Come with me out to the orchard. Carry your bread crusts tied with soft yarn to hang on the branches. Stomp your feet, feel the cold. Enjoy the warm cup of cider just handed to you. With that first taste the hot liquid pours through your body. Take another long sip, then walk to the trunk of a nearby tree and offer it back a little of its own.
It’s wassailing time for the orchard. Wassailing is an old English winter tradition when farmers gathered around one of the largest apple trees in their orchards. They poured cider libations on the roots and hung bits of bread dipped in cider on the limbs for the robins, good spirits who would protect the trees. The farmers would of course drink the cider too, and then circling around the tree they would sing:
Here's to thee, old apple-tree, Whence thou mayst bud, and whence thou mayst blow, And whence thou mayst bear apples enow! Hats-full! Caps-full! Bushel, bushel, sacks-full! And my pockets full, too! Hurra!
Wassailing celebrates the gifts from the trees by returning a portion of what they have given. The ritual acknowledges nature’s generosity and our dependence on her.
Virtual singing doesn’t work well, so let’s read The Apple Orchard by Rainer Maria Rilke (tr. by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows.)
Come now as the sun goes down.
See how evening greens the grasses.
Is it not as though we had already gathered it
And saved it up inside us,
So that now, from feelings and memories,
From new hope and old pleasures,
All mixed with inner darkness,
We fling it before us under the trees.
The trees, like those of Durer,
Bear the weight of a hundred days of labor
In their heavy, ripening fruit.
They serve with endless patience to teach
How even that which exceeds all measure
Must be taken up and given away,
As we, through long years,
Quietly grow toward the one thing we cannot be.
Rilke invites us to walk with him through the orchard. It’s evening, the light is fading as the sun sinks lower. The sharp slanting light makes the moment more intense. The grass is greener, brighter. There’s something he wants to say, to share with us. But it’s not outside, not in the orchard, not in the fallen fruits under the trees. It’s inside each of us, inside our heart bodies.
What does he do next? He turns us around and makes us not the receiver but the giver. All our yearnings and desires, our memories, the dark searchings of our spiritual seeking, even our optimistic hopes of repair, he has us cast them out to the trees.
These are ‘real’ apple trees, old and gnarly, with peeling bark, and bends, and borer holes, knots, and thick calloused trunks. They’ve suffered. They’ve lived and encountered the hardships and pain of learning how to grow and ripen fruit.
They teach whatever expectations we carry of the way things should be, it doesn’t matter. The early frost, the too many days of rain, the dryness of summer, and even the perfect season with bushels of bright apples are soon over. For we are here but for a short time. And we carry nothing with us when we go. Everything that we grow is to be given away.
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I was looking for poems written by friends of the farm but couldn't find the Wassailing file. If you are a poet who was here and wrote a poem, or have a favorite apple poem you’d share with me, please do. I’d love to gather a collection of apple orchard poems. Next January, we’ll Wassail in person in the orchard. If you’re inspired, come visit the trees and start your poem now!
