MayDay by Sameesi

Details: Written by: Queer Spirit; Read Time: 5 mins; Published: 01 May 2019; Last Updated: 23 February 2023

MAYDAY! Or.... How to celebrate unity when you're really feeling scarcity! by Sameesi

Today is Beltane, cue the images of the Goddess and her Consort entwined, talk of fertility rituals and just the general feel that everyone and every living thing is getting it on!

Beltane, or Mayday as it is sometimes called falls bang in the middle of the spring equinox and the summer solstice.

Rain has been falling through April, the earth has been warming up, and we get that quickening energy. The next wave of blossoms appear, the trees are green with life and it would have been the time our ancestors turned their herds out to the pasture from the winter homes.

Everything about now is talking about life being in full swing. It’s the adolescent phase of the year. Those who came before us told the stories of the divine energies they believed to be at work here. The Greenman or Lord of the Wild Things has reached manhood, and for whatever reason, earns a place at the Goddesses side. In their sexual union and love making they are believed to ignite the full fertile abundance of the summer to come.

The erecting of the phallic Maypole, in to the verdant Mother Earth is symbolic of this. Mayday revellers dance around the pole, entwining the red ribbon of menstrual blood and the white ribbon of the man’s cum together signifying the coming together of two creative forces to make something new.

It is said at this time sexual morals were a little more relaxed and the youth of days gone by would go out to collect may blossom and other flowers for garlands on the night of Beltane and fool around in nature. This would be known as a greenwood marriage. Hand-fasting, the joining together of two loving and consenting partners for a year and a day was popular at this time too.

Now if you’re in the head space I’ve been in that can feel a little overwhelming.

All this talk of union, sexual or otherwise might end up leaving you with serious Fear Of Missing Out. What if this kind of union doesn’t feel accessible to you? What if you don’t want to become bitter and twisted as the young and vibrant come together and make sweet love? What if it all just feels so damned hopeless?

Well I pondered on this and was gifted by a very divine perspective indeed. Consider this:

You are a part of nature, always have been and always will be. All that is happening for nature is happening for you. We can all reap the rewards of the abundance that flows from what happens at this time of year.
Union is a force in the universe unto itself. There is a pull bringing things to merge and unite together. This is cyclical in its nature and always at work. Water runs back to the oceans, our bodies decompose in to the soil. Life is brought together to create new life. If you don’t get actively in the way of this force, it will come to you.
We are limiting our ideas of union as that of two partners, of a man and a woman, to the idea of love, a pairing. Nature themselves has a far more expansive view of what union is. Challenge yourself to notice where two become one, where life is co-operating, where you yourself are being offered opportunity to connect with nature.
Be kind to yourself about the automatic and often unconscious responses we all have moving about this world thanks to centuries of a dominant patriarchal and hetero-normative message about love and union that centered on the biological family, competition with others and control of resources.
Use your mind as a tool to take critical note of what messages we’re being fed and are downloading about how we should and can meet our needs for intimacy and love. Remember you ARE equipped with the pre-conquest qualities of connection, co-operation and a shared investment in others and this world.
Sit with a tree, smile with a flower, talk with a non-human animal, share your heart with a friend, smell the blossom on the breeze, feel the grass beneath your feet. You’re maybe more connected than you were allowing yourself to realise.
You are not alone, the universe wants to know you, you just have to let them in. The cold and dark of the winter months can close us up, but this is life itself flirting coquettishly with you asking you to dance. This is the time to get your groove on with the world.
Know that unity, like any act of consensual pleasure, is a conscious choice we can make every single moment. We may not be perfect, and we may trip and stumble along the way, but we can come back to this choice if we only remember.

Before I connected with this message, and wrote this post, I had no idea how I could ever get into the spirit of a pagan festival about a sexy beast of a man in his prime getting it on with a gorgeous and glowing maiden in the woods. Now though, I realise it’s a metaphor for the potential we all have, that everything has when two (or more) paths meet, when energies merge and can create something entirely new together. That is something I can definitely celebrate!

Have a blessed start to your summer of love and oneness with all you choose that with!