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Bread with wheat design decoration I didn't do particularly well in university philosophy, so on the scale of depth, this will be closer to a stoner's "what if this is all just someone's dream, man" than to a real treatise...

The Allergic Pagan has a brilliant post called "Why I'm Boycotting Lughnasadh". Reading the comments section, the response post from another Pagan, and the comments section on that post reminds me of why I don't usually read comment sections; a lot of people seemed to miss the point of the post, or didn't read it at all and were reacting to the title. The boycott article reminded me of articles about understanding Baudrillard using pumpkin spice lattes and FaceBook and the hyperreal.

To philosopher Jean Baudillard, a simulation is when a representation of something takes the place of the thing it originally only represented: where pumpkin spice flavouring take the place of real pumpkins, where digital representations take the place of real people, and where the grain festival mythology takes the place of what is actually happening in our backyard. These simulations act in the same way as the things they've replaced but they're ultimately empty of substance, without juice or depth. According to Baudillard, there are four steps in the process of separating simulation from reality. To use Lughnasadh as an example:

1. First is a faithful image, where rituals of early August are created to reflect the weather and seasons of the local climate right in front of the creators.

2. Second is when images do not faithfully reveal reality to us, but hint at the real reality which the image itself is cannot completely include, such as when the early August rituals are labelled as "Lughnasadh" and created into a tradition that transcends the actual weather or activities in any given year.

3. Third is when the image pretends to be a reflection of reality, but it is a copy with no original, such as when those Lughnasadh traditions are exported wholesale into completely other ecosystems and eras.

4. Finally comes pure simulation, in which the image has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Images merely reflect other symbols, as where a ritual is constructed around the theme of sacrifice where the God of Grain dies in order for the wheat to be harvested... when there's no actual wheat ready to be harvested where you are. Of maybe no wheat grows in your area at all, ever.

Our Pagan rituals are at risk of becoming mere simulations. It isn't about faking connection; we may still be participating fully in our rituals, but as Emile Littre says "Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and pretend he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" but that doesn't make them sick.

Baudillard continues to say that when simulations interact, they create a hyperreality - a web of interconnected simulations that separates us from reality. A simulation of the wheel of the year does not celebrate the changing of the seasons, but puts a layer between us and the real, sacred earth.

The Allergic Pagan says it well: "Bend down and touch the earth." If it is around the beginning of August, you can call the result Lughnasadh, or Lammas, or first harvest, or nothing at all, but try to celebrate the actual dirt under your hands and not an image of a season from another place and another time.

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Flowers in February When and where I grew up, there was winter. The snow piled high for weeks - for months - and we made snowmen and forts and I went sledding and cross-country skiing and we had a skating rink in our backyard. And we ate red delicious apples all winter because they stored well, so they were cheap all year around, even in the north of Canada.

There and then, spring came. It was a slow event, but it happened. The snow became mud and then soil and then grass and flowers. Winter-stored apples gave way to strawberries and then blueberries.

I'm elsewhere now, where the ocean and the mountains guard us from extreme seasonal changes. Still, people who grew up here remember winter. It was shorter and milder than the ones I knew, but there was snow. There isn't any longer. It got cold, here and there, but barely more than frosty. Fruit comes from California; there's no end to strawberry season.

I'm not exactly nostalgic for winter. I remember shovelling out cars and scary rides on icy roads and power outages and I never did like red delicious apples very much. But I do miss the unique pleasures of each season savoured because they were fleeting. The wheel of the year turns and relieves one season's pains and brings in the next's pleasures. This too shall pass...

Unless it doesn't anymore. Climate change has slowed the wheel to a near stop some places, and sent it spinning like a toppling top in others. Here, climate change has stolen our seasons. Our wheel of the year is cracked, especially in this city, and we could be set adrift into seasonless time, another step away from nature. We Pagans will have to stand with locavores and gardners and seasonal sports lovers and hold the wheel together, finding the seasons even in the changed, unchanging city streets and honouring the subtle shifts. Our magic cannot fix what has been broken, but we can hold the energy while we join others in trying to make the earth healthy again.

Large mushroom growing in gravel

There seem to be mushrooms popping up all around me right now. The photo above is of a mushroom growing in my front yard. There are several other patches of different mushrooms on my walk to work, my work is selling two different kinds of mushrooms next week, and my in-box contains an invitation to a wild mushroom meal. Finally, today, I came across the mushroom photography of Bryan Beard and decided that perhaps something's trying to tell me something. I've got my oyster mushroom growing kit set up again and I've been reading weird facts and stories about mushrooms all evening.

There are, of course, stories of mushroom rings associated with fairies, and in medieval Ireland, mushrooms were thought to be umbrellas for leprechauns. Ancient Egyptians thought that mushrooms grew by magic, due to their sudden appearances overnight. Egyptian pharaohs reserved mushrooms exclusively for the royal tables because of the fungi's association with immortality. Ancient Romans called mushrooms "food of the Gods", and other cultures thought that mushrooms had powers that could give people super-human strength, help them find lost objects, and lead their souls to the Gods.

