Hello, lovely listeners, and welcome back to the backyard to another episode of Backyard Magic. I'm your host, Nicole Berrios, and today I'm joining you from the actual backyard. I thought it was high time that we did another outside episode, so you might hear a little bit of background noise. Oh there might be some thunder. Hold on, I'm waiting. Is anybody counting? Oh. Yeah, there it is. There was just a big flash of lightning, so I was wondering when the thunder was gonna arrive. It must be pretty far away from me. Yeah, I had to come outside because it's um it's a little monsoon-y. Really, really dark. Super, super dark clouds out to the south this morning. Oh, I just love monsoon season. It's the best. So welcome to the backyard. How's everyone doing this week? I uh I I guess I I wasn't on last week because I came to an executive decision for myself that I'm going to just do um every other week for the show. So I will be uploading a new week every other Wednesday. Just so y'all know. So here we are. It is every other Wednesday. What's in my mug today? I've been combining herbs lately. I know, go figure what's new. I feel like I'm always combining herbs. I haven't been doing Chinese herbs lately, though. I've mostly been combining like Western blends. I have two blends that I've been mixing together for no particular reason, other than I thought it sounded good. And it is pretty good. And it's funny, I do have to mention that I still have my tea hot even though it's hot. It's hot outside. I just it I can't really drink iced tea. Like I can't have something cold first thing in the morning. I guess that's just the acupuncturist in me. If any of you has ever worked with an acupuncturist or somebody who studies Chinese medicine, you will know that acupuncturists don't like cold. We'll tell you it's bad for your spleen. And I just can't, like just can't start my day with something cold. It has to be something warm to get my spleen going. So I still have my tea hot, even though it's hot outside. I typically don't drink my hot tea outside. I think that's the thing. Like I'm inside with the climate-controlled air conditioning, so it you know psyches you out, makes you think that it's not that hot until you step outside. But I've been combining these two blends. One is called Vital Woman. I had talked about it several months ago as one of the blends that I was doing for hormone balance. I don't really like it on its own. That I think that might be where the blending started, is because the I don't super like the flavor of this one on its own. There must be something there's something in here that let's see, I'm trying to figure out what it is. Like it's got red raspberry and nettle. Those are lovely. I love both of those. Uh Linden. It might be the linden that I don't super like. Uh lemon verbena, vitex, orange, and cinnamon. Lemon verbena. I'm trying to remember what lemon verbena on its own is like. I'm confusing it with lemon balm because I love lemon balm. Lemon verbena. Maybe that's what I'm not liking. I don't know. One of these, it's either linden or lemon verbena that are in this particular blend that I just don't super like the flavor of. So I've been mixing it with another. Let's see. Another blend called Stomach Pal. This is just something that I had in the cupboard. These are all from my local herb shop, by the way. Like they come, they make them there. They've also got like a ton of individual herbs that you can just make your own blends. But it's kind of nice to just go and get one that's already made because the thought has already been put into it. It just makes it easier. So, stomach pal is chamomile, fennel, rose hip, cinnamon, peppermint, slippery elm, orange ginger, and papaya. This one is yummy. I like to have this one on its own. I actually just ran out looking at an empty bag, which is sad. I don't yeah. I don't know what I'm gonna get next. Maybe I'll get more stomach pal. So I've been mixing the two with I ran out of my local honey also, so what's whatever honey I have in the cupboard from just the regular grocery store. That's not nearly as good, by the way. And it's been pretty good. So that's what's in my mug today. It's been a little bit of hormone balance with a little bit of just digestive support, and mostly I just mix these two because it's yummy. I just thought it was yummy, and sometimes that's enough, right? Like not everything has to have some crazy medicinal property to it. It can just be because you want you want it. So all right, welcome again to the backyard. Today we're going to be talking about llamas or lunasa, which is one of the Wiccan or uh pagan wheel of the year holidays. I've I've done episodes like these for all of the holidays so far, like for as for whenever I started the show. Like I'm pretty sure the spring equinox was the first one that I did because I started the show in March. So for all of the all of the Wiccan, I I'm just calling it that because that's the easiest way to describe them. The Wiccan, I'm not Wiccan, but I do like to celebrate these holidays. The Wiccan Wheel of the Year holidays, there's eight of them. They're called Sabbaths. And for like so I mentioned this in previous the previous episodes that I've done on these holidays, but for anybody who's new around here, hi, how's it going? Welcome. If you are unfamiliar with the Wheel of the Year holidays, there are eight Sabbaths that Wiccans, pagans, anybody really who feels like celebrating can celebrate all throughout the year. They happen about every six weeks, all throughout the course of a year. And it because this is more of a Wiccan tradition, again, like I said, I'm not Wiccan, but I