E.6 - Hearth & Harvest

Intentions: sustenance, gratitude, fulfillment

Perhaps mankind’s most basic ritual, dining is a biological necessity, a home for culture, and a spiritually significant experience. Cuisine is both cultural and natural, as it necessarily develops from a basis of local plants and animals in a region, and bears those memories forward as it spreads to other lands. In today’s world, food is an environmental battleground, between the ecological cost of feed, carbon footprint of imported ingredients, and issues of pollution.

Dining is also a privilege: these numbers from the WHO show that nearly 900 million people on this planet are starving, and that’s number is rising — not falling. I have added a small but powerful seed to this ritual in order to address this issue, and I hope it will grow into something greater. Hunger is, after all, a natural problem, and it is one which is within our power to solve.

With so much meaning bestowed on the act of dining, it’s hard to choose a single ritual that is globally shared. Making a ritual of dining can mean anything from a small gratitude to a large celebration, and we’ll explore the latter in a bit more detail once we get to the Solar Rites — some of them are Feasts, and are built around the idea of a big meal. This ritual is simple,

• Candle

• Coins and offering jar (optional)

There’s so much magic you can put into your cooking with various herbs and ingredients, and even the direction you stir a pot… but I am going to focus the Hearth part of this ritual on the meal itself, and getting a healthy balance in your meal.

This is an extremely loose interpretation of the “healthy plate,” but if you want to bring a natural elemental balance into your meal, try to get equal amounts of each of these in your meal:

• Grain - represents Earth

• Fruit - represents Air

• Vegetable - represents Water

• Protein - represents Fire

If you’re struggling and can’t afford to engage with the offering, that’s okay! But even if you only have a few coins to offer, try this and see where it leads. In gratitude for your own meal, make an offering for someone else’s. Here is how to include it in your ritual:

Before you sit down to eat, find whatever loose change you have available, and put it in the jar. You don’t have to say anything special, just know that you are giving this offering in gratitude for the blessing you receive by having your own meal today.

At the end of the month, take whatever is in the jar, and donate it either to your local food bank, or to a charity that feeds the hungry elsewhere in the world.

Place your meal on the table. Look over your food and consider it as an offering to yourself: a blessing and a reward, the fruit of your labor, and the gifts of the Earth.

Light the candle, and say:

I celebrate the Grain, the Vine, the Tree,
and all the blessings of the Earth!

I give honor to the Earth which bore me,
and I accept these gifts with gratitude.

Eat up! When you are finished eating, blow out the candle, and clean up.

• Many of find a connection to our ancestors during cooking, so this can be a nice time to make an ancestral offering of food or drink, and to thank them for their efforts, their survival, and their teachings.

• If you’re not able to make the coin offering, consider making an offering of food in another way. Maybe you’re at a drive-thru and you buy the next guy’s meal. Maybe you invite someone to dine with you and pay for them. There are lots of ways to work this into your ritual.

• Dig into the elemental part of this ritual, and get creative with your meals and the elemental balance that you find there. Try new recipes and dietary techniques that support this.