Moving away from mythology and ancient history, I really enjoyed this blog post: What mushrooms have taught me about the meaning of life. I especially liked his thesis statement:

I would like to share three things that I have learned about the meaning of life from thinking about these extraordinary sex organs and the microbes that produce them. This mycological inquiry has revealed the following: (i) life on land would collapse without the activities of mushrooms; (ii) we owe our existence to mushrooms; and (iii) there is (probably) no God. The logic is spotless.

I'm not as atheistic as the author, but I am always intrigued by the ways things we don't see or appreciate are so necessary for life as we know it. Fungi.com points out that without the external digestion and recycling powers of fungi, turning dead plants into rich soil, the Earth would be buried in several feet of debris. Mycelium, the body of the fungus which lives in the soil or in wood, are the ultimate recyclers:

Due to it's ability to decompose organic matter, and recycle it back into the ecosystem to further enhance life around it, mycelium may very well prove to one of the most significant organisms that graces the planet earth. ... Some of the enzymes produced by mycelial colonies are powerful at breaking down long chains of hydrocarbons. The colony is so efficient at secreting these enzymes and breaking down the hydrocarbons that soil contaminated with them and other toxic oils can be restored in a matter of months. ... When these hydrocarbons have been broken down, the fungus produces lovely blooms of mushrooms and the surrounding environment is nourished, alive and thriving.

Fungi were among the first organisms to colonize land about a billion years ago, long before plants came about. Miracle Mushrooms adds:

Mushrooms are not plants. They are fungi. Fungi are as uniquely different from plants as plants are from animals. In fact, fungi and animals are now in the same super-kingdom, Opisthokonta . More than 600 million years ago we shared a common ancestry.

We're related to mushrooms... the idea gives me goosebumps.

Speaking of goosebumps, A World of Words blog offers, along with beautiful pictures, this intriguing thought:

... what if God is Mushroom? Now, of course we all know that since God is too big for just one country, just one religion, just one planet, this all-encompassing energy of boundless and unconditional love and truth is also too big for just one species. But I like the idea of these beautiful, primordial and little-understood forest creatures as manifestations or metaphors for something as large and omnipresent as divine inspiration.

Mushroom expert (mycologist) Paul Stamets may be a scientist, but there's something about fungi that inspires spiritual thought:

See, this is the thing about mushrooms: It's not luck. There's something else going on here. We've been guided. But this is what happens.

Domestic mushrooms - white button, cremini, portabello, cultivated oyster - are available all year around, but fall is when the wild mushrooms can be found in our damp forests. September is even National Mushroom month in the United States. Mabon could very well be a mushroom harvest celebration just based on the timing. Add in that Mabon is an equinox - a time between seasons, between light and dark times of the year - then fungi seem very appropriate. They are both above and below the ground; they are between plants and animals, being truly neither; and the fungi family includes yeasts, used in baking bread, which is more traditionally associated with Mabon and the harvest.

Stamets also says that western society is pervaded by "mycophobia": an irrational fear of fungi. He traces this fear back to England, where mushrooms are often associated with decay and decomposition. This feels like another opening for Pagans as we try to reclaim the dark, the breaking down, as part of the wheel of the year and the cycle of life. Fungi take what is corrupt and, through their mysterious underground processes, they turn it into fertility again. They break down the dead and make space for life.

Oh, and one last awesome mushroom fact: The world's largest living organism is believed to be an Armillaria ostoyae fungi living in Oregon, occupying 2,384 acres. It is estimated to be 2,400 years old, based on its current growth rate, but it could be as old as 8,650 years.

Edited to add: The Mabon ritual I created from these ideas is now available on the website: Mabon: Mushrooms.

Branches of ripe plums

Yesterday, a member of my Circle ran a sweet little Lammas ritual on the theme of "as you sow, so you shall reap". That got me thinking about Pagans, the wheel of the year, and its relationship to nature.

One of the wheel of the year stories we can tell through Pagan rituals is of planting and harvesting: we plant in the spring, the crops grow through the summer, we harvest in the fall, and then everything rests in the winter. Many rituals will draw connections between these literal agricultural cycles and metaphorical growth: starting new projects, nurturing their growth, reaping the results, and then resting to allow for new inspiration.

What is striking me as interesting right now, though, is that the human version of this story is almost exactly opposite nature's version.

The human version is based on agriculture and food. It is based on what we have done for ten thousand years to feed ourselves. Nature's version is even older, though. In nature's version, Lammas and Mabon are not the harvests, but the plantings.

All the luscious fruit and golden grains coming our way over the next couple of months are full of the seeds of the next generation. Imagine a wild apple tree, outside of a tidy orchard. Birds and animals eat the apples and distribute the seeds in their droppings, thus creating the next generation of apple trees. The tree is planting; the tree is creating new life and celebrating fertility; it is in its Beltane, not its Lammas.

