Blessed Lughnasadh

Blessed Lughnasadh everyone!

This blog post gives a brief overview of this seasonal festival, its spiritual significance and what it means to me personally, but first, let us address how you actually pronounce it. As usual, regional accents produce a variety of pronunciations, but I tend to pronounce it as ‘loo-nuh-suh” with ‘nuh’ similar to the word ‘nut’ but without the ‘t’ sound and ‘suh’ with a soft ‘uh’ at the end.

As mentioned above, it is a seasonal festival, and one of the four major Celtic seasonal festivals along with Samhain, Imbolc and Beltaine. These festivals mark important points in the seasonal and agricultural cycles of the land with Lughnasadh being the first harvest festival. It is a profound point in the year and one that offers us a chance to honour and reconnect with nature and acknowledge the waxing and waning of the land we will live within. In particular, it is a time of expressing gratitude for the gift of sustenance and honour the power and strength in contributing to a community. In terms of other symbolism, we have foods such as bread, grains, honey and vegetables, colours of green, yellow, and gold and herbs such as chamomile, meadowsweet and calendula. If you are inclined to using crystals, tigers eye, citrine and pyrite (fools gold) seem pretty pertinent at this time.

It is important to remember, that contributing to a community can mean many things and sometimes, it is the little things we can do that have the most impact with grand and gregarious gestures not always being the most needed. If you are like me and tend to be more solitary and less involved in community activities and gatherings, we can still honour the spirit of Lughnasadh simply by being there for others if needed. This can include offering advice, a sympathetic ear, giving someone a lift, loaning out a tool or sharing an over abundance of resources. In my village, people who have vegetable patches or fruit trees often leave any excess out for others to take if needed. I also feel that providing food and water for the other creatures we share our land with is an important part of Lughnasadh. This can mean putting out bird food, providing a water bowl during dry weather and not trimming our gardens when there are still flowers in bloom. These simple acts, to me, sum up everything that Lughnasadh is about.

However you choose to celebrate Lughnasadh, whether it is through making a simple contribution to your community or just acknowledging that we are interconnected to everything around us, I wish you a blessed day.