Mabon and Preparing For The Darkness

 

 

 

“Whether your creative expression involves hacking at slabs of granite with a sledge hammer or sitting at a piano and tickling the ivories, the act of creation is a sensory experience.  Treat your body as the creative fountainhead it is.  Close yourself in your favourite room, fill an aromatherapy lamp with lavender oil, and let that fragrance transport you.  Schedule a one-hour foot massage and then follow those mellow feet to a salon for a long, luxurious pedicure.  Close your eyes and touch an ice cube or a kitten’s belly.  Sink into a steamy bubble bath surrounded by twenty scented candles.  Delight your senses and they are likely to return the favor.” – Lynn Gordon

We are a few days into Mabon, the Welsh/Celtic celebration of the harvest.  Suddenly the days are noticeably shorter and the nights are becoming longer.  This is the “Give Thanks” Moon, the time for feasting on gathered harvest, fires, offerings and sacrifices.  I am running late to celebrate as I had one more Lammas Bread to make before I switch over to feast foods of fall.    Out come the horns of plenty, gourds; time to eat apples, potatoes, onions, carrots and squash.  Making a squash pie and eating our Molasses raisin bread.  Out come the colors of Fall; orange, brown, gold, maroon and reds.  Redoing my altar to fit Mabon, with colored leaves, dark colored crystals, (Amber, citrine, cat’s eye, aventurine, sapphire, jasper), sage, adding a brown, orange and/or dark yellow candles. 

Making fall stews, apple pies, apple cakes, apple everything is a main activity for Mabon.  Root vegetables, fresh from the gardens, squash (my pink lady squash should be done ripening on the vine starting the 30^th.  I have seven.,. ok, HAD 7 but one took a nose dive from up halfway to the top of our juniper trees and landed softly on the swing top and slid on down to the ground…the wind and the weight of it.  I am hoping it ripens off the vine.  New carrots, new onions, lots and lots of harvesting of tomatoes, here.  Lots of new corn right now.  I have already made homemade beans.  I am on the look out for the first pumpkins.  I know stews are on the menu.   My sunflower plant is over ten feet tall and has over 21 sunflower blossoms on it.  I am letting them grow to become seeds for the birds during winter. 

The animals of Mabon are the owl, the stag, the blackbird and the salmon.  I include Makqua, bear, for the native American position of Fall on the Medicine Wheel. 

Time to start a new gratitude journal.  It would be a sad sad life if you could not think of something to be grateful for, even in the hardest of times. 

This celebratory time of Mabon will bring to the forefront, beginnings and ending thoughts, it behooves us to dance like the leaves for this final moon before the cold drives us indoors.  The dark nights and short days are upon us and I sense a foreboding because I do not appreciate winter any more.  It is time to plan our stories to be told around the bonfire.  It is a time to take stock of supplies (skills) we have stored up this year.  We should prepare to be faced with losses, hardships and maturation pains.  We may sense a coming interpersonal darkness preparing to fall on us, but remember, there is always balance in all things.  We are strong trees.  Here we are, aren’t we?  We have grounded ourselves and we are called to release things that no longer serve us.  Prepare to need rest.  Learning to surrender is huge. 

May Mabon find you busy as bees and squirrels and have many feasts like the bear, of all things that will sustain you during these next months. 

Happy harvesting, sisterfriends.

©Carol Desjarlais 8.26.22

 

 I wish I could get a better photo of the bear's eyes.... they look something cool.