Blog
August ... something is deeply wrong in Eden.
Sunday 30th August 2026
Mike Mullins
A warm summer’s day but with a cool northerly breeze. I can feel the warmth of the sun on the tops of my bare feet and the cool stone patio on my soles. A beautiful contrast. As the sun lands on my body and warms my face and skin, it browns and heals me. I sense the divine in my body: the warmth of the sun, the touch of the breeze, the bench holding me.
There’s a large, ripe apple bending the branch of our apple tree, looking for all the world like the apple that tempted Adam and Eve with knowledge before they had the wisdom to live in harmony with nature and the Dharma. Is that the real message of the myth of Genesis? The origin of the all-encompassing world of the Machine?
Purple-flowered verbena, four feet high, sways in the wind. Raspberries, red, ripe and ready. A single bee flits lethargically on the marjoram. The fig tree is doing well, with at least five fast-ripening figs. Only the fleabane, verbena and hollyhock have flowers everything else is desert like.
The weather is beautiful but something is deeply wrong in Eden. The land is wounded, parched and thirsty. The Fisher King lies dying.
Twice this last month, in the unnaturally intense heat of July, I’ve gone out onto Clapham Common to water newly planted sapling trees and shrubs with a local team. What place have we arrived at when only human intervention can save indigenous nature from the perverse, unnatural climate we have created with our greedy, self-indulgent lifestyles?
I saw a dust devil on Clapham Common, something I’d never seen before in England, only in the Middle East. Abnormal heat and strange meteorological phenomena are becoming common.
I was upset by how suddenly the rowan tree I planted in October went into shock because of the heat. Its leaves and berries shrivelled and diminished. Eventually all its leaves browned and died. I’m learning about its needs as a result, nursing it back to health. Hopefully in the spring I shall see new buds and new leaves emerge.
I feel a deep sadness for the Earth.
For school kids so alienated from nature that they would kill grasshoppers and moles (tales a friend who’s a primary school teacher shared with us). Nature actually frightens them.
The Earth, the goddess Prithi is suffering so much.
A second apple has been plucked and eaten by Eve and Adam’s descendants: the apple of arrogance and entitlement. This is the beginning of the age of the Eremozoic, the age of loneliness. An age where man dominates, triumphs alone because every other form of life has been killed off in his arrogance. Man will stand triumphant on all the dead of the earth and proclaim his godlike transhuman status enabled by AI and technology. Fool - all knowledge and no wisdom.
Eclipse at Salisbury felt slightly apocalyptic: sleeping in the heat in the cloisters of Salisbury Cathedral.
Beautiful, cool swims in Tisbury village swimming pool in the tremendous heat.
Camping at Owley Woods on the edge of the Mendips and seeing a deer standing stock-still in the paddock behind our tent, beneath the oak.
Watching the bats and rabbits in the setting sun from the Mendip Hills. Sunset on the Mendips, Somerset, at Owley Woods. It’s cooler than in the valley; we’re getting a respite from the heat.
I’m sitting with Paula on a bench outside the farm barn. It’s ten to nine, and we’ve counted no fewer than 33 bats flying out of the barn to catch insects.
As we look west, we can see the hill of Nyland and Cheddar village illuminated, nestled in the flat Levels below us.
Around us are no fewer than three robins singing the sun to bed. Good night, sun. Thank you.
Five rabbits, a family, in the field in front of us. An ash tree sways before us in the breeze. All the haws are out on the hawthorn tree behind us, berries on the brambles but six weeks early because of the intense heat of the last five weeks, dry, small and desiccated.
Deep and restful sleeps in the tent at Owley Woods.
When you get to 61, you realise that everywhere is filled with ghosts. Taking Mum to Angela’s funeral on Friday, I found myself re-meeting dear family friends who were so much a part of our family back in 1970s Reading. Shared memories of a strangely harsh yet compassionate school.
Thinking back, I realise I had no story of my own back then. I lived caught between the stories of others. It’s so important to have your own myth, your own story and a bigger story to live within. I’m no longer looking back to my younger self through a blurred lens but directly back. Suddenly I feel as if I can see through the Matrix. The Tao. The Dharma. The Kingdom of God. Nirvana. The deeper truth. The deep river of the divine that runs through everything, all things. Whatever you call it, it is beginning to reassert itself against the Machine and spit us out. This is the deeper story I live within now.
September
The Irish name for September is Meán Fómhair, which means the “middle of autumn” or “middle of harvest”. In the traditional Celtic calendar, autumn began with Lughnasa at the beginning of August, not at the September equinox as in our modern meteorological calendar.
Lughnasa was the start of harvest. Gatherings took place on hills and beside lakes, harvest fairs were held, pilgrimages made, and communities began bringing in the year’s crops. September wasn’t autumn beginning, but autumn deepening.
Traditional September work included harvesting cereals, digging potatoes, bringing home turf, fishing for herring and mackerel, and gathering blackberries. The last sheaf the Cailleach, the old woman or hag, was ceremonially cut, decorated and brought into the harvest celebration. Straw harvest knots were also exchanged as tokens of love and affection.
Harvesting a field wasn’t simply practical. The final standing stalks of grain had a special power. In Ireland there was a belief that the vitality, or “spirit”, of the crop retreated into the remaining grain as harvesting progressed, until it became concentrated in the last sheaf.
Nobody wanted to be the person who cut it.
The last sheaf was tied or woven into a human figure, brought ceremonially into the farmhouse, kept through the winter, fed symbolically to livestock, or mixed with the seed used for the following year’s crop.
One source for the tradition of the corn dolly.
The Gaelic word cailleach means an old woman, or hag. In Irish folklore the Cailleach is a mysterious female figure associated with winter, mountains, storms, wild places and the shaping of the landscape.
Imagine a September field being progressively emptied. The golden grain disappears until only one small patch remains. The life of summer has contracted into those final stalks. They are cut. The Old Woman has arrived. Winter is coming. But the Cailleach isn’t simply death. The grain she contains can become next year’s seed. The Cailleach, the apparently barren old woman, carries the possibility of future fertility.
September is not yet the darkness of winter. It’s the moment when the Earth begins gathering herself inward. The last sheaf is the concentrated wisdom of the year.
Something precious from the year can be gathered and carried through the darkness of winter. The Cailleach of the dark half and Brigid of returning spring are the two faces of the land.