Lammas: Waters and Roads, Part I
In honor of the year’s first harvest festival, I wander by waterways and coastal roads to discover why I should be more of a hippie
I have a very special Lammas tradition that’s been remarkably consistent for nearly a decade now: first, I fail to mark the actual observance of the cross-quarterly holiday on August 1, and then I spend the next three weeks or so swimming in a lot of anxiety about it.
Hey, I said it was special and consistent, not that it sounds appealing or makes lots of sense. I should add the third step, though, because usually I come out the other side of my anxiety having learned some lesson about the year, the state of affairs, and the way forward.
Allow me to demonstrate just how consistent I really am:
On August 12, 2013, I wrote “It is a Holiday and I Don’t Like It” about how much anxiety it gives me and how I never celebrate it on the 1st. I’m not ready to start reaping the harvest for the year — I’m not even ready to really look at the harvest straight-on.
On August 7, 2014, I wrote “Taking a Vacation From a Vacation While On Vacation” basically about having arrived past Lammas and feeling deeply behind on everything.
Then on August 12, 2014, I wrote “Michael Brown Was Murdered and We’re All Screwed: A Sermon of Sorts for Lammas”, in which I contrast the tragedy of Michael Brown with the potential I see in educating children differently from the beginning (as in Waldorf education specifically; indeed, this may have been the first introduction to the Waldorf Dilemma)
On August 9, 2018, I wrote “The Dogs of Lammas” all about how I have a really difficult relationship with Lammas that involves a lot of anxiety about being behind and not ready to confront the implications of it all.
On August 10, 2018, the very next day, I wrote “Lammas in the Retrogrades”, a discussion of the SPECIFIC difficulties involved with observing Lammas in a year with like seven overlapping astrological retrogrades.
In 2015, I was apparently on “Wizard Sabbatical, whatever that means, and in 2016 and 2017 I may have been slacking too much to write about it but I’m sure it was right there, fresh on my mind. This is just a thing I do, every year.
Now, ometimes I like to thinkI’m getting better at all this. I mean, most things are still the same. I feel like I’m way behind on everything in all of life. I didn’t get as much done this summer as I wanted to. I feel a lot of anxiety right now about all of this. As always, I didn’t do much to mark August 1.
What’s a little bit different this time around is that I feel the anxiety and I’m convinced I’m behind, but the harvest didn’t actually sneak up on me this time around. I may not like it, but I’ve expected these early signs of summer’s end and this hidden beginning to this year’s harvest. I know that I’m feeling grief right now over the summer that’s gone, even as a week from now I’m going to realize that it isn’t really over and there’s more warmth and light and mirth to be had, even as I seek to kick off my “school year” of renewed discipline in two weeks (not to mention the busy church year that kicks off in three). I’m observing all of this without being surprised by any of it, and I think I can say without compromising my notorious modesty that this seems to be a good sign.
I also don’t have to feel much trepidation about the year’s harvest — no covering my eyes and peeking slowly between the fingers this time around — because I’ve been looking at it for a long time and have known well what it is.
The year is far from gone, but it’s on the downward slope; all its elements are present and usually we can see them by now. This has been a full year, a year that seems filled with grief and change, endings and confusion. For a while — at least through June — I considered myself exempt from this, only to learn in July that I am not. And even if I had been, it is enough to be surrounded by others going through such things even when one is not directly experiencing them oneself. That’s enough, right there, to define a year.
It’s more than that, though — of this I’m convinced. This is a difficult time period, maybe even what we might call a dark one. It started last year and by all indications is going to continue through 2020 before some kind of resolution/fulfillment greets us in 2021. On the way, we’re likely to have a whole lot more of what we’ve seen so far this year, all the change and grief and all that. It seems increasingly likely we might even get to deal with a recession layered on top of the never-ending election. It’s hilariously gloomy, isn’t it?
What’s become clear to me over the last several months, however, is that this is a time of great transformation — perhaps on a grand scale, collectively, as a society or world. Certainly this is true, though, for many of us as individuals, and it’s unquestionably true for me.
If we really want to be honest about it, I’d have to admit that this has been clear for a lot longer than just the last several months. But it’s been during this time that I’ve slowly and reluctantly come to accept it as true. Simultaneously, I’ve begun to receive (and then accept, slowly and reluctantly) some details about what this requires of me personally. Some color, if you will.
