After seven long weeks of drought and heatwave with temperatures in the 90s culminating in a blood moon where the energy felt quite oppressive, the weather broke for Lughnasadh, the first harvest.
Celebrating the first harvest is usually a great joy. A relief that there is food ready for the winter and that John Barleycorn will die again so that we may have bread. Joy too that the crops for later harvest are growing well, the apples are starting to swell on the trees, the blackberries have just a tinge of purple peaking through their early green look. But it is different this year.
That long heatwave has taken its toll. Crops have struggled, just like the rest of us have struggled. Climate change has driven the summer heat to new records and there are more records to come this summer with 48C forcast for Spain this week. The northern hemisphere is burning, quite literally with wildfires raging out of control.
This is what humanity has done to the Earth.
While the press obsess about antisemitism in the Labour Party and the Tories in-fight about Brexit, Nature suffers as big business continues to dominate the social attitudes, perpetuating the myth of the need for continuous growth and the need to spend and consume more and more.
Let us hope that Lugh comes to fight for us. That he takes on the corporate Mamon. That he helps humanity wake up and smell the wildfire we have started. And that he helps us change our ways to live with Nature not against her.
