Today we finally got round to celebrating Lammas. Emily baked some rather scrummy cheese rolls to honour the first harvest:
This afternoon, we spent a while in the garden making patterns with a huge variety of seeds, for tree decorations:
We also lit a little fire in Emily's cauldron; she wrote down her fears and worries on slips of paper and dropped them into the fire to burn away. We'll bury the ashes in the garden so that symbolically, new confidence can grow from the ashes of old fears. Or something like that ;-) Worked last year anyway, according to Emily!
Finally it was back inside to decorate our festival tree, this time round with the seed designs and some ears of wheat and barley.
I'm very pleased we've managed to establish a tradition of celebrating the pagan festivals. Well, it's early days yet - started with midsummer last year, and we've had the festival tree since Imbolc this year - but Emily really looks forward to each festival and the decorating and the activities and the stories and the lore. Since we're not religious in any other sense of the word, it also provides some much needed structure to the year, and forces us to take a break approximately every six weeks or so and reflect on what's going on in the seasons and the natural world.
We were accompanied all afternoon in the garden by this lovely dragonfly, which rarely moved from its spot at the tip of a bamboo cane. I'm not sure what type it was, since we've temporarily lost our insect book and it's not like any of the ones on this dragonfly identification page (although granted we're nowhere near Milton Keynes!) but anyway, it was interesting :-)
Tomorrow I'm off to the doctors with Grandad, just for a change, then Emily and I will go out for some retail therapy in the shape of choosing a cosy kitten basket and new scratching tree thingy for the two new arrivals, who we'll be picking up from Jackie's on Friday. I'm not at all convinced that Romeo, Juliet and Cassie-Cat are going to be very impressed!
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