Those seeds will not grow much immediately; they will rest in the earth, biding their time over the winter hibernation. When spring comes, the tree reaps her reward - seeds spread and the future of apple trees secured - in the spring. Nature harvests not for consumption, but for the next generation. Spring time is the tree's Lammas, not its Beltane.

I work in organic food. Every year, it is the same: we get some warm and sunny weather in May or June, and people start asking me where the local food is. They want to know why we've still got tomatoes and nectarines and strawberries from California during the summer; shouldn't we have BC products? So every year I have to educate people about the growing seasons: the local fruits and veggies are still on the trees and in the ground in May and June. That sunny weather that means summer to people is just the start of their growing season. Locally, the best harvests aren't until August and September, and sometimes later if we have a long, wet, dark spring. So I think that honouring our agricultural wheel of the year is very valuable, as it connects us to our own bodies and needs and reminds us to what extent we are still dependent on nature.

But if we consider nature to be sacred and beautiful in and of itself, not just in how it is useful to us as people, then maybe we will want to honour this contradiction between the agricultural cycle and nature's cycle. I don't know what this would look like yet, but I think it could be an interesting theme to play with. I do know we are sometimes so far away from our food, but maybe we are even further away from the wild.

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It is raining again in Vancouver. Cherry blossoms are being washed down the streets, and the temperature is back to autumn. This is quite the change from the gorgeous sunshine and early summer weather that so recently blessed us; I think we all have a kind of spiritual whiplash from the back-and-forth.

Despite the cold and wet, this weekend's projects include writing the Beltane ritual for my spiritual family. This is one of the things I struggle with as a ritual writer who wants to connect my rituals to what is happening with the season: I have to write the ritual in advance, without really knowing what the season is going to be when it is performed. It is working out this time, though, as the ritual I have in mind is about the heart.

A couple of years ago, I was training at the gym with a very athletic friend of mine. He gave me a lot of fantastic advice, but I remember one conversation in particular. We were discussing why it is important to do frequent cardio and he said:

"You only get so many heart beats. If your heart beats slower, they will last longer."

There's a joke about that, of course. A well-meaning seeker asks a monk: "What exercise should I do to live longer?" The monk responds: "Your heart is only good for so many beats, and then it will wear out! Speeding up your heart won't make you live longer; that's like saying you can make your car last longer by driving it faster. Want to live longer? Take a nap!"

Though exercise does temporarily increase your heart rate, doing it regularly decreases your resting heart rate, resulting in a net savings in heart beats. Which goes to show that you shouldn't take health advice from jokes... or monks.

Anyway, my friend's comment stuck in my head, and I've been contemplating a heart-themed ritual ever since.

I am fascinated by the connection between heart beats and life. I like the seeming paradox: make your heart beat faster in order to make it beat slower. And there's a beautiful tension there: our beating hearts keep us alive while counting down to our deaths. So much of the language of a full life is about the heart - her heart felt like it was going to burst, his heart grew three sizes that day, she took that to heart, he took heart in that - while each beat is closer to our last. To me, that tension feels like the same tension we have with Beltane and Samhain - Sabbats that are directly opposite on the wheel of the year. One is a celebration of love and life that includes death and the other is a celebration of the dead and the ancestors that embraces life.

On this rainy day that feels like autumn, I am trying to write a Beltane ritual that honours the miracle of our hearts: the real, physical importance, and the metaphorical truths. To that end, here are some random heart facts that get mine racing with inspiration:

The natural length of a lifetime for birds, fish, mammals, and reptiles seems to be about 1 billion heartbeats. Modern humans seem to get about 3 billion. (1 Billion Heartbeats – The length of a lifetime)

A mouse's heart beats about 500 times a minute and an elephant's about 28 times. A mouse lives about 4 years and an elephant about 70. (Size Matters: The Hidden Mathematics of Life)

The heart is the first organ to form in utero. The embryonic heart looks the same across nearly all species, including frogs and fish and mice and elephants: a pulsating tube. In humans, that tube will eventually loop to form the four-chambered heart we are most familiar with. (What is a beating embryonic heart?)

The heart symbol evolved from the ivy leaf portrayed by prehistoric potters. “This botanic symbol found in ancient Greek and Roman art ... represented both physical and, above all, eternal love, withstanding death. ... During the Middle Ages and early modern times, when medicine had a scholastic character, this symbol was used even by anatomists to portray the heart.” (Heart Symbol & Heart Burial: A Cultural History of the Human Heart)

The ritual is still taking shape in my head, but I think there's a two-parter in the works – one ritual for Beltane and one for Samhain – both playing on the tension between life and death.

Edited to add: The Beltane ritual I created from these ideas is now available on the website: Beltane: The Heart.

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