Harvest / Fall Equinox

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S4E29 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

Mark: Welcome back to The Wonder, Science Based Paganism. I'm your host, Mark,

Yucca: and I'm Yucca.

Mark: and once again, it is time for us to talk about the autumnal equinox, one of the eight stations of the wheel of the year of holidays.

Yucca: That's right. It just keeps turning and turning. So here we are.

Mark: Here we are once again, you know, looking at The, the the calendrical arrival of autumn anyway. I mean, I I'm pretty clear that I'm into autumn here where I am already, and I think you are too, Yucca but,

Yucca: though, because the beginning of autumn and the end of autumn are very, very different seasons here.

Mark: yeah. I mean, autumn and spring are the transitional seasons, and they things change pretty radically during the, during their extent. Yeah, so, well, we can talk about kind of what tells us that autumn is coming, but we can also talk about the holiday, and what it means to us, what we call it, how we celebrate and kind of its positioning within the wheel of the year and how that relates to the things around it, and all that kind of stuff.

Yucca: Sounds good. Well, let's start with names.

Mark: Okay.

Yucca: So, for me, the equinox, and of course it's one of the equinoxes, but it's pretty clear which equinox we're talking about during this time of year. And it's also first fall or first autumn,

Mark: Mmhmm.

Yucca: because here I look at the seasons like there's either eight seasons or there's two seasons.

Mark: Mmhmm.

Yucca: So there's the Because the traditional temperate four seasons, really as we were just saying, early or first fall and second fall are two very different seasons

Mark: Mmhmm. Mmhmm.

Yucca: But then there's also really, there's just the hot time of year and there's the cold time of year. And this is the transition between the hot into the cold. This is one of those, those gateway or door holidays. For me it feels like we're going from one season to the next and so it's a very busy season.

Very busy holiday, very busy season here.

Mark: Sure. Yeah, you've got to get everything prepped and everything buttoned down for, for a cold winter.

Yucca: That's

Mark: Yeah I call this holiday Harvest. And of course it's not the only harvest holiday, but this, this is the time when kind of the cultural imagery of cornucopias and all that kind of stuff really, you know, starts to pop up in all the media and all of the winter vegetables are producing abundantly out of people's gardens and the earlier vegetables are pretty much petering out at this point.

The, the grape crush. The grape harvest and crush is happening right at the point of the equinox, it starts usually in August but it extends, what happens is the whites get harvested first, and then the reds, and then there are what are called botrytis vines, which have the botrytis fungus growing on the berries.

And they create so they, they sort of shrivel and they get very, very sweet and concentrated in flavor. And those are used to make dessert wines and ports and things like that. So there's this, you know, there are several phases to the grape harvest and crush. And it's just... It's a lovely time. The leaves are changing in the vineyards and and in some of the trees around here, and there's a feeling of industriousness

Yucca: hmm. Mm

Mark: uh, you know, people have gone back to school, they've gone back to work, all that summertime playing is pretty much over now so there's just, it's just a, as you say, it's a very busy time, but it's also a very lovely time and so I call it harvest.

Yucca: Yeah. And neither of us are in areas where we have lots of broadleaf trees that are churning, but I have a few here and it's just so lovely. to see the, to see them changing and watch that, that very traditional fall look start to, to start to happen. And there's a, there's a smell to it too. There's this very lovely crisp smell that comes with the changing of the leaves.

So, do you smell the Like, when the crush is happening, is there a, you smell that in the air,

Mark: If you, if you drive around the country roads, it smells like rotting grape juice everywhere. It's,

Yucca: you like?

Mark: I do. It's a, it's a it's a sort of quasi wine smell. It's not quite there, but it's working on it kind of smell. And you know, and there are truckloads. So grapes going by and, you know, farm equipment all on the roads and all that kind of stuff.

We do have a lot of broadleaf oaks here. We have a lot of valley oaks and California coastal oaks and black oaks.

Yucca: Do they change during the autumn? We have a, we only have a few oaks here, we have these little scrub oaks, and they hold on their leaves, really, they, they really hold on to them for a long time, and then it's just, they turn brown, and then they're... They, they don't even drop them really till the spring, till they're growing new ones.

We don't, and we just don't really have any other oaks at all. So I

Mark: Huh.

Yucca: do all oaks do that, or is that's a very special

Mark: No, I mean, there, there, there are what are called live oaks. There's California live oaks here, too, and the live oaks, they don't drop their leaves at all and and they're kind of unpleasant to be around because the edges of their leaves are prickly.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: So, you know, you end up walking on them and it hurts.

We had one in the last place that I lived, we had one outside of our yard that leaned over into our yard and dumped huge numbers of those sharp pointy leaves into our yard every year.

Yucca: If they don't want to be eaten,

Mark: no.

Yucca: that, yep,

Mark: And they have adapted ways to prevent that from happening.

Yucca: yeah.

Mark: So, but yes, the, the oaks do change, except for the live oaks, they do change and they do drop their leaves.

But they don't turn red and yellow, they just turn kind of a rust color. And that then eats in from the outside of the leaf into the, into the center of the leaf and then it drops. And I particularly love the look of the oak trees in the late autumn and winter.

Yucca: hmm.

Mark: Because they're so crabbed and Halloween y and, you know, wonderful in the shape that they have.

And, you know, there's just such a stark sort of gothic quality to those trees when they've dropped their leaves.

Yucca: Mm

Mark: Um, So yeah, harvest. And thematically, that really is kind of the centerpiece of how I think of this time. It's, it's a good time for feasting with friends and relations. Sometimes I think of this as pagan Thanksgiving. And, of course, Canadian Thanksgiving is right around this time. They have it figured out much better than, you know, late November. I don't know who's, I don't know who's doing harvest celebrating in New England in late November. That, that just seems a bit off to me.

Yucca: Well, I suppose you have all of your harvest in at that point, right? You're not in the process of harvest, you've gotten everything ready,

Mark: historically that first event almost certainly didn't happen in November. It just got declared as a holiday by Abraham Lincoln some, you know, century later. Or quite a bit more than that actually. Fourscore and seven years ago plus. The, so I think about this not only as a time for, you know, coming together with loved ones and feasting, but also to reflect on what the last cycle has been like and what the fruits of that have been, of the cycle of the last year, what I've invested my energy in, and my creativity, and, you know, what I've had hopes for, all those, all those dreams and aspirations and plans, you know, that happened around the February Sabbath and And the, the spring equinox, you know, those got implemented, and there was a lot of work involved, and all this energy got invested, and all that kind of stuff, and then now is the time when it's like, well, how did that work out? …