like these holidays, so I kind of make them my own because I think it's important to celebrate them. But they're kind of a mashup. There's the solstice events, solstice and equinoxes, those are the celestial events, and then there's the cross-quarter holidays. So those are like the holidays that happen in between the solstices and the equinoxes. Those, the cross-quarter holidays, I believe those are based more on Celtic mythology. And then the celestial events are definitely like they're important markers, but the way that they're celebrated in Wicca, like who knows where the celebrations came from. Some say they come from like Germanic lore. It's I guess what I'm trying to say is that the the way that we celebrate the the Wheel of the Year in 2026 is kind of a mashup of different different holidays from different people over the course of centuries and centuries and centuries. And they were just kind of mashed together in like the 50s or 60s, like whenever Wicca was being crafted and created. And so that's kind of what we celebrate today. It's it's I think it's cool because it's like an evolving sort of thing, you know, like it kind of gives you some insight as to how celebrations might have been created a long time ago. Like, I don't know, just blending things from different cultures. This could also be because I'm in America where we live in the melting pot, and there's just tons of different people and cultures and influences here. So I I guess for anybody who was wondering, like what is the wheel of the year? It's a mashup of different celebrations from different cultures who that mark the turning of the year, basically, is what it is. And Lamas or Lunasa happens around August 1st in the northern hemisphere. Sorry, southern hemisphere, folks. And it is a cross-quarter holiday, it celebrates the halfway point between the summer solstice and the fall equinox, so it's in between the celestial events. So what the heck is Lamas or Lunasa? You've been hearing me using these two terms interchangeably. Lunasa, it's we're just I'll I'll get into a little bit of history on like where these two different names came from, and then what you can do to celebrate them, or what I'm gonna be doing to celebrate, and why I like to celebrate this particular holiday. Again, I don't identify as Wiccan, you don't have to be Wiccan to celebrate these holidays. You just have to want to, basically. Like, if you want to, you can. It's available to you. Go for it. So Lunasa is one of a it's a harvest festival on the wheel of the year. There's three harvest festivals actually, and Lunasa marks the first one. It's Lunasa and then the fall equinox, and then I believe Sawin or Halloween is the third harvest. So it marks the turning of the of the Wheel of the Year where the days are noticeably beginning to get shorter. This is actually part of why I wanted to come outside for my episode this morning, because as I got up and I'm looking at the time, I realized that, like, oh, it's I I actually had to use the light on my cell phone to like walk through the house without turning on one of the big lights because I needed to, because there's not as much light at the same time of day anymore. Part of it is because the sky is dark, because it's stormy, and um there's some thunder and lightning off in the in the south, but also because there's just not as much light because the sun is coming up later, and that's that's important because it you can see that the wheel is shifting, and we are in the waning part of the year where the light is beginning to fade. So Lunassa marks the first harvest festival of the Wheel of the Year in Celtic tradition. Hold on, I've got some notes here that I wanted to make sure that I covered what I wanted to cover. Yes, so Lunasa in particular is a Celtic celebration, so early or early Irish mythology, um, where they described a festival named after a pagan sun god named Lu Lum Lum Hada. I don't know how you pronounce it if you've ever read like Celtic words. Is it Celtic or is it Gaelic? I'm so sorry if I'm if I'm messing those up. Like the word Lunasa, it's spelled L-U-G-H-N-A-S-A-D-A-H. Like there's a lot of letters in there that you don't pronounce, basically. So I'm very sorry if I'm mispronouncing this. But the the like theory, the myth behind this is that it's a celebration for this the Celtic sun god, who was also a master of arts and crafts and the law. And I guess the the legend goes that his mother or his foster mother died on August 1st from exhaustion after clearing the the plains, like clearing the the land where they were growing food on in Ireland for farming. And in order to honor her, Lou, the sun god, held a like a festival that brought people together to commemorate her death. And the the ancient festival of Lunasa emerged from this as a time to like bring people together with the harvest and to celebrate like basically a woman who worked herself to death. That's kind of how the the theory of like the myth of Lunasa goes. And then lamas, because the terms are often used interchangeably, either Lunasa or Lamas. It's another typically another term for Lunasa, and there, like I said, the terms are used interchangeably in like the pagan community. But it is um this is more from Britain, like from the Anglo-Saxon tradition, not Ireland, where they would they would also do some sort of a harvest festival, and they would do it at the same at the same time. But they they didn't have like the association with Lou and everything there, but they I don't know. It's basically like two different festivals that were very similar and they happened at the same time, so they kind of got mashed together. Again, this