Sometimes it’s just a sense I get, but it’s more than that because it always eventually comes through in words, very clear words. It seems, usually, to come from somewhere outside myself; whether it actually comes from my unconscious mind, intuition sniffed from a more collective unconscious, my ancestral or other spirit-based friends, I really can’t say. But I’ve cultivated a pretty direct line with it and tend to connect several times a year, particularly when engaged in sacred ritual. I generally get some piece of very simple advice — and by simple, I just mean it’s usually pretty easy to understand, requiring little interpretation. That doesn’t mean it’s simple to implement or to follow. Quite the contrary. As with all advice, I never follow it until I find out the hard way that it was definitely right and I should have listened.
This year, it seemed like I wasn’t really getting much in the way of advice. So I listened a little bit harder, revealing — somewhat predictably — that a message has been being softly repeated all along. This time, the message is tough because part of me believes it sounds a bit dumb: “your pendulum needs to swing pretty dramatically back toward your hippie side.”
Told you it sounded dumb. But I knew immediately exactly what it meant. Like most people, there’s multiple sides to my spirit, some of which are basically at odds with one another. I have a hippie side. From the outside, this is probably pretty obvious given how often I talk about the Grateful Dead and not least because I have this strange tic of calling myself a wizard. Granted. It IS the side of me that becomes one with the music, the side that washes willingly down the rushing stream of magic and the spirit.
It’s also the side that’s gentle. That’s kind. That sees the good in others and the world. The side that actually has faith in the face of darkness and difficulty — you know, in times like these.
And it’s not at all to say that this side of my spirit has been suppressed or otherwise absent. Far from it. We’re close friends; he’s here with me now. But I’m not basing my will and my priorities and my actions and my days on this force within. Not at all. Because this is the side that isn’t calculating or ambitious. It isn’t sharp or vigilant. It isn’t aggressive. And for better or worse, for years now — I’m not even sure when it started — those are the traits I’ve been calling forward. I don’t say this with regret. It’s all justified. I needed that hardness, that edge, to pull myself out of the 2013–2014 gutter and not just survive but thrive. It’s worked, and it’s worked where gentleness and simplicity absolutely could never have worked.
Even beyond this sort of practicality, I would describe it as a necessary correction in my development as a person. In the past, my over-reliance on the hippie within led to a lot of pain and cognitive dissonance. Because my peace and love was unaccompanied by competence or credential or even a solid grasp on the often cold and hard nature of things, it led mainly to failure after failure; I lived a spirited life, but not a successful one. It often wasn’t even a fun one, because the pain of my failures was always compounded by a lack of understanding. It seemed like I wasn’t getting back from the universe what I was putting out there — absolutely silly as that sounds now — and that kind of thinking leads to resentment, which leads to more mistakes and a twisted overall disposition one might call the Hippie Miser.
In order to grow, I had to leave the hippie behind. Now I have the opposite problem. I’ve gone too far the other way. It’s like that old Dave Matthews line, “You seek up a big monster for him to fight your wars for you,/ But when he finds his way to you, the devil’s not going, haha.”
Haha.
Though perhaps not (always) quite a devil, the cunning courtier in me needs to be augmented by a nicer, slower, softer side. It’s been true for a long time, and I’ve known it longer than I’ve known how to articulate it. After all, this is what the Waldorf Dilemma is, is it not? More recently than that, it’s been obvious since the first moments of the year, when that same soft little voice told me it was time to start taking it easy on Phish and Tolkien — time perhaps even to appreciate them.
Here I am, eight months later, having listened to a great deal of Phish and contemplated a great deal of Tolkien. His world helps to illuminate this problem, as well, for my hippie side is actually much less like a wizard than it is some sort of hybrid of a hobbit and an elf.
He lives in Rivendell. Perhaps that’s part of the secret, too, that his job is to either bring others into the sacred hidden magical refuge or to bring the refuge out into the world.
As always, the question is — and has been — how?
With a couple of non-consecutive weeks away from work and partially away from home in late July and early August, I thought maybe I would spend some time along my journeys to try and seek out the answer to that question. Or at least the beginnings of one.
On August 1, we actually drove to the ocean. This had been my first time immersed in the great Atlantic this summer, much to my shame. On the way back, one of the older boys pointed out to me, “Daddy, we’ve been in a lot of different bodies of water this week. We’ve been in a lake, a pond, a pool, a river, and an ocean.” Damn, he was right. That was pretty cool, and though it hadn’t occurred to me until he said it, it was no accident.
So, indeed, lies the setting for our journey.
Keep your eyes peeled for Parts 2 and 3 later this week. Dispatches from the underground will return to their regular schedule on 8/29.