Posts Tagged ‘autumn’
Harvest Festival
Come, into the circle, come,
Raise the song of Harvest Home.
All is safely gathered in,
Let the winter storms begin.
Now our Goddess does provide,
For our needs to be supplied.
Come, into the circle come,
Raise the song of Harvest Home.
All the earth is her own field,
Fruit unto her praises yield.
Wheat and corn together sown,
Unto joy or sorrow grown.
First the blade and then the ear,
Then the full corn does appear,
God and Goddess grant that we
Whole and pure as grain shall be.
from a Pagan Harvest Prayer.
Boerderij Dronkers
Autumn, beautiful, wonderful autumn, my favourite time of the year. Here in the northern hemisphere autumn officially began Tuesday, September 22, the autumnal equinox, for me it began this weekend.
On Friday Nina and I marshaled our troops, that is to say three children and two guide dogs, packed up our rugged country clothes for a long weekend and set off to invade Nijmegen. We moved, lock, stock and barrel to my parents for the weekend, for a few days of autumn celebration on their farm, the Pagan festival of harvest.
Pagan Festival
Each autumn, usually on the weekend nearest to the autumn equinox, for longer than I can remember they celebrate the Pagan harvest festival. This is much to the irritation of the local Dutch Reform Church minister because my parents celebrations are better attended than his church ! Even more irritating is that the whole event is filled with the pagan stories of harvest festival which show rather show up the Christian event for the fraud it is. Typically of the Christian faith harvest festivals were hijacked from Pagan celebrations.
The weekend is actually pretty hard work setting up tables, tents and facilities. The farm animals have to be moved to enclosures for the weekend so that they will be safe and yet guests can pay their respects to them. The harvested produce of the farms is set up into displays so that people can see the variety of things our organic farms produce. The yards have to be cleaned, a job I have always done since childhood, while the farms hands laid on power and water so the local sellers can set up stalls in the yards to sell their very fine produce.
This year with Nina being with child she was let off the heavier duties but she helped set up the story reading circles in the fields and down by the lake. We make them out of semi circles of straw bales with a radiant gas burner in the centre to provide some heat. This year Brigita had the idea of setting out a screen on a boat on the lake with a PC driven projector on another craft close by so that pictures of the ancient pagan gods could be projected out over the lake. I could not see it so well having limited night vision but I am told the effect was rather good.
And Hundreds Came….
All day Saturday parties of people were shown around the farm, given the chance to touch animals, taste produce fresh from the fields, drive some of the machinery and even try and plough a few lines on a field. On another field my dad ran a ploughing display using steam traction engines. They are a wonderful sight and beautifully atmospheric with the smells of hot oil, coal smoke and steam. They are our sons’ favorite and he always manages to get up onto the footplate of one of the huge machines!
All through the afternoon people wandered about the farms visiting the animals, the great barns, and the produce market. For children and families we lay on nature walks and field competitions, treasure hunts that ranged through the woods and fields. The woods are home to many rare flowers and plants and these in turn support many insect types so during the summer months they are largely off limits to the public but this time of year people are free to roam. In the barns children have a chance to stroke, feel, feed and hold animal such as goats, lambs and horses. This is my favorite part, watching the expressions of children as they discover the animals. All children respond well to animals, but it is especially rewarding to see how children with problems react to animals. To hold an autistic child in your arms and lift them up to the massive bulk of a Belgian draft horse and feeling the child’s body go from tense apprehension to total relaxation as the horse so very gently nuzzles it’s massive head into the child is wonderful.
Come evening the fires are lit and supper is cooked. All the food is made from locally harvested ingredients with soups, broths, baked vegetables and stews. In other words food you could easily wander about with from story circle to story circle. The story tellers are all volunteers from around the country and their stories ranged in tales just for children to tales with a more adult theme for much later in the night but all linked to the land, the fruitfulness of it and the cycle of life, growth and death.