is all like speculation, and there's you know mystery within the history and the myth, so nobody really knows like where these celebrations actually came from. We just know that in modern day 2026 they are celebrated kind of as one thing around August 1st, and they are both for commemorating the first harvest of the year. So we are not in modern times an agrarian society anymore. We don't have to rely on the seasons for the crops because we have things like um shipping, you know, we have huge ships that can and airplanes that can transport produce from all over the world, like so the parts of the world where things are currently growing can ship their produce to other parts. It's it's different now. We don't have to rely on like living directly off of the land. So why why celebrate an agrarian holiday when you don't live in agrarian society anymore? For me personally, because this I mean it's it's my show, but for me personally, what the reason why I like to celebrate this holiday is exactly because I don't live an agrarian lifestyle anymore. Celebrating Lama Srulunasa, whichever term you want to use, is a way for me to connect with the seas this the cyclical shifts in a way that I don't really get to for a lot of the rest of the year. I and honestly, the reason that I celebrate pretty much all of the Wheel of the Year, the turning of the Wheel of the Year holidays, again, even though I'm not I'm not wicked, is because it connects me to this cycle. It it allows me to be observant of the shifts that are happening, the way the light changes, to just observe the shifts that happen in general as the seasons shift, so that I can feel more tuned in and more connected to the land that I live on. And it's also a way for me to honor the land that I live on by just giving it a little bit of my attention. In 2026, I feel like the currency of this year and probably for a while going forward is your attention. Everybody's trying to get your attention. Like, seriously, that's that's modern-day currency. So anytime we can slow down and devote our focus to something as simple as observing the seasonal shifts, I feel is important and relevant today. Honestly, I feel like it's it's taken on a different type of importance than it used to in the past, you know, if they were celebrating the fact that the they were starting to harvest some of the crops at this point in the year because they they had to, like they were going to die without the crops, you know, and we don't necessarily have that problem anymore, but we do have an attention problem. We're very scattered and distracted, and there's so many things vying for our attention. So when we can like pause and reflect on the turning of the wheel of the year, I feel like that's that's how we celebrate it. That's that's how we get some magic out of it, in my personal opinion. I don't know if that makes any sense. So therefore, yes, I like to celebrate Lunasa because even though I'm not tilling the fields and I'm not dying from the you know, from my labor, like Lou's foster mother in the the mythology here or the story, I still feel like it's important to recognize this momentous occasion, you know, like to recognize this part of the year and what it symbolizes. So I just kind of wanted to give you some quick things that I will be doing to celebrate this turning of the year, um, to give you ideas for maybe if you decide that you would also like to devote some attention to the turning of the year for Lunasa, some things that you could do that again are always super easy because this is backyard magic where we just don't need crazy elaborate rituals and we don't need a lot of stuff to do it either. Sound good? Okay, so for Lunasa, the first thing that I wanted to go over was how I kind of feel the like what's significant for me for this particular holiday and this time of the year. Because I live in the desert, right? I'm in the American Southwest. We have different different climate here. We don't have the traditional four seasons. We do have seasons here, they just look different than the traditional four seasons. This was super hard for me to understand for the first 10 years when I moved out here. I've been here for 15 now, so it's really just within the last five that I've been okay through summertime. I used to have very debilitating seasonal affective disorder in the summer, and I have recovered from that. You've probably heard me mention that before if you've been following the show for any number of months here. And this time of year at Lunasa is like usually the point where I would start to come out of the seasonal effective disorder. It was really just like peak June and July, a little bit of the last part of May, like the last part of May, June and July, like the peak of the seasonal effective disorder. And it was usually right around Lunasa. I didn't celebrate Lunasa at this point in time, but I did recognize that something about August, like the turning into August, was starting to make me feel better. And now that I do celebrate Lunasa, I can I can see it. I'm like, oh, this is why I would start to feel better come August, is because you can feel the shift. You like it's still hot. Don't get me wrong. I'm currently sweating pretty badly right now because I'm outside. It is still pretty hot. But like I was saying earlier, this the light is beginning to change. I'm not getting as much light in the morning. I have to turn the lights on inside the house to be able to see, whereas a month or two ago, at the peak of you know, like the summer solstice, I didn't need to because the sun was there for me. So, like you can feel the shift just by the way the light is changing. And