Welcome to the merry, merry month of May!
Here’s a special May Day message and poem (The Masque of May, below) from Melody Lee:
May is a season for lovers and also for remembering the loves and passions of one’s youth. The second stanza of the poem is in the past tense. I like that detail because for us crones the current May is enriched by the memory of Mays past. Beltane, celebrated by all of nature, is a joyous moment in an infinitely repeating cycle in which we as individuals are participants but for a time.
And Dorothy Emerson adds:
Beltane is a Celtic festival celebrating the abundance and fertility of life and the imagination. Maypoles and bonfires are often part of traditional celebrations. I remember celebrating May Day as a child in California by leaving small bouquets of wildflowers on neighbors’ porches, ringing the doorbell, and then running away, leaving them with what we hoped was a nice surprise.
The Masque of May
The chiffchaff and the celandine
The blackbird and the bee
The chestnut branches topped with green
Have met my love and me
And we have played the masque of May
So sweet and commonplace and gay.
The sea’s first miracle of blue
Bare trees that glitter near the sky
Grow with a love and longing new
Where went my love and I
And there we played the masque of May
So old and infinite and gay.
By J. M. Synge
A Healing Ritual
We hope you will enjoy a festive Beltane/May Day, however you celebrate it. While we rejoice in the beauty of the greening, flowering Earth, we are filled with sorrow over more violence in our world. This is the year of the Great Turning, a season of eclipses. As we mark and honor this season of planting, perhaps the time calls for a healing ritual:
• To share and release our grief,
• To attune to the water and the land, the plants and the animals,
• To gaze deeply into the fire and up to the stars for inspiration,
• With voices and drums and dancing, to raise energy for transformation,
• To harness the power of our collective imagination to break the chains of the past and fly to new possibilities.♥
We invite you share your woman’s wisdom to help the planet in its healing process and help bring forth its growth.
Blessings!
♥ “Becoming Women of Wisdom” evolved out of Women’s Lodge, a Boston-area ritual group of which the three co-creators are part. Thanks to this year’s Beltane co-creators for these ritual suggestions.
Carla Gomez, Communications
Melody Lee, Karen Edwards, and Dorothy Emerson, co-creators
