Living the Dream, Honoring Grain, Harvest

Welcome
Seasonal Quote
August Calendar Update
My Season: Harvest
Slow Time Update: Becoming a Bestseller
Living in Season: Living the Dream
Recommended Resources: Honoring Grain
Lammas Lessons
Holiday Packet: Harvest
Autumn Correspondence Course
Calendar Companion
Signs of Autumn
Copyright
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Welcome to my semi-monthly newsletter featuring ideas for bringing the beauty of the current season into your life.

Please forward this newsletter if you enjoy it. If a friend sent you this newsletter, welcome! You can subscribe for free at my website:
www.schooloftheseasons.com

The August calendar is up featuring an array of wonderful holidays including Transfiguration, Weaver Woman, the Days of Comfort, Hecate-Diana, Feast of the Hungry Ghosts, Tisha B’Av and two new moons. Learn more about these and many other holidays here.

My last few blog posts (livinginseason.blogspot.com) will tell you a little bit about how I celebrated Lammas this year: picking blackberries along the Burke-Gilman trail in Seattle and then sitting around a bonfire exchanging stories with friends at a farm in northern Washington. Another Lammas observation took place over a fabulous dinner with two women friends at a local vegetarian restaurant where we shared our regrets and accomplishments.

For some reason this year, I am really experiencing the abundance in my life (see article below about Living the Dream). Every day brings me new opportunities to appreciate the small pleasures of my life. Today it was going to my favorite coffee shop, Pettirosso, for a turkey-avocado sandwich.

May you experience the abundance of early autumn (or late summer),
Waverly Fitzgerald

Slow Time Book Update

I just learned that my print-on-demand publishing company, Lulu, considers books bestsellers once they reach the 500 copy mark. My book is at 438. Help push it into bestseller status by buying a copy for yourself or someone you know who needs more time:
You can order it directly from Lulu here.

If you’d rather read my Slow Time book slowly, I’m posting the chapters, one a month, on the Slow Time book website. The eights chapter, “Living in Season” will be posted on August 15.
www.slowtimebook.com

Living in Season: Living the Dream

All my life I’ve dreamed of living the life of the White Witch of Elizabeth Goudge’s novel of the same name. Froniga Hazelwood lives in a cottage near a village close to Henley-on-Thames (I found the cottage once but that’s another story) and has a fabulous garden full of flowers and herbs which she uses to make cordials and magical talismans for her friends, family and neighbors.

Imagine my surprise when I did my business consultation with Mark Silver of the Heart of Business and realized that I am living my dream. Mark’s work is a beautiful fusion of spirituality and business. (www.heartofbusiness.com) He helps spiritually-minded people who are inspired to be in business to make a difference in the world, but also make a profit.

I’ve been receiving his newsletter for years and also took a Heart of Money class from him a year ago during which I began to get a glimmering of how my business could grow. So I hired him to do a one-on-one consultation with me about School of the Seasons.

In the first part of our consultation, Mark invited me to go into the Remembrance, a Sufi practice of calling upon the Divine, and envision my business as a separate entity from me.

It was much nicer than my actual garden (my plot in the neighborhood p-patch is one of the weediest in the garden). It was lush, beautiful, overflowing with healing medicine ready to be distributed to the world. I realized I had accomplished my lifelong dream and had done so by doing what I do naturally and easily.

Witnessing my business as separate from me enabled me to see how I could help it grow. And it also eased the problem I have with receiving appreciation (which sometimes causes me to ignore my emails). If the appreciation is for School of the Seasons and not for me, that gets my ego out of the way and I don’t have to worry about disappointing my readers or getting puffed up with pride. After all the garden might be something I tend but I don’t make the plants grow.

The perspective I gained from working with Mark has continued to permeate my life. One of my themes for the year, that I’ve been working with in the Natural Planner, is the theme of coming home. I phrased it that way rather than finding the right home, which is how I phrased the same thought last year. I’ve always wanted to live in a cottage, full of books and beautiful objects, a short stroll from a village.

I’m currently teaching an Artist’s Way class and I gave my students the task of writing about their ideal days. This is one of my favorite exercises from Barbara Sher’s book Wishcraft. You write in first person, present tense, as if you’re living your ideal day. I’ve been doing this exercise for years and my ideal day has remained fairly consistent. I’m always living in a cottage with a beautiful garden near a village and spending time with friends.

After you write your ideal version, Sher suggests you go through your list and just note the indispensible elements of your dream. I realized that my one-bedroom apartment in an old brick building is probably as close as you can get to a cottage in the city. And it’s one block away from an urban village which provides most of my needs, including friendships, good food, good coffee and good books.