also, if we are fortunate, we will have Monsoon. So, like right now, it's it's raining, there's thunder, there's lightning, it's beautiful. It all like this only happens at this time of year. So monsoon season definitely helps. It help like it would help me to feel like okay, one, we get a little reprieve from the constant, endless blue skies. That was part of the seasonal effective disorder for me, is just the complete consistency with the way everything looked outside. It was very weird when I first moved here, like trying to understand that I felt so awful when the sky looked so beautiful outside. Like it was blue and crisp and wonderful, but there was like no variation. It was just endless sunny days, blue skies and hot. And so when monsoons would come, it was a it was so relieving. It still is, honestly. It doesn't hit as hard as it used to because I'm not really affected by the endless blue skies like I used to be. But it's still refreshing to be able to see some variation in the way it looks outside with um the presence of the cloud spirits and the thunder and the lightning and the rain, and then the trees and all the plants start to look more vibrant. It's lovely. I love monsoon season. Have I mentioned that I love monsoon season? Because I love monsoon season. So for me, Lunasa is particularly important because it marks the end of my seasonal affective disorder. Even though I don't struggle with this anymore, I still remember what it felt like to have, like to be just laid out, depressed, barely functioning for two months out of the year. And Lunasa was the turning point. Like that's when I started to come out of it, when I knew that there was hope. And like, oh thank goodness, like I'm going to be feeling better very soon, even though it's still hot. Like the end is near because the sun has shifted. So for me, again, not ooh, thunder. I wonder if this will show up on the audio. I hope so. I hope you guys get some thunder magic in the backyard. Hello, thunder spirits. Oh my goodness, I lost my train of thought. I'm so distracted by thunder and lightning. See, attention, but at least I'm distracted by like the elements and the weather and not something on my phone. But yes, Lunasa marks the turning, like the shift of like the end of the seasonal effective disorder for myself. And be I'm like I said, I don't live an agrarian lifestyle. I don't have to rely on the land for producing the food that I eat. But I do like to see this time of year as a time where I can give thanks to the land, especially the land where I live, because it is so hot here. And how anything survives here, I don't know. Like the trees and the plants, like the native ones, I understand. They're they're native to the area, but there are a lot of not native plants here, and I just I don't know how they do it. Like, I don't know how they get through summers here. So to me, I like to take this time of year as a time to like just kind of, especially in my yard, just walk around to all the the trees and the plants and be like, thank you for making it through another summer. Good job. Like you, you did it. We're coming to the end of it, you know. Like, again, it's still hot. We're not we're not gonna be out of the hot part for a while, but like the peak of the sun is over. And I think that is something to celebrate. And again, we're not harvesting food, but we are we could be harvesting many other things. We could be harvesting like a goal or a project or something else that's important to us, and I think this is a good time of year to like celebrate that, to just take a moment to honor how far you've come. Like it's August, we're more than halfway done with 2026, which that blows my mind by the way. Time has no meaning anymore. But to just recognize your own achievements, how far you've come, what yeah, what you've done this year, even if it's not as much as you wanted to. Oh, lightning. Lightning is so cool. Hello, thunder. This is how I practice backyard magic, by the way. I come out into the yard and I just observe what is happening around me. And I I typically don't have my phone with me or anything. I just I come without it just so I can be completely present. So if you hear me stopping a lot so that I could like hear the thunder, this is me practicing backyard magic in real time. I highly recommend that you guys try this. Because again, it's it's simple things, simple things that make you feel completely connected with the land that you're on wherever in the world you are. So the thunder spirits are providing the soundtrack for today. Love it, love it, love it. Okay, I'm gonna try to wrap this up here. So, turning of the wheel of the year, I've already kind of explained like why this holiday is important for me in particular, why it was important for people in the past, and even though we're not an agrarian society, we can still celebrate it. So, some quick little rituals that I like to do for Lunasa. Because this is traditionally an agrarian holiday, um, people would historically bake things with grains that they have harvested from that that year's harvest. So I will bake bread usually or like little um not muffins, biscuits. I like to make biscuits. I didn't harvest the grain myself, but it's still like part of the bounty of the earth, you know, and I like to do this as just a way to honor that like somebody harvested the grain and that I am grateful for it. So I will bake something both to eat, something that I will leave outside for the land spirits, and then I'll put something on my altar as well, just as a little symbol of like the tradition of the festival from olden times. So that's one thing that I like to do. At