I don't suppose life was ever easy for people who subsisted directly from the land they lived on, whether hunting and gathering or practicing small-scale agriculture. But it has become even harder to live "off the land" in the past thirty years, in particular.

I grew up in a remote, rural corner of Eastern Oregon and my parents made a fair stab at living an earth-centered life, growing and raising a great deal of our food in the 1980s. There are still people who do that today and some even live off the grid, running their homes with solar and wind power. But there are a lot of hardships involved. The climate has become harsh and unpredictable in many areas. Climate change and international travel have spread pests to areas where they have no predators and made subsistence organic agriculture has become a risky gamble indeed.

Economically, in the United States and Europe at least the burdens of taxes and regulations have made it increasingly hard to raise children while living on the land and off the grid. I'm not saying it's impossible and those who do it, even for short periods, have my respect. But as much as I would like to, I don't live entirely in that way.

Instead my husband and I have worked to build a life that is as ecologically sustainable and low-impact as we reasonably can make it - given our climate, geographic location and economic situation. Our second goal is to raise our children in as healthy an environment as possible without entirely segregating ourselves from modern society.

In practice, this means we grow as much food as we can, focusing on crops which do well in our climate and which are somewhat resistant to local plagues of slugs and mold. This means that we eat a lot of squash, pumpkins, kale, lettuce, green beans, currants, blackberries and plums. I was fortunate enough to start out loving these foods. Yet I'll admit that going into our tenth year at this, I find bananas exciting and maple syrup is an ecstatic experience.

But on another level, I have come to grasp viscerally the way agricultural peoples saw their staple crops. Early to mid-June is a very sensitive time for squash and pumpkin plants in our climate. They are still fragile and susceptible to being eaten by slugs until they grow spines and tough sin. One year a hail storm in June decimated our crop, having a painful impact on our family's ability to eat organic meals for the next year. We are fortunate that crop disaster doesn't mean starvation for us, but it does mean unhealthy, pesticide laden food. The fact is that in the Czech Republic organic produce is far beyond our budget, unless we grow it.

And so gardening, the work of feeding a family directly from the soil has become a big part of my spiritual path as well. This year my pumpkin and squash seedlings were slow to get going and I worried and called out for help. But they finally did come up and are now a good hand high. When a hail storm came last week, I ran out in it with pots and bowls to cover the seedlings. My six-year-old daughter stood in the doorway handing me more, her eyes wide with anxiety and excitement, as the downpour soaked me to the skin and the beginnings of hail bounced off my head.

I saved the crop and caught a cold. Fortunately, the garden also has medicinal herbs for tea. While I recovered, my daughter devised her first ever ritual and prayer on her own.

I was amazed and gratified to see the level of sophistication she had gained mostly by just watching me in my spiritual practice. She asked me to help her light candles and use a sage smudge. Then she made up a prayer, invoking Thor (as the Norse god she associates with Thunder based on a story she heard once three years ago) and White Shell Woman the Navajo goddess of crops and livelihood. She asked for the hail to move on, for the rain to go to the desert "where grandma Julie really needs it" and for our garden to grow. She made an offering of blackberry cake outside, a true sacrifice because it's a special treat.

By the time the Solstice comes around the pumpkin and squash plants will be big enough that they can survive both slugs and hail, the corn will be well started, the fruit trees will all have flowered and set fruit and the green beans will be climbing their trellises. We'll have very practical reasons to celebrate and a sense of our labor combining with the energy of the earth and sun to give us our livelihood.

Whether you live in a city or in a place where you have the luxury of a garden, Litha or the Summer Solstice is a worthy time to think about how you combine your labor with the energies of the earth and sun. Maybe you live in such a way that you do have the budget to buy locally grown organic produce and thus support a large-scale development of sustainability. Maybe you grow basil and sage on your window sill in a small apartment, so that you can cook tasty food from scratch and avoid harmful and ecologically unfriendly flavorings and packaged foods. Maybe you volunteer or contribute financially to organizations that work for ecological and sustainable development.

Whatever it is the Summer Solstice is a time for these energies to come together. Here are some of the ways I celebrate in a family with small children.

Cooking

Picking strawberries - Creative Commons image by Loadmaster (David R. Tribble)

There is one other crop we've worked long and hard to grow. It hasn't been as easy as our staple crops but it is one that is worth it. We grow 20 strawberry plants. After years of trial and error we have hit on a system where we get most of the strawberries and the slugs and mold only get a few. And it is usually right before the Summer Solstice that our full-season-producing strawberries are at their peek. Given a good sunny week, we can all have fresh strawberry shortcake with organic strawberries that I can feel good about watching my kids eat.

Here is my deluxe strawberry shortcake recipe. Keep in mind that strawberries really are one of those foods that is particularly worth buying organic. If you can't grow them yourself, barter, trade and save to buy them. There are places where you can pick your own in local organic gardens and cut the cost a bit.

