Growing up in coastal Maine, fall meant one thing in our house: putting up. Gardening still mattered to my family, and by the time the Harvest Moon rose, the work had shifted from tending to preserving. Jars were filled and sealed, winter apples were set aside, and the root vegetables were stored away, including the rutabagas my grandmother called turnips, an old Down East habit that never quite died out. Winters on the coast are long, and what you put up in the fall was what got you through them.
Looking back, I think that’s where I first learned what the harvest really is. It isn’t just abundance. It’s the work of taking what the summer gave and turning it into something that will outlast the season. Which is probably why, every year around this time, the old ballad of John Barleycorn starts running through my head.
If you don’t know it, the story goes something like this: three men swear that John Barleycorn must die. They plow him under, and he rises up green in the spring. They cut him off at the knee, bind him, thresh him, grind him between stones, and drown him in the brewer’s vat. By any measure, poor John has a rough go of it. And then, at the end of the song, everyone raises a glass, because there he is in the ale, warming the hearts of the very people who did him in.
It’s a drinking song, sure. It’s also one of the oldest mysteries we have, hiding in plain sight in a pub.
The God whose life stirred in the first green shoots of spring is the same God standing in the fields now as ripe grain. The harvest is his sacrifice. He is cut, crushed, transformed, and consumed. The Harvest Moon rises over abundance, but you don’t get the abundance without the sickle.
What I love about Barleycorn is that nobody in the song seems especially troubled by any of this, least of all John. His death isn’t an ending. It’s a change of address. He goes into the bread on the table, the seed saved for spring, the strength in the arms of the people who eat and drink him. The life doesn’t stop. It just stops looking the way it did.
The Buddhists call this anicca, impermanence. Everything that takes form will change. Seasons turn, bodies age, and the moments we’d most like to hold on to slip through our fingers regardless. Whitman, who never met a blade of grass he couldn’t find the cosmos in, saw the same thing:
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
Underneath all that change, there’s something that doesn’t go anywhere. I’d call it joy, though not the kind that comes from getting what we want or keeping what we have. It’s quieter than that. It’s the life moving through the seed, the stalk, the loaf, and the soil without belonging to any one of them. One thing is all things; all things are one thing. The grain is cut, and the joy isn’t lost. It goes into the bread.
Barleycorn doesn’t fight the scythe. The lesson isn’t that we should go looking for the blade, but that joy is found in joining the dance rather than resisting it.
So, under this Harvest Moon, a few questions worth sitting with. What has ripened in you this year? What are you putting up for the winter ahead? What’s ready to be shared rather than stockpiled? And what has done its job—an old habit or an old story about yourself—and is ready to go back into the earth?
Grieve what passes. Celebrate what has come to fruit. And when you raise a glass this season, spare a thought for John Barleycorn. He’s been dying for us for a very long time, and he still seems to be enjoying himself.