In Nature's Honor: Myths And Rituals Celebrating The Earth
In writing this book, I discovered the most important theme running through the history of rituals related to the earth’s seasons is renewal.  The wheel turns and the old season gives way to the new, the old year to the new, the old life to the new.  Each planting of seeds promises new possibilities.  Each harvest brings sustenance for yet another year.  Each fallow time regenerates the life of the soil.  The sun deities retreat and return.  The grain goddesses are lost and restored. The vegetation gods die and rise again.  The cycle of life goes on and on, birth after death after birth.  Perhaps what all the rituals celebrate is this ongoing-ness of life: the miraculous natural world that makes it possible and our abiding connection to it.For the ancients, the interdependence was clear.  When the people fasted on the eve of a new season’s beginning, they purified not just their own bodies, but the land itself.   The fires that encouraged the fecundity of the land also made its people fertile.For us moderns distanced from the earth by technology, the interdependence is not as clear.  And we are paying the price: in polluted air and water, in soil erosion, in deforestation, in global warming.  How different the condition of the planet might be if we allowed ourselves to be renewed at each turning of the wheel of the year, if we took the time periodically to celebrate the beauty and bounty of nature.