Sweet Harvest, friends Pagani!
The bread is baking in the oven. The world has turned its thoughts to fall. And I am anticipating the delights of the season more than usual this year, because I missed fall last year entirely. What was I doing during this sumptuous, glorious season you ask? Well, best beloveds, I was holed up on a couch with a broken ankle, that’s what. See, what had happened was, my first day in the urban jungle, I stepped off a curb into an unseen hole in the pavement (covered by early autumn leaves…ah, the irony), and snapped the bone above my ankle like a little twig. Thus, I watched the passing of what is arguably the most holy of Pagan seasons out the window in 2008. This year, beloveds, the turning is more precious to me than ever. This year, I will walk in the gloaming on my two feet (one of those feet articulating some small complaints that it will now have for the remainder of my days), and remember with humility the blessings that act embodies. And…I will stand in my kitchen, and make bread.
A couple of weeks ago, I had something of a vision. Like that gravel-throated bard, Stevie Nicks, I tend to keep my visions to myself, but I can say that in the throws of sweet ecstasis, I was consumed with the sudden urge to bake bread. And so I have. At a pretty intense rate, bread has been issuing forth from my oven, kneaded by my own hands. It’s nothing fancy – I do take a cobbler approach* to most things in my life nowadays, from cooking to sorcery – but it is good. Yeasty, salty, wheaty bread. Oh Mama, hells yes. Over this new bread, I have started to pray.
This is Bread. Daily miracle, fire and salt and work.
The body of the Mother.
It is a blessing from the scythe that gathered it.
It is a blessing from hands that threshed it.
It is a blessing to the mouths that eat it.
May my heart be as this bread:
Born of earth, Shaped by fire, Sealed by Love.
Bread has been the ultimate metaphor. I’ve waxed rhapsodic about it before (and around this time of year too….coincidence? or bedrock universal cycle of the Mama running around in my DNA? You decide). It’s amazing in that it has withstood a million stories, comparisons, variations. Bread is both metaphor and reality simultaneously. And no metaphor, ever, no matter how pedantic, can take away its inherent power.
Though sometimes I think we do try pretty hard to do just that, Pagani, to suck the living power from a metaphor until it withers on the vine. But hear me out here….I’m fixin’ to go on a bit of a tear.
Psychology-ritual. We do it year round, but for some reason, it really hits home around harvest. Sometimes it seems I can’t turn around without hitting up against a harvest festival asking me to ponder what I’m “gathering/harvesting/threshing in my life,” to consider what “grain” represents to me, what I consider my own “first fruits,” and what aspects of myself I expect to leave on the threshing floor, etc. And frankly, friends…I’m wondering if all this me-based interpretation is really necessary.
But don’t take that the wrong way, beloveds. The year is ripe with potent meaning and shattering depth. It is so flush with metaphor and story that it’s bursting at the seams. Yes, there is power in bringing a cosmic mystery down into your own breath and bone, and asking it how it works in your microcosm. Certainly. But…. Power, Big Power, shattering Holy Power, also, and profoundly, lies perfect and plain in the thing itself, by itself, without the need for our sometimes heavy-handed, hyperindividualized, personal-psychological extrapolation. And it is ritual based on this premise, on the things themselves and the mysteries they simply embody, that I wonder more about – that I find myself digging and reveling in come the turn of the leaves and the blue sky filling with the heart-smoke of autumn.
Have you ever made bread? Ever knocked on the bottom of a hot loaf, searching for the perfect hollow note that will tell you it’s done? Ever bitten into sweet corn in July, a ripe peach in August, acorn squash in September? Ever made a summer fire? Thrown your most beloved God into its burning mouth? Ever danced the ecstatic volta at Sabbat with loved ones and heartfriends? Darlings, I know you have. And I wonder, as I wander, friends friends, I think it’s possible that the vast majority of the time…yes yes yes….these are enough. The meaning is there – grokked in the deep myth, sitting sated and strong in the marrow of our bones. There is no need to ask “what the grain represents” at Harvest. It is itself, the Grain, and that staggering mystery is enough. It is plucked, threshed, ground, mixed with yeast and water and salt and kneaded until it looks like satin, and then, swollen and ripe with pure life, it is thrust into a livid hole of fire, to emerge an alchemical miracle, and effing delicious with butter and blackberry jam. Isn’t that phenomenal? To consider this each year, or every day, is the spiritual devotion of a storied being wed forever to the heart of the Mama. Break the bread and give it to a neighbor. If words are needed, make them a prayer. If singing is required, sing your guts out. If you are so gobsmacked by its profundity that you lie on the fertile ground for an hour, enchanted by the stars and the smell of the fistfuls of frankincense and peasant loaves and apples you gave to the hungry fire until your arms were slack and your skirt empty, and during that hour you feel the weight of the fragile and amazing thing that is your body settle down into the planet’s lap, and you grok Harvest, beloveds, well….you can stick a fork in the season and call it done. And no one had to even ask you what abstract qualities you were metaphorically harvesting, or what the bread meant. The bread sits in your belly, infusing your whole body with its ineffable perfection. The mystery is in the bread. Literally.
And in the bread, poetry. In the poetry, a meal. And in the meal, relationship. And in relationship, the divine. The mama. Forever and ever. Amen.
Grok Bread, Pagani! Pray without ceasing, and put some butter on it. S’what I’m gonna do right this very minute.
Maybe I’ll have jam too. Jam, beloveds, rocks the free world.
*An illustrative tale: One night, I decided I wanted to bake a pie. From scratch. With a whole wheat crust…from scratch (this is where those in the know start chuckling). 45 minutes later, I was livid, red with rage, had exhausted my extensive collection of expletives, and had produced the most hideous mockery of a pie the world has witnessed. I immediately called my covenmate, who can, practically blindfolded, make the world’s most amazingly delicious (and vegan to boot) pies, and her words to me were: “Ms. Sara – you should make a cobbler. Cobbler is really more your style.” It was a profound moment for me…covered in flour and apple bits as I was.
Within my circle of night-blooming friends, we run a range of magical knacks and methods. Some among the Pagani have, in the past, categorized these various knacks in ways that are highly problematic – “high” magic vs. “low” magic, etc. As for me, I see it mostly as pie-people and cobbler-people (well, and then there’s “pastry chef” people we discovered, but these folks are pretty rare). Friends, pie takes a few things – an attention to detail, patience, specific tools wielded by a firm but gentle hand, etc. Cobbler takes know-how and the ability to use what the kitchen gives ya. Both methods result in something tasty – neither is superior to the other. Different methods, different knacks. I, forever and revor, am a cobbler person. I can *make* a pie on occasion, but for the average meal…I’m whipping up some kickass cobbler. I know what goes well together, I know what tastes good…and there’s no effing crust involved. Then, some of my best friends are pie-people…and thank goodness, because who doesn’t love pie?