this time of year, if we are having a decent monsoon season, we will get like really tall grass that grows in my backyard. I think at some point my backyard had like a full lawn, it's got a rock lawn now, but I think at some point in its history, it's it's the house was built in 1972. So in the last 50 plus years, there's been grass out there, and it still grows, like it just needs a tiny little bit of water, and it's been monsoon-y, so it's been rainy, and the there's just random patches of tall grass that grow out there. So if we're having a good monsoon season and there's grass in my backyard, and again, it grows tall. I think at this point it's probably like 15 inches tall, like it gets tall very quickly. I will go and I'll pull some of it up and I will make it into what I call a grass dolly. So some people will make corn dollies. It's like you take a corn husk and you like kind of wrap it so that it looks loosely like a doll. This is again to like celebrate the agrarian nature of the holiday, like the corn harvest. This is what I do from my own backyard. Like I harvest the grass. We don't I don't have any corn out here. But if there's grass, like I like to celebrate that because it means that it was a fruitful monsoon season, and this is what came out of it naturally is just the tall grass. So I will harvest some of that grass, kind of wrap it up a little bit, and tie it, tie it off so it looks very loosely like a doll. And I put it on my altar. So we've got tall grass right now. You bet I'm gonna be making a little grass dolly this year to put on my altar for Lunasa. Thunder. And then just my the rest is basically just my usual things that I do for all of the Wheel of the Year holidays. Um, if you're new, you you probably haven't heard this, but um, for anybody who's been listening, I love the seasons of the witch oracle decks. Love, love, love them. So I have the one for Lunasa, although they call it Lamas on the box. I haven't played with it yet. I always wait until the day of the holiday. So I think this Saturday, August 1st, I will be busting open that deck and I will be pulling a card from the Lamas deck for the first time. Or I'll probably do a whole spread. Um, I'll link in the show notes to that particular deck. So that's always something that I love to do. It helps me commemorate the holidays. It's like it's become my tradition for this year and will be the tradition going forward because I love looking at the beautiful art. So I will be pulling a card from that deck. I also always do a tarot spread for every turn of the year. I don't know what my spread will look like this year, but I will figure something out. So I will be doing my tarot spread. Um, and then I will probably be at my altar and I will do a meditation for Lunasa. I really like um Sarah Robinson. She has um, you can look her up on Insight Timer. Again, I'll put her in the show notes too. But she has beautiful meditations where she does guided journeys through the Wheel of the Year. So I'm gonna do her Lunasa meditation at my altar and probably just light a candle. Super simple. And then I think I'm just gonna be outside as much as possible. I might go swimming if it's not monsoonly, um, or just spend some time on my porch, maybe do some art with my daughter while I'm outside. I don't have anything crazy planned because this is backyard magic. It's all simple, right? Simple ritual, simple magic, little things to commemorate, the seasonal shifts to help remind you that, like, even though life is fast-paced, it's different than it was back in olden times. We can still commemorate these cyclical shifts and still make them our own. In fact, I think it's super important that we do because again, it helps us feel connected to the land, and it helps to slow us down because we're so busy nowadays. Too busy. So, this is a time to just slow down, bake some bread, eat some food, appreciate that the sun is shifting, that the days are getting shorter, that pretty soon we will be at the fall equinox, the halfway point. And for those of us who live in the desert, we are one day closer to it not being hot. One day closer. We still have a good two months of hot. I it doesn't really start cooling down until about sawen. So we still have a ways to go. Um, but we do have monsoons, so yay for that. That's pretty much it. I like like I said, I like to keep it simple. Um, I don't do anything elaborate, even if I planned anything elaborate, something inevitably happens where it just kind of falls apart. So it needs to be simple, and I like it better that way, anyways. It just I don't know, it makes it feel more intimate, in my opinion. So that's all I got for you guys. I hope that was helpful. And I am very curious if any of you are celebrating Lunasa or Lamas, what you will be doing. Let me know. Definitely let me know how it's going for you and how this year is turning for you. So thank you for listening. Happy Lunasa, happy llamas. Happy Thunder Day. It is really going today. We usually don't get thunderstorms during the day. They usually happen at night. So to have one during the day is a real treat. Oh, love, love, love it. And it's sprinkling a little bit too. Yay! If you live in the desert, enjoy the monsoons and the thunder and the lightning. If you live elsewhere in the country or the world, enjoy whatever is happening there too, even if it's sweltering hot and awful. Like this this time of year marks the turning where it's going to be coming to an end soon. So hang in there, appreciate what has transpired so far, and yeah, just go with it. Thanks again for listening, guys. Have a great week, and I will catch you two Wednesdays from now. Bye.