What a strange sensation. To wake up and realize I’ve been living my dream for years and never even noticed it. I’m basking in my good fortune as I plan new ways to share it with the world. Meanwhile I’ll make a cup of tea and go out and sit in my garden.

May your dreams creep up on you and surprise you with their arrival.
Waverly Fitzgerald

I was originally planning to write about grain for this newsletter but decided to share the experiences above instead and point you instead in the direction of some wonderful grain resources that have come my way during the past year.

Heritage Wheat
I just found out about this amazing organization, working to restore ancient wheat varieties, like einkorn and emmer wheat. Includes links to a photo essay on ancient bread-baking in Palestine, a copy of the proceedings of the Ancient Wheat conference. You can also find out about ancient wheat related events in the Northeast, and buy flour and seeds of ancient wheat varieties. I’m particularly interested in the variety known as Celtic Lammas winter wheat.
www.growseed.org

Seven Planetary Grains
Two years ago, a reader informed me about this interesting article written by Bruce Dunhower in 1989 based on the idea that there were correspondences between the planets, the days of the week and seven types of grain.

For more information about the reasoning behind these correspondences, you can read a reprint of the article at:
www.alchemycalpages.com/7grains.html

Demeter’s Wheat: Growing Local Food and Community with Traditional Wisdom and Heritage Wheat by Sharon Rempel, Grassroot Solutions 2008
I haven’t read this book but it look beautiful. It’s a self-published book written by Sharon Rempel, who founded the Heritage Wheat Project in Alberta and has been preserving the variety of wheat known as Red Fife, a heritage variety which was nominated by Slow Food Canada for the Ark of Taste.
www.grassrootsolutions.com/books.html

The Complete Book of Corn Dollies and Wheat Weavings
Doris Johnson and Alec Coker, Dover Publications 1987
A reader sent me a picture of a beautiful wheat weaving in the shape of a Catherine’s Wheel from this book. Alas, the copies available on Amazon start at $34.99. Not sure I’ll buy it. The one review says it’s a must for anyone interestd in wheat weaving.

I’ll leave you with this great story from reader, Karen Albeck. Two years ago she made a wreath (you can find the instructions in my Harvest packet) out of mini-ears of corn. She writes “the result was glorious and last year I took it out of its storage place and happily displayed it again. This year, however, it looked different, and it took me a second to realize what had happened: mice had eaten the kernels off, every single one.” Karen wonders what the lesson is in this and considers that maybe the mice have understood the true celebration of Lammas: consuming the harvest.

Harvest Holiday Packet

The Harvest holiday packet contains over 50 pages of ideas on how to celebrate the Autumn Equinox, including the:

Ancient celebrations of Harvest and Michaelmas
The meaning of the Harvest Moon
The September Full Moon holidays of Mid-Autumn Moon and Sukkoth
Transformation mysteries of beer and wine
Recipes for gingerbread, ginger beer and other traditional Harvest foods
Instructions for creating wheat weavings, a corn dolly and a basket to honor Demeter
and much more.

It is available in an email version for $10 (sent within 24 hours) or via snail mail for $15 (please allow 10 days for delivery).

Autumn Correspondence Course

You can sign up for the online class or receive the packets and work on your own. If you join the class you have an opportunity to get feedback both from me and from your fellow students.

The course includes packets of ideas for aligning with the qualities of Autumn in six areas: Natural Studies, Feasts, Crafts, Goddesses, Magical Skills, and Personal Growth. You will also receive an Introductory packet helping you claim your personal relationship with the season and packets on celebrating Harvest and Halloween.

Calendar Companion: Leaves from the Tree of Time

This is a graceful way to incorporate spirit and seasons into your life. Use it along with your usual planning tools and calendar to help you:

Every week for 52 weeks you will receive a brief email with a reflection on the qualities of the present time period and one suggestion, task or question that you can savor throughout the week.

Start whenever you like. When you order the Calendar Companion, you will receive the next week's calendar companion, along with an introductory email.

$26 for a year's worth of gentle reminders to help you stay aligned with natural rhythms. To order or to see a sample reflection, click here.

Signs of Autumn

It still feels like summer in Seattle but the rowan berries are gradually turning orange, one of the first signs of autumn.

Send me your signs of the season and we will post them on the website at Signs of the Season.

Copyright © Waverly Fitzgerald 2008
All rights reserved. You may reprint material from
Living in Season in other electronic or print publications as
long as you credit me and provide a link to:
http://www.schooloftheseasons.com
Please send me a copy of the publication.

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