then the trees carry on filling up the void with new creation. There’s where the escape leads…
Right back to where we all started. No matter the energy expended.
So why bother…
I’ll put the bean stew on to warm, shall I…
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
By My Solitary Hearth 