Love Wins - the Soul Turns Home at Beltaine
By C. Austin
My heart basks in the illumination of a new season. The shadowy,
brittