The modern world loves to paint late July and August in a soft, golden light. We are bombarded with images of idyllic summer holidays, perfect tans and effortless abundance. We see the ice clinking in glasses of crafted gin and tonic, or the thick condensation running down the side of a cold beer. I am not against it - and I know I will find those moments happening for me during the upcoming summer holidays - but the flawless images of those moments mask the grueling reality that precedes them.
Right now, in the corporate trenches at McLaren, we are closing the budget plan, predicting the future across four grand quarters. We are chasing excellence and accuracy, a pursuit that must live within a very real, uncompromising understanding: You can have the answer quickly, but it may be wrong; or you can have it slowly and have it mostly correct.
The actual demand, of course, is for correct and fast. So, we put in the extra hours. We sweat the stress into our shirts and hang tight to that summer dream we are sold.
A dream that is often a lie wrapped in cellophane.
As someone who thrives on moving through the natural world, I know the true aesthetic of late summer isn’t a sun-drenched meadow; it is choking dust, a baking sun and the quiet panic of a ticking clock.
Alongside the corporate finances, I manage a twenty-by-ten-meter plot of land. If you have ever spent an evening sweating over an allotment, frantically weeding and watering while the midsummer earth tries to bake itself into concrete, you know the truth. True abundance isn’t handed over. It is dragged out of the dirt, one calloused hand at a time. Here, close to the soil, I feel the ancient truth of this season cutting straight through the travel brochures.
Historically, this is the season of Lughnasadh. Its origins are soaked in sweat, muscle strain, and sacrifice.
The Bones of the Season
Many today have never heard the term Lughnasadh. Mythology tells us this festival was founded by the god Lugh, but it was never intended as a celebration of easy wins. It was established as a funeral feast for his foster mother, Tailtiu, a woman taken down by absolute, systemic exhaustion. She died after clearing the massive, heavily forested plains of Ireland with her bare hands, solely so her people could plant crops and survive.
It is difficult to comprehend from the comfort of the modern day, but it remains a fact: the very ground we walk on, the fields that feed us, were bought with a broken back. Perhaps not by the literal bare hands of a mythic goddess, but by human hands that broke, bled and laboured without ceasing.
There were no excavators or heavy machinery assisting back then. If you look up at the canopy of a single tree, you can envisage that same massive network of branches mirrored in the root system beneath the earth. Now imagine thousands upon thousands of those deep-rooted giants standing together. Consider clearing them with nothing but pure human effort.
It is work that has been wired into our very DNA and we feel distinct echoes of Tailtiu’s exhaustion in our own modern rhythms. It lives in the sheer, heavy lifting required just to take a week or two away from work. With our bandwidth utterly consumed, we pull double shifts, clear overflowing inboxes, tie up loose ends and burn ourselves out just to earn a brief respite. We push through the mental weeds, aching to clear a small patch of time where we can finally breathe.
Survival - and sanity - is always built on a foundation of hard, unglamorous labour. The cold glass of beer is not the metaphor for this season. It is merely a brief, fleeting reward for surviving it.
The Sacrifice of the Bull
In the ancient world, Lughnasadh was also marked by the ritual sacrifice of a sacred bull. There is a deep synergy here to how we look at things: the Bull represents the massive, unyielding power of the world-forces we must learn to dance with or be broken upon their charge.
This ancient sacrifice echoes that exact dance. The ritual not only fed the tribe with meat to sustain them through the coming winter, but the bull's hide was used in sacred ceremonies to transition power to a younger, stronger beast. It was a stark reminder that to sustain life, something massive must give way. This happens in nature and we do well to recognize it in our own lives.
We face our own bull this season. With our bandwidth utterly consumed, we head into the second half of the year, balancing the weight of our corporate responsibilities while planning our family holidays. We must ask ourselves: What needs to be laid down so the rest of the year can thrive?
True growth isn’t a gentle, passive slide from one season to the next. It is a deliberate decision to shed an old skin, to butcher an old habit, or to leave behind a heavy project that has run its course and can go no further.
Sometimes, it is people we allow to add static to our clarity - those who benefit from our strength while we only deplete ourselves by maintaining them. Other times, it is routines that once served a purpose but are now just mechanical habits, yielding no growth or reward. In simple terms, that which we choose to carry forward must serve us in the future dance. Our time and our energy are finite. You cannot carry the dead weight of the past into the harvest.
The Lean Gap
Supermarkets remove the truth from modern life, but working the land keeps it firm in my consciousness that August was historically a terrifying month. It was known as the "lean gap" - an agonizing period where the winter stores were completely depleted, but the new grain wasn't yet ripe enough to harvest.
The community was running on pure fumes, praying the weather wouldn’t turn before the crops were safely in. Lughnasadh, therefore, was never born out of relaxed luxury; it was born out of profound tension and pure, hard-fought relief.
So, let’s loop back to the glossy image of summer. As we mark the end of July, we can skip the superficial gratitude lists. Look at your calluses instead. Look at the dirt under your fingernails from the toil, the mental fatigue of keeping your life on track and the heavy personal cost you’ve paid to get this far.
Honour the brutal work that got you through your own lean times. That moment of paradise we all hope to capture on holiday will taste all the sweeter for it. Such a break is not an inherent right, but a reprieve hard-earned.
Honour yourself for earning it. Others may not show recognition for your aching back or your tired mind, but we do not need external validation to wear the medals we earn upon our hearts.
The harvest is coming. Never forget the grit you showed, or the graft it took to clear the field.
Bones
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