Today I harvested my mushrooms, and I didn’t want to. They were beautiful exactly where they were. I had waited for them, watched them emerge, watched the tiny caps become larger every day, and there was something almost painful about taking the knife and cutting them down when what I really wanted was to leave them there and continue enjoying the sight of them growing. But they were ready. And suddenly I understood something about Lughnasadh that I don’t think I understood before: harvest is an act of love too.

Six months ago we were learning about a very different kind of love. Imbolc is the hand protecting the first fragile shoot. It is quiet, slow, almost maternal. Something has only just been born, and you don’t yet know what it will become. You don’t pull it from the soil to inspect its roots. You don’t demand fruit from it. You don’t rush it. You listen, you feed it, you give it warmth, attention, energy and love. The teaching at Imbolc was very clear: what you feed now is what will grow. Where are you giving your strength, your attention, your love? Are you continuing to feed your fear and old destructive programs, or are you feeding the living impulse trying to emerge through you? 

At Imbolc, love may look like patience. But six months later, the Wheel has turned, and the same hand that gently protected the seedling must now be capable of picking up the sickle. The fruit is ripe. And this is where I think we sometimes misunderstand waiting. There is a time when waiting is wisdom, and there is a time when waiting becomes refusal. There is a time when touching the plant will damage it, and there is a time when not touching it will destroy the harvest.

My mushrooms taught me this today in the most literal way possible. I could leave them there because I love looking at them. I could tell myself, one more day. I could admire them tomorrow and perhaps the day after that. I could call this patience, non-attachment, surrender, trusting divine timing. But nature is already taking its course. They will not remain perfectly ripe while I decide when I am emotionally ready to harvest them. They will continue to change. They will age, release their spores, lose their texture, and eventually begin to deteriorate. The Wheel does not stop because I didn't have courage to take a sickle. 

And suddenly I thought about how often we do exactly this with our lives. Something has already ripened, but we are still behaving as though we are at Imbolc. We keep nurturing what is asking to be harvested. We keep contemplating what is asking to be chosen. We keep asking for another sign when the answer has already become flesh. We call it patience. We call it surrender. We call it waiting for the right time. Sometimes that is exactly what it is. But sometimes waiting is an action too. Sometimes waiting is the action through which we allow the harvest to ferment, rot and return to the earth without ever having tasted it! Like that bottle of champagne I saw at the antique store and thought how strange that people never opened the bottle to enjoy it... to celebrate it! they probably were waiting for "better times"... only to die themselves... 

My teacher reminded me of this in a completely different way when she shared a story about love. She told me that the feelings between her and her second husband came before the choice. I find that distinction incredibly important. The heart had already moved, but reality had not. And between those two things: I feel this and I choose this, there was fear. She also said that impossibility itself can create enormous emotional charge. When two people cannot fully have each other (they were both married to other people), the longing, tension, uncertainty, secrecy, restriction and prohibition can become fuel for the feeling. That doesn’t mean the love is not real. It means that sometimes we do not know how much of the fire belongs to the love itself and how much belongs to the walls surrounding it. And so when she and her husband eventually made their choices and became free to actually be together, another fear appeared: what if the impossibility was the very thing that had made the love feel so enormous? What if the longing disappeared when there was nothing left to long for? What if all that intensity existed because they had not been choosing each other, and once they finally could, something simply switched off? 

I think this is such a profoundly human fear, because fantasy never has to wash dishes. Longing never has to pay bills. Impossible love never has to wake up tired beside you on a Tuesday morning, irritated about something stupid, deal with children and money and taxes and schedules and illness and dirty laundry and all the profoundly unromantic machinery of an actual shared life. As long as something remains impossible, it can remain suspended in possibility. Choice brings it into matter. And matter is where truth gets tested... 

