The Celtic Wheel & Beltane
Beltane, a cross quarter festival of fire situates directly opposite Samhain (otherwise known as Halloween), the Celtic New Year.
The fires lit on Beltane are meant to purify the living earth and her species, burning out any leftover tendrils of winter.
The Flower Maiden represents the fertile aspects of the land goddess as a young mother. Flowers are strewn on doorsteps and roofs welcoming fertility in all aspects of life. *
As a young girl, I recall creating a May basket of flowers and putting it on the doorsteps, ringing the doorbell and hiding in the bushes hoping my mother would think the fairies left it there. Alas, she heard me giggling in the shrubberies!
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The Celtic Wheel, with the Summer and Winter Solstice, Spring and Fall Equinox and the less acknowledged but more important cross quarter festivals are a Cosmology, a way of making sense of the world.
Living in rhythm with the seasons and connecting to the gifts and wisdom the Earth offers us in all the turnings of the wheel.
I find myself in these season of teeming life, blossoming trees, the emergent shades of green climbing up the tree line, not yet on the ridge tops of the Appalachian mountains in a very different space.
My mobility challenges/pain prevent hiking and all of the yard work and gardening, both flowers and food that define this season for me.
I sit with my emotional response to this, allowing sadness, grief and tears and then I get to the business of curiosity, which always is a saving grace to me in complex and painful situations.
Curiosity and contemplative practices and cosmologies such as The Celtic Wheel, Ayurveda and Eight Limbs of Yoga, The Work That Reconnects (from Joanna Macy) and my Mennonite faith ground me.
What lies underneath my emotional response? What am I grieving? What else is here? What is emerging from this grief?
I don’t abide by easy, quick solutions that react from fear. I let things percolate, process. I allow and acknowledge the grief but increasingly recognize it doesn’t define the whole of me, just this corner of time.
When I fear financial uncertainty of being self employed, an unknown surgery ahead with an unknown length of time that I wait (in pain) prior and a likely lengthy recovery post op, I remind myself I am resourceful AND I can ask for help when I need help.
Ideas emerge.
They take shape and I breathe a little life into them. I find even in this season of my life which feels like a field laying fallow, there exists hope blossoming into something that feels really important and rich.
Eldering
Eldering. This process of letting go of attachments and embodying wisdom.
This season of life recognizes mortality, is likely closer to Death than the Flower Maiden fertile young earth mother goddess, yet lays claim to life on its own terms.
So here I am at this crossroads, Eldering in spring.
*Source-Ever Ancient, Ever New- by Dolores Whelan
