Celebrate Lammas With Abundance Gratitude and Sharing

August 2nd is the day to celebrate Lammas, the first of three festivals celebrating Mother Earth’s bounty. Baking loaves from the first grains and offering them at a communal meal has always been central to these gatherings, going back to thousands of years before the Common Era.

The Celts called this time Lughnasadh (loo-na-sa), Native Americans called it the Green Corn Festival and in Slavic Regions it is called the feast of the Big Glad Woman. Ireland celebrates Lammas as Big Sunday and farming communities gather at hundreds of traditional hilltop sites to set up craft fairs, feast, play games, and dance. A part of every one of these gatherings is a ceremonial meal where the first fruits of the harvest were shared in gratitude to Mother Earth. Our ancestors knew that the intelligence of nature is Love

The feeling of abundance is very closely linked with gratitude. The community that shared their harvest with all those who gathered together rejoiced. It made their gratitude all the sweeter because it was shared. In this way of life millennia ago, people truly understood that sharing is deeply entwined with abundance. In lean times people offered their bounty with those who had less with an open heart, knowing that neighbors would do the same for them. Abundance of the heart begins with compassion and a deep connection with community.

The big expensive charity galas today are impersonal: it is tossing money at disadvantaged folks without truly caring about specific individuals. We live in a time of extreme hierarchies; the wealthiest capture the largest percentage of economic resources and those on the lowest rungs are food insecure, often homeless, and do not have resources for education, job opportunities, or even basic human dignity.  How is this possible when once people lived by sharing their prosperity? My friend Simone Butler www.astroalchemy.com described how the game of Monopoly was hijacked (bought for a pittance and utterly changed from the original creator’s patent) and morphed into a fight for greed and domination. The winner buys up all the property and impoverishes all the others. Nobody should celebrate Lammas like that.

Here’s the actual history.

In 1904 a woman named Elizabeth Magie got a patent for her creation, called “The Landlord’s Game” which had a round board and in this version all players benefitted when a player succeeded and the wealth was shared. Charles Darrow was solely credited with inventing Monopoly and it became a widely popular game that extolled the values of hotel acquisitions and ‘smart deals’ to buy up other players’ homes and then charging them for landing on what was once their home. Simone posed this question: how might America (and I would add all the patriarchal cultures) have been different if the popular game had been Elizabeth’s where one prospers by sharing wealth? Laws now support the rich getting richer and rarely are they held accountable for their deeds of continuing greed.

I would love to have us all return to the values of community and connection, sharing each other’s burdens with life’s challenges and celebrating shared abundance with gratitude for Mother Earth’s bounty.

Joanna Macy wrote this about the power of Love in action:

“You don’t need to do everything. Do what calls your heart:

effective action comes from love. It is unstoppable, and it is

enough.”

My wish for you is to celebrate Lammas, the abundance of the heart, by caring and sharing in your own way with your chosen community.

Much Love, Linda