She chose anyway. So did he. They picked up the sickle... And what she discovered was that the feeling didn’t disappear. The prohibition had indeed created additional charge around their love, but when the prohibition was removed, the love remained. I keep thinking about the courage hidden inside that decision, because we usually speak about courage as the courage to pursue what we want. There is another kind: the courage to FIND OUT whether what we have loved in possibility can survive reality.

Because once you harvest something, you can no longer worship the beautiful field from a distance. You have to take it home. You have to touch it, clean it, cook it, eat it, digest it. It becomes part of your body and your actual life. Otherwise, that beautiful possibility will dies if you don't harvest it and you will never know the taste of it... ever... And maybe this is one of the deepest mysteries of Lughnasadh. At Imbolc, we are asked: What are you feeding? At Lughnasadh, life turns the question around and asks: Are you willing to receive what you have grown?

Not merely to see it, photograph it, talk about it, or stand beside the field admiring how beautiful the wheat looks in the evening sun. Harvest requires participation. And harvest always contains a little death. The mushroom I cut today will no longer grow. The wheat cut by the sickle cannot remain a golden field. The fruit removed from the tree has crossed a threshold. Something ends at exactly the moment something else becomes available. The mushroom stops being something I am growing and becomes something that can nourish me. The grain stops being a beautiful living stalk and becomes bread.

This is why the sickle belongs to the harvest... and to the same loving hand...  There are moments when love has to stop protecting possibility and begin cutting reality into form. At Imbolc, the loving hand says, Not yet. Don’t rush it. Give it time. and it make all the sense! At Lughnasadh, the loving hand says, Now! And wisdom is knowing which hand life is asking us to use. Because using the sickle at Imbolc kills what has barely begun, but continuing to stroke the wheat at Lughnasadh does not preserve it. It loses the harvest. You are going to starve in colder months... 

There is something almost ruthless about the Wheel in this way. It moves whether we participate or not. The season of decision does not remain open forever simply because we haven’t decided. Fruit doesn’t wait for our psychological readiness. Children grow. Bodies age. People change. Doors close. Opportunities pass. Love changes form. Even the things that appear to be standing still are moving through time.

And this may be one of the hardest truths for those of us who have learned to make waiting sacred. Sometimes waiting truly is sacred. Sometimes restraint is wisdom. Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is keep our hands off the fragile thing and let it grow. But sometimes we remain at the altar long after the ceremony has ended. Sometimes we keep calling something patience because we are afraid to admit that the season of patience is over.

What in my life is ripe now? What have I already spent enough time understanding? What am I still calling a seedling because admitting that it has matured would require me to make a choice? Where am I still nurturing when life is asking me to cut? Where am I waiting for certainty while the fruit is already beginning to soften on the branch? And what harvest am I willing to lose because harvesting it would change my life?

Because the sickle doesn’t only give us the harvest. It destroys the field as we knew it. And maybe that is why we hesitate. We think we are afraid of making the wrong choice, but sometimes we are afraid that the choice will actually work. Because then the longing ends. The fantasy ends. The waiting ends. The identity of being the person who is almost there ends. And something frighteningly ordinary begins: life itself.

Today I cut my mushrooms. I would have loved another day of watching them grow. But I wanted to taste what I had grown more than I wanted to preserve the image of it. Maybe that is Lughnasadh. I WANTED TO TASTE THEM MORE THEN WASTE them... Six months ago, the sacred act was to protect the tiny shoot with my hands. Today, the sacred act is to put a knife into those same hands. Not because I love the living thing less, but because it has become what I was waiting for. 

And then there is one more part of harvest that I think we forget almost as often as we forget the sickle: we are supposed to enjoy it. To eat, to taste, to celebrate, to allow ourselves pleasure in what has finally ripened. Because what was the point of all that planting, feeding, tending, waiting, fearing, hoping and growing if, when the harvest finally comes, we are too afraid to take it into our hands?

There comes a moment when the way we honor what has grown is no longer by waiting. We harvest it. And we allow ourselves to enjoy the harvest.