First Harvest
My maternal grandfather, of whom I have no memory, a hardware store owner, car salesman, and sometime family farmer, notoriously lacked the patience typically required of farmers or backyard gardeners for arrival of harvest time. Greenhouses, fertilization, insecticides, pesticides and other agricultural advances notwithstanding, still there is, as the ancient preacher proclaimed, a time for planting and a time to pluck up what is planted. And generally speaking, if we’re at all involved in the harvest, our job is to prepare what is necessary–gather the bins, hire the seasonal labor, service the machinery, sharpen the scythes–and then wait for the time to pluck. But my grandpa, not well equipped for waiting, might boil up some young field corn if the sweet corn in the garden wasn’t ready for picking when he had the season’s first craving for corn on the cob. Creative if suboptimal early harvesting, and hardly what the Celts had in mind when they celebrated Lughnasad, a celebration of the first harvest of the year.
When I think about harvests, I tend to think about abundance–about myriad fruits, vegetables, and grains coming to ripeness and available for consumption, about cornucopias filled to overflowing with produce, about hay bales and sheaves of cornstalks, about resourceful folks freezing and canning and preserving because to partake in abundance throughout the year requires forethought and preemptive action. And most of my harvest thoughts have an autumn glow about them. That makes a certain amount of sense because as mainstream US society has moved farther and farther away from hands-on agriculture, and as refrigeration and transportation advances have brought a dizzying array of produce into our grocery stores year round, we’ve come to conflate harvest with the celebration of Thanksgiving in late autumn–or the arrival of pumpkin-spice everything on store shelves and coffeeshop menus.
Exceptions to this general autumnization of harvest imagery and celebration include indigenous communities or farm communities holding celebrations and festivals at times tied to actual harvests, pagan communities celebrating the old Celtic festival Lughnasad, and some Christian communities celebrating Lammas.
On August 1, the halfway point between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox, both Lughnasad (Loo-NAS-ah) and Lammas (which means loaf mass) traditionally celebrate the first harvest of the year, specifically the grain harvest. I learned something this week about the timing of Lughnasad that I hadn’t known before, something that echoes back to Ecclesiastes’ “a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted.” This festival of the first harvest isn’t celebrated on August 1 simply because that’s when grains are coming into full ripeness–I imagine the exact date of perfection varies some from year to year. Rather, it’s celebrated on August 1 because that’s when it is prudent to harvest the first grains. Harvesting, baking and consuming the bread made from the grain much earlier than August 1 might mean that winter stores of grain will be depleted before the next year’s harvest. And left unharvested much later than August 1, the grain might rot in the field or be destroyed by late summer storms.
Timing matters in harvesting. But it is also true that there is more than one time to pluck that which is planted. Even we, for the most part far removed farms, know this. We know that National Sneak Some Zucchini onto Your Neighbor's Porch rolls around next Friday on August 8, but asparagus season peaked back in April and May. Most citrus is ready for harvesting from November to March. Root vegetables tend to be harvested in autumn or early winter. Apple harvest spans late summer and autumn months. Some species bear fruit only every other year. And all harvest seasons vary by climate region and by hemisphere.
So, the ancient verse [there is] a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted tells us something true and important about human-managed agriculture, planting, harvesting and gathering. And nature, through the uncounted numbers and varieties of species as well the variety of climates and differences between hemispheres, builds in plenty of wiggle room–those perhaps not as much wiggle room as my grandpa claimed. Most of us aren’t farmers. Some of us aren’t even backyard gardeners, but we can bring both of these truths–there is a time and there is wiggle room–to bear on non-food-producing human endeavors.
We plant ideas, projects, educational pursuits, families, reforms, and routines throughout our lives. When we do so we usually have a very specific goal in mind: a published book, 3 children, a completed marathon (or half marathon or 5K), the election of a chosen candidate, sobriety, the defeat of a particular bill, X number of affordable housing units, completion of a degree, elimination of credit card debit, revolution. We might, and often do, think of those goals as the harvest of what we have planted, the benefits we pluck at the appointed time–that is to say, at the successful attainment of the precise goal we had in mind at the outset. But we reap the benefits of nature’s built-in redundancy of harvests–first harvest and later harvests, different harvest seasons for different fruits, vegetables and nuts, different harvest seasons for different climates and hemispheres. Why would it be any different for human endeavors?
The first harvests of revolution aren’t the successful overthrow of a corrupt system or authoritarian regime but rather heartbeats of empowerment, tendrils of community, and hopelessness giving way to hope. The first harvests of a writing project are discipline and discovery. The first harvest of marathon training is increased stamina or budding confidence. The first harvests of family building are connection, intimacy, and an expanding, shifting vision of possibilities, long before a baby, child or adult is welcomed in. The first harvest of sobriety isn’t a one year chip, it’s a 24 hour chip. The first harvests of an effort to eliminate credit card debt are incremental, steady reductions in the amount of interest accruing, not a zero balance. And so on. And some projects, like recalcitrant green beans, bear fruit only after months, years of inexplicable, maddening setbacks, despite our every well intentioned efforts.
My grandpa died before I was on solid foods, so I can’t say for sure that that field corn was a poor substitute for sweet corn–but I bet it probably was. This summer my mom has shown herself to be her father’s daughter. After an entire lifetime of heeding her mother’s edict to “wait for the Colorado” peaches, Mom made the first 14 or 15 of her annual 2 dozen secret recipe peach cream pies using the first peaches to hit the supermarket–mostly South Carolina fruit. Having tasted a few of those pies when I was in Minnesota last month I can attest that Mom’s impatience had no ill effect on the final result. There are ways to enjoy the first fruits of the harvest that allow us to taste, smell, benefit from them in all their richness and subtlety, depth of flavor and nutritional value. And there are ways that have us eating field corn.
Abandoning a project after the first harvest, the first achievement, the first milestone, or settling for an approximation of success–the lesser of two poor choices, any partner rather than no partner, trading integrity and independence for short term gain–all of these are as so many mouthfuls of field corn when we’re craving sweet corn.
I’ve had to work a bit too hard, forcing this analogy between harvesting crops and garden produce and reaping the rewards of human endeavors. It is my first attempt at preaching after several weeks away! But I think you get my point: while there are appointed times for projects to come to fruition, optimal times for us to pluck what we have planted, often there are multiple appointed times, multiple harvests to be gathered in. We know this, just as we know that different fruits and veggies come into season at different times, but we forget sometimes. Too eager for the big finale, too impatient to recognize and savor what’s in season, ripe and ready to sustain us now, along the way to the next harvest time.
These times when our human impulses, wills, and frailties have brought us to and over the brink of devastation we cannot yet fully comprehend, these times call us to heed the lessons of the cycle of earth’s seasons, including the folly of harvesting at the wrong time and wisdom of reaping nature’s life-sustaining gift of staggered harvests, each in its time. Let us be eager and unwavering in our pursuit of the remedies nature’s ways might teach us, fearless and joyful in turning our learning to action for the transformation and salvation of the world. Amen.