My recipe, developed over the past dozen years is a combination of my mother's buttermilk biscuits and my strawberry sauce

Grandma Julie's buttermilk biscuits

1. Preheat the oven to 425 F (210 C).

2. Mix together:

1 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 tablespoons sugar
1/4 teaspon salt

3. Stir and tweak in

1/4 cup (1/2 stick) cold butter cut into small pieces.

4. Add

1/4 teaspoon soda
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder

5. Stir and add

3/4 cup buttermilk (plain yogurt works in a pinch)

6. Combine and kneed a very little in order to make a smooth, somewhat sticky dough.

7. Divide into six equal pieces and shape each piece into a flat disk.

8. Put the biscuit disks on a cookie sheet covered with baking paper (or greased).

9. Bake for 15 minutes.

Mama Arie's strawberry sauce

10. Clean and cut the tops off the strawberries. Then divide them in half.

For each biscuit you'll need about a double handful of strawberries. You can get by with a bit less but the more the merrier.

11. Put one half of the strawberries into a bowl. Use a potato masher or a fork to slightly crush the strawberries and release their juice.

12. Add

about 4 tablespoons of sugar for a standard batch (or add slowly to taste)

13. Mix and add

4 - 6 tablespoons of sour cream

14. Save the other half of the strawberries for putting on top.

15. Place a biscuit on a plate and cut it into cubes. Pour strawberry-sour-cream sauce over it and top with cut strawberries. Whipped cream is optional.

Our other staple of the Summer Solstice is big salads containing garden greens, chives, radishes and edible flowers (dandelions, violets, daisies) - basically whatever we can grow at this season - with feta cheese, boiled eggs, sunflower seeds and herb and yogurt dressing. The kids are very enthusiastic after a winter of cooked veggies.

Crafts

There is so much activity around Beltane that the fairy theme seems to get lost in the shuffle then. This is when we really go all out with fairy crafts, coloring sheets, anything with multicolored wings (butterflies made of tissue paper, wands with fairies at the end). We also make sun catchers to hang in the windows or from trees outside, often using translucent materials that can channel light.

However,these crafts can often be found elsewhere, so the one I want to highlight here is one I partly developed from just the glimmer of an idea mentioned elsewhere. It is particularly special because:

It is exceptionally easy and can be made by even very young children.
Yet it's beautiful enough to delight adults and be a real home decoration.
It's a sun image.
It's made with natural materials.
And it helps to clean out the pantry in preparation for storing food for another winter.

Creative Commons attribution required illustration by Arie Farnam

Thus it really combines all the elements we want with the Summer Solstice - sun, natural materials, the bounty of the earth, the remembrance that winter will come again. You could even add a fairy if you wanted.

You will need:

A clean, sanded, flat square of wood or stiff cardboard as backing
A pencil
A lot of white glue
A bag of red lentils
A bag of black beans

And here are the steps:

Draw a simple, bold sun shape on your backing with a pencil.
Cover the area you drew generously with glue.
Pour red lentils generously over the glue.
Lightly press the lentils into the glue with your hand.
Set aside to dry.
Pour the excess lentils, which did not get glued, off.
Cover the remaining area of the backing generously with glue.
Lightly press the beans into the glue with your hand.
Set aside to dry.
Pour the excess beans off.
You can either fix a hanger to the back and hang this on the wall or prop it up on your window sill or alter.

Blessings of the sun to all!

Ritual and fun with children

We rarely do a large ritual at Litha. If possible we hold a family bonfire in our garden and sing and drum to help the crops and our dreams grow. Because the Book of Runes by Ralph H. Blum was written over the night of the Summer Solstice, I find it to be a good time for run work. I made my rune script of protection that hangs on the center beam of our house on the Summer Solstice, for instance. It's a time of activity and work.

But I like to have something that sets the special days apart for the children and besides crafts and strawberry shortcake, we often make fairy houses in the woods. The key is to use all found natural materials that don't harm the plants. It is a way for children to connect with the growing natural world in a deep way.

We usually start by making walls out of rows of sticks, placing leaf dishes and beds inside and then covering the whole with a roof of moss or bark. Pebbles can be used to make a pretty pathway up to the door.

Children's Summer Solstice Blessing

Here is a short sun blessing that my children have enjoyed this year. Feel free to use and adapt as you wish.

Ancient Sun, reborn sun, giver of life and energy,

in oil, tree, herb and tide, in harvest bounty and in light,

as you shine in the heavens kindle our hearts with fire.

May you light the world as you light the sky

I love to hear from you. Feel free to ask questions or share your own summer solstice blessings and tips in the comments (icon on the lower left). Share this article with your friends using the icon on the lower right.

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