Summer's Wheel Turning

Black Micron 01, graphite, General's White Charcoal Pencil. Tangles: Trix is forming the "string" for this tangle, surrounded by Groovy, and then filled in with Meer.

We've had some stellar weather for the past two days, now about to come to an end as the humidity moves back in tonight and for the rest of the week.   Summer is about to put in another appearance...and yet, I can also strongly feel that the wheel of the year is turning.  Some type of shift is underway, and it's dramatically affected me.

I'm thinking about Lammas, the old holiday celebrated around this time of year (in the Northern Hemisphere)  to salute the grain harvest.  Even though summer is still here, the beginning of the harvest means that a change has occurred and we are now moving towards autumn.  I could feel that shift this morning as an internal presence, and all day I've been restless. 

The countryside here is full of outrageously tall corn; the crop is up so high that, driving by, I'm already thinking about the increasingly common "corn mazes" that allow Hallow's Eve revelers to scare the daylights out of themselves in late September and October, once the harvest has passed.  Our roadside farm stands are bulging with corn, squash, and other bounty.  Days are growing irrevocably shorter.

Lammas is all about change.  For many of us--the lucky ones who have "enough" in our lives--it is a time of gratitude for the harvest.  Yet it brings an unsettling sensation as well. 

Change is the one constant in life.  Some of us handle it better than others.

---

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
--Robert Frost