I hope you had a chance to experience the bursting full moon last night-known as the Full Cold Moon or the Moon of Long Nights.
I lost track of the lunar calendar over the past few days, yet yesterday happened to reach for a book I've been meaning to spend real time with: Full Moon Feast by local food activist Jessica Prentice. When I realized it was the full moon, just as I started putting dinner together, I decided we clearly must have a feast.
With inspiration from the book I took out a large mason jar of stock made recently from a rooster we'd raised (and had to put down, one of the saddest days we've had on this little homestead); added a few of the last Chioga beets we grew this summer and a single cayenne pepper from a little plant that reared itself determinedly from the garden just on the cusp of first frost; some of the bulk dried mushrooms that have become a staple of our winter pantry; splashes of Coconut Aminos and Hany's Harvest Fire Cider (the one flavored with molasses, which he no longer makes); and a cup of rice.
I thawed half a filet of wild Alaskan salmon harvested and shipped by one of Hany's closest friends, poached it with olive oil and pickle juice from some of our pickles along with some of our pickled turnips. I drank a cup of the pickle juice while I cooked, savoring the taste of late summer and sensing the probiotic goodness flowing into my gut.
And then for the salad, more pickles -- cucumber with garlic scapes and beet from our garden. We have so many of these pickles stocked we'll be eating the same salad every day for the rest of winter, happily.
It was one of the most nourishing meals I ever remember consuming. Maybe because we called it a feast?
Then we went outside to pray on the moon. As I gazed up at it I thought about moving beyond the habit of setting intentions (we’ve had the better part of a year to ponder those) into the practice of making commitments.
One of our top commitments for this coming year is to maximize the sustainability of our food consumption through what we cultivate on our land, harvest in the wild, and source locally from our neighbors. This includes all that we grow, forage, raise (our hens started laying their first eggs at Solstice, and there’s little as satisfying as a meagerly sized egg from chickens who have eaten your garden scraps) and, yes, hunt (Hany harvested two deer this season, and we’ve been learning to utilize every part).
Still, we have a ways to go. That salmon, while fished sustainably, incurred a huge carbon footprint to get to us, and it’s an occasional treat. This year we plan to forage much more widely, cultivate mushrooms, and preserve a greater variety of nourishment using a greater variety of methods.
Still, as a recovering vegan who spent seven years on a strict plant-based diet, largely because I lived in a big city where I wasn’t able to reliably source sustainably and ethically raised animal protein, I’m proud of knowing where and how our sustenance is raised and harvested. And the more I’ve been waking up to the impact of my previous grain & legume heavy diet on both my body and the earth, the more grateful I am to be renewing my relationship with food and cultivating a broader belief system around nourishment and sustainability.
That goes beyond food to movement, sleep, and technology. Citing anthropologist T.S. Wiley, Jessica Prentice writes of the fact that many if not most modern degenerative illnesses (diabetes, heart disease, cancer, obesity) presented themselves alongside the invention and widespread use of electricity, reasoning that “the use of electric lighting, televisions, and computers after the sun goes down (and our bodies consequent ability to stay up later and sleep less) serves to keep our bodies in an artificial state of perpetual summer. This disrupts our natural hormonal functioning and deprives us of a period of semi-hibernation that our pre-agrarian and even many of our agrarian ancestors would have enjoyed: a winter season of long nights and lots of extra sleep" leading to excessive cravings for sugars and carbohydrates, which our bodies associate with summer, when they’re available.
Sleeping for fourteen hours, common during pre-electricity winters, allows the body to drop into a deep prolactin-releasing state generative of meditative healing and spiritual communion, of connection with our higher consciousness. So the 9-10 hours of sleep my body wants (and often gets) during the winter, which our society wants me to consider lethargic and lazy, is just plain natural.
Indigenous peoples nurture the wisdom that darkness is sacred, a time for connecting with the spirits. As the renowned teacher Malidoma Somé writes (also quoted in Nourishing Traditions) “Our night is the day of the Sprit and of the ancestors, who come to us to tell us what lies on our life paths. To have light around you is like saying that you would rather ignore this wonderful opportunity to be shown the way.”
Let’s spend some time nourishing ourselves in the darkness this winter.
Rewild yourself podcastwith Daniel Vitalis — especially episodes 143 & 169 for my fellow recovering or questioning vegans & vegetarians, but so many more on other aspects of sustainable nourishment, wellness and living.
I’ll be writing monthly around the themes of the full moons. I’d love to hear your thoughts & journeys.
