✦ A Lammas Practice
What Came In
The first day of August was once called hlāfmæsse — loaf-mass. The first grain of the harvest was cut, ground, baked, carried into the church, and blessed. Not stored. Not sold. Broken and given away. The first thing gathered after a year of labor was the one thing the farmer didn’t keep.
Here’s a suggestion of ritual we might try this week …
Bake a loaf, or buy one from someone who did — not a factory-made thing full of preservatives. Something local. Something you worked to shape in your own home. Before you eat any of it, break it into four pieces with your hands — no knife. As you break it, let each piece stand for something that has ripened in you since January. You may not have four. Two is plenty. One is enough. And if nothing comes forward in that moment — that’s okay, too.
Then set one piece aside. Don’t eat it. Leave it out, give it away, put it on the ground at the edge of your yard for whatever comes. There’s an old Anglo-Saxon charm that has the Lammas loaf broken in four and laid at the four corners of the barn — a harvest that begins by giving a portion back before anything is counted.
Maybe we then might make space to notice what rises in us when we’re asked to set something aside. Generosity? Accounting? No corrections. Just witness.
If the question of what’s ripening in you — and what you might be refusing to cut — is alive for you right now, this issue is full of resources categorized by how much time and attention you’d like to spend.
New to Lammas? Eleanor Parker, a medievalist who writes beautifully about the Anglo-Saxon year, traces the loaf-mass back through the old chronicles here: A Little History of Lammas (~10 minutes, free). In addition to the primer on Lammas, there’s much to appreciate in Parker’s work to honor the uniqueness of the past, and in how thorny it gets to understand pagan and Christian influences in rituals and celebrations that evolved over time.
✦ In This Issue
Quick Dip · A Rilke prayer for ripening, a loaf broken in four, and three women gleaning a field
Full Sitting · An economy of gifts and eight years on a farm
Deep Dive · A divinity graduate who found God at the handle of a plow, and Agnès Varda among the leavings
A Harvest Examen · Five movements over five days — an original Haden resource, yours to explore and keep
An Invitation · Join one of our newest cohorts of spiritual direction students as they begin their certification training in September. The application deadline has been moved up to August 26. Save your spot now before we begin a waitlist for next spring. Learn more and apply.
Iona · One spot has opened up for the Haden pilgrimage to Iona this fall. Apply now or reach out directly to Megan Lyon at innerpathwv@gmail.com or 304.421.1584.
✦ The Resource Guide
Seven resources exploring first harvest, the turn toward autumn, and the gift economy
We’ve organized these by time investment, as always. Pick the entry point that fits this week — and know that the shortest one here is a poem you can read in ninety seconds.
🌾 Quick Dip ~15 minutes
“Autumn Day” (“Herbsttag”) — Rainer Maria Rilke
“After the summer’s yield, Lord, it is time …” Rilke wrote it in Paris at twenty-seven, a petition asking God to finish things, to command the last fruits to be full, to press the final sweetness into the heavy wine. Then it turns, in the last stanza, toward whoever has no house now and will not build one.
Two or three translations are easy to find online and they differ meaningfully — Stephen Mitchell’s is the most quoted.
Bake a Lammas Loaf
Here’s another invitation to lean into the practice at the top of this guide. Flour, water, salt, yeast, time. If you’ve never baked or feel intimidated by making bread at home, this no-knead recipe asks almost nothing of you but patience.
Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners (1857)
Three women stooped in a field that has already been harvested, gathering what the reapers left. Behind them, in golden light, the actual harvest goes on in abundance — stacks, a cart, a mounted overseer. Millet was accused of political agitation for painting it. Sit with it for ten minutes. Notice where your eye keeps going, and how long it takes you to look at the background.
🔥 Full Sitting ~an hour
“The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance” — Robin Wall Kimmerer
Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist, picks serviceberries alongside the birds and works out from there what a gift economy actually asks of us. Her ethic is built on enoughness — take only what you need, never the first, always leave some — which turns out to be indistinguishable from the gleaning laws in Leviticus. The essay is free, it’s read aloud by the author if you’d rather listen while you walk, and it might change how we think about the word abundance.
The Biggest Little Farm (2018)
A couple leaves Los Angeles for two hundred acres of dead soil and spends eight years learning that every solution creates the next problem — coyotes, snails, gophers, drought, fire. It’s gorgeous and it’s funny and underneath it is one of the least sentimental accounts of vocation you might see this year: the work does not get easier, it gets more intricate, and the intricacy is the point.
📖 Deep Dive many hours
Soil and Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith — Fred Bahnson
Bahnson finished divinity school at Duke and then found his answers, as he puts it, not in a pulpit but at the handle of a plow. He started a faith-based community garden in rural North Carolina — partly to feed people, partly to feed a hunger he couldn’t name — and then went traveling: to a Trappist monastery, a Pentecostal farm, a Jewish agricultural fellowship, a Protestant garden project. What he’s after is communion in its widest sense, the connection between how we feed our bodies and how we’re fed. It’s a book about dirt that is unmistakably a book about God, written not far from where we gather at Kanuga.
The Gleaners and I (2000)
Varda took a small digital camera across France and filmed people who gather what others leave — potatoes rejected for being heart-shaped, grapes past the vintage, furniture, figs, oysters after the tide. Millet’s painting is her explicit starting point, and she keeps finding it alive in parking lots and market closings. Then, partway through, she turns the camera on her own aging hands and includes herself among the gleaners: an old woman gathering images before the light goes. It is funny and tender and completely unhurried, and it is free through most public libraries.
✦ An Invitation
Still finding your way to Haden?
The movements in this guide — taking honest inventory, sitting with what has to end, learning to leave something in the corners for someone else — are the ordinary work of spiritual direction. It’s part of what Haden’s Spiritual Direction Certification develops, in community, with people who will not let you rush what needs space, what needs time, what needs better attention. If something in these pages has named a longing you’ve been carrying, apply now to join a cohort this fall or next spring.
✦ The Harvest Examen
We wrote this one. The Ignatian Examen is traditionally a daily prayer — a fifteen-minute review of the day’s presence and emotion. We’ve stretched it across a season: seven months, from the turn of the year to this first harvest. Five movements, one a day for five days. Walk the Field. What Ripened. What Rotted on the Vine. The Cut. The Corners You Leave.
It isn’t an audit and it isn’t a verdict. Lammas is a first harvest — nothing is finished, nothing is being graded, and there’s still a whole autumn coming. Print it, take a journal, and go slowly.
✦ Iona
Sacred Pilgrimage to Iona, Scotland · September 25 – October 4, 2026
One seat has opened on Haden’s autumn pilgrimage to the Isle of Iona — one of the oldest thin places in Celtic Christianity, and a journey built in the spirit of everything this guide points toward: sacred ground, ritual in community, and unhurried attention to what’s actually here.
September is late harvest. If this issue has you taking stock of a season, there may be no better place to finish that work than an island where the weather does the deciding and the light comes and goes as it likes.
Open to Haden graduates and current students.
Learn more and apply → Or reach out directly to Megan Lyon at innerpathwv@gmail.com or 304.421.1584.
✦ As You Go …
Glen Hansard died this week, in Dublin, at fifty-six.
He started busking on Grafton Street at thirteen — years of playing into an open guitar case, which is one of the older forms of the gift economy. You offer the thing. You don’t get to decide what comes back.
Here he is singing “On Raglan Road.” The words are Patrick Kavanagh‘s, a farmer’s son from Monaghan who worked the land before he wrote about it, and who spent a career on the subject of lives that go unharvested. It’s an autumn poem, sung to a much older air, about giving gifts freely and gathering nothing.