Demeter & Persephone
My personal favorite harvest story is of Demeter and Her Daughter. Demeter was a goddess of grain and of the harvest in ancient Greece. Her daughter, Persephone, caught the eye of Hades, god of the underworld (not to be thought of as hell). When Hades abducted Persephone and took her back to the underworld, Demeter’s grief caused the crops on earth to die and go dormant. By the time she finally recovered her daughter, Persephone had eaten six pomegranate seeds, and so was doomed to spend six months of the year in the underworld. These six months are the time when the earth dies, beginning at the time of the autumn equinox.
In some interpretations of the story, Persephone is not held in the underworld against her will. Instead, she chooses to stay there for six months each year so that she can bring a little bit of brightness and light to the souls doomed to spend eternity with Hades. Either way it’s a lovely story and worth learning. I learnt it as a child listening to my father who is a wonderful story teller, recount it to an audience by the light of the harvest campfire one chilly autumn night. Even now as I remember that time I can hear his voice so clearly in my head even though I cannot hear it for real any more. He would weave this wonderful stories that encompassed thousands of years, about the cultivation of food plants, what we think of as farming now, and it came into being about 12,000 years ago. The ability to grow food had a dramatic impact on the human way of life, we forget this from our easy, comfortable lives now. Farming meant clans and tribes could settle in one area, creating communities and commerce, the foundations of villages, then towns, then cities, then city states and finally countries. Rather than living a nomadic life of stalking herds of edible animals, people could settle in one place and venture out of their growing communities to forage only when hunting and the gathering of non-farm plants were needed. These settled communities grew fast. Our ancestors discovered that this was an excellent arrangement for raising children, teaching survival skills, sharing work, and sharing food during the long winter months.
The last point is often forgotten today, but thousands of years ago entire populations could, and frequently were, wiped out by one bad winter. These farm weekends and picnics is to teach children where food comes from and just how precious a thing the land and farming is. By linking the event to mysterious pagan origins, complete with hedge magic and more than a little mystery it is made interesting and engaging for them. Throw in the old connections to Halloween and the time of spirits, the one time of year where our ancestors would trespass onto burial lands and go into the tunnels of the burial mounds and pay their respects to the dead and take it from me, you will completely engage with anyone.
And Into The Night & Next day….
Some hardy souls stay the whole night around the fires or sleeping in one of the barns. For those brave enough to weather the first frost of autumn we reward them by providing hot breakfasts of farm fresh bacon, eggs, tomatoes and lots and lots of granary toast all washed down by big mugs of coffee. In return they had to help feed and tend to the farm animals before helping the farm hands move them back into their respective fields. Sunday was mostly friends and family day. We spent the morning clearing up then had an al-fresco lunch and an afternoon walk with all the children. The teenagers tended to slip off into the denser areas of the woods to do what teenagers do best together to reappear a little later still straightening up clothing !
It was a terrific weekend and well worth the day spent clearing up afterwards. Now the farms will settle down for the long pull through winter, Many of the farm workers will take their holidays heading off to their homes in other parts of Holland, or in the case of some others to Latvia, Poland, Ukraine. For my parents they will have a period of peace until the Sinter Klaas celebrations start to kick in, made even more interesting this year by our baby being due in December.
For me the weekend has felt like an awakening as much of my acquired anxieties have fallen away and confidence has returned. On the train journey up I was aware of being very on edge, taking my finger nails right down, but on the journey home I realized that I was actually enjoying the trip. I feel I have reached some resolution inside myself to accept the fears that this comprised eye sight brings me. In a few days the girl who ruined my sight will be released back into the world and expelled from the country so I think it is time that I got on with living fully again. I will never see as well as I once did, but I can still see (mostly) so I think it time to get used to being frightened when I am out and just push on. I have neglected friends to catch up with and obligations to fulfill so I need to get to it !
Enjoy your autumn, appreciate the changing world about you at this most beautiful time of year and see the approaching winter and be ready to embrace it.
Love to you all,
Judith van der Roos
