By Rev. Judith Laxer

I’ve waited till twilight when the bees are gone to harvest my lavender. I don’t want to disturb their pollen gathering and I don’t want to get stung as I gather mine. My arms are full as I walk to the table in my garden and set down the purple flower heads on their strong stalks. Their perfume, sweet but not cloying, smooth but not dull, fresh but not young, always signals harvest time to me.

August must be the gardener’s favorite month! All the planning and planting, tending and weeding, all the watering and watching now comes to fruition. This is what all that labor of love was for. Now my salad bowl holds cucumber, tomato and carrot as well as lettuce, herbs and flowers. There is patty pan and zucchini squash for the grill, green beans in the steamer. A few small but sturdy ears of corn lean away from their petioles as if to say, “Hey! Don’t forget about me!” I’ve already spent one full day canning apple sauce, and now I peer at the pears growing heavy on their boughs. Soon…chutney!

As I separate the tangled lavender, placing each flower next to another in bunches, clipping the ends uniformly and wrapping a rubber band around them in preparation to dry, I notice that my breathing has slowed. I hear the evening birdsong, a symphony underscoring my work. The heady aroma puts me in an altered state. I feel euphoric. I stop and look at the splendor all around me: the reddening tomatoes, cute cabbages, the all-too-few-but-I am-grateful-for-them pumpkins, the tall and leggy cosmos, sassy marigolds, and promising poppy heads. Everywhere I look my eye falls on something dearly familiar, carefully cultivated, and beautiful.

To the Ancients, late Summer was spent hard at work bringing in the harvest. Every bit of waning daylight was used to scythe, pick, and transport. Hours were given to preserving food for the upcoming season of fallow; canning, pickling, salting, smoking, drying. In an era when we go to the grocery store and buy what we put on our plates, I am thrilled to grow as much of my own food as I can. I believe I am in part preserving these ancient ways. How gratifying it is as an urban gardener to fill my life with my own garden goodness! To fully delight in clipping and drying lavender, tansy, tarragon. To have several quart jars of dried oregano already in my pantry. To fill vases with Daisies, Lilies, Roses and Black Eyed Susan’s. To bake pie with fresh picked apples. To pour oil infused with rosemary, and vinegar infused with dandelion root. To sip aged liqueur made from my own champagne grapes. To sauté kale and chard for supper and pop blackberries in my mouth for dessert.

It causes me to ponder. Do all our modern advances truly give us a better quality of life? Is being able to text a photo of my dinner plate sized dahlia better than encountering her face to face where she grows? Does being able to buy whatever I want trump the joy of making iced tea from my own chamomile? And don’t we have all this backwards? Instead of taking time off, shouldn’t we be hard at work in this season of harvest? Shouldn’t we be resting in the Winter when Nature is dormant? Instead, we vacation in the height of Summer when Nature needs our tending, and are at our busiest and most social during the depth of Winter when we should be quietly dreaming by the fire. When we forfeited our hands-on interaction with the rhythms of Nature, even in a simple kitchen garden, we lost our deep connection to the essence of what keeps life alive.

By now, I have eight full bundles of lavender. I pull myself out of my reverie and place them on my drying wrack and behold their beauty, but only for a moment. I have precious little daylight left and much to do. It’s August and I am happily harvesting. Placing my hands on what I have been working for. Soon enough the leaves will turn and the air will chill and I will be tying the empty corn stalks together for Autumn décor by my front door. The rain will return and I will no longer need to water. And when the last of the garden produce is in my crisper or in jars on my shelves or in my body having nourished and delighted it I will still, and always, feel thankful for the bounty of the Earth.

Rev. Judith Laxer is a modern day mystic who believes that humor, beauty and the wonders of nature make life worth living. She is the founding Priestess of Gaia’s Temple, an inclusive, Earth-based Ministry with over a decade of service. www.gaiastemple.org, www.judithlaxer.com

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