Virgo, the Mythic Poetic Creative Harvest
cosmic virgins, earth priestesses, ecocentric foragers, wild wheats
In the kitchen there is a cast iron pot boiling with tomatoes and there are jars waiting for the red ones to fill up their bellies. I am saving tomatoes for winter, some as cooked and jarred, some as chopped and frozen. This is one of my main Virgo season rituals, spending time with kilos upon kilos tomatoes and making plant blood. This year, I also happened to write the harvest chapter of Enchanted Zodiac while preparing tomato people (domesticated by the indigenous people of South America1) for colder months.
The other day, I received an email from one of the farms I buy my food from. I owe this farm quite a bit of my health in the last decade. The owner of the farm writes an email each time she sends the list of the week. This time she storytold their harvest; how the wheat was tremendously abundant this year. It seems like wheat loved the heat of twenty twenty three. She also mentioned that chick peas and beans got baked and became smaller, less abundant yet more delicious and nutritious. It has been such a hot summer that even melted money in here so I would not be surprised if she had told us that the extreme heat burned some of their produce and the prices skyrocketed in their farm also. Instead she chose to share this part of her news with her optimism and she invited us to cook our traditional pot dishes that feed many mouths throughout winter.
Every harvest tells a story. The story of a planet, of a place, of a culture, of a climate, of a landscape, of soil, of seeds, of plants… In fact, every harvest tells many stories within stories. When a planet like Earth that is home to such a rich web of life reaches their ripeness, reaches their harvest time, you can be sure that you will be reaping and eating the food as well as their stories. Some domesticated, some wild, some native, some nonnative, some planted, some not planted… I hope you give them an ear to hear your planet storytelling.
So this is the moment of the ripeness, the peak, the culmination, the plenty or the scarcity in the Northern Hemisphere and at the end of Virgo season we will be half way through the zodiacal journey we started with Aries, when the spring sprung. At the end of summer, the Sun will have traveled half of the zodiacal belt gifting us two full seasons, spring and summer and six full zodiac signs. Virgo is the sixth sign of a twelve-part wheel of the year and they welcome us to the end of summer, to the ripeness of our planet. Virgo and their cosmic virgins are the ones that tend to the mythic poetic creative harvest of the Earth. A harvest that change from one place to another within the Earth, a harvest that would be completely different on another planet. You can unlock this door and join me and Virgo on this enchanted harvest journey…