Counting Your First Fruits, Or What To Do With Spiritual Zucchini?

Lammas, the festival of the loaf. The festival of first fruits. Of tomatoes and cucumbers and other things that go nicely on sandwiches.

I’ve been spending some time considering what my own first fruits are this year. I have found some good things. I have some stability. Not much, but a little. That makes a big difference. I have found some peace. I am more at peace with who I am than ever before. I have never felt so glorious in my own skin before. When it comes to self-respect and self-love, 30 is a simply marvelous age for me.

However, one of those first fruits of the year is frustration. Have I ever got a bumper crop of frustration. The happier I am with me, the less I fit into the world. The broader and more inspired my vision, the less the world is equipped to handle it. For every brilliant idea is a mile of redtape, and for every joyful impulse is a vacuum of joylessness ready to suck it up like one of those tubes at the bank drive-through.

Some mornings I wake up and have the most brilliant idea, and then I realize that to accomplish my idea would take other people changing their personalities or relaxing their bureaucratic rules. A joyful idea suddenly becomes the Battle of Gettysburg, and the only weapon I own is a pocketknife.

I don’t know what to do with a bumper crop of frustration. I have a gazillion recipes for zucchini, but I don’t know anything useful or tasty to do with frustration. Seems a good time of year to deal with it. Between the first harvest and final harvest in October, you have to can, freeze, dry, pickle, preserve and transform your crops.

Like zucchini, you can’t simply leave a bunch of frustration lying around. It will rot. It will smell bad. It will make a mess. It will make you nauseous. You have to do something with it, even if that simply means getting rid of it.

So I will bake my bread for Lammas today (brownies, ’cause that’s how I roll) and be thinking about what to do with my bumper crop. What’s your bumper crop, and how do you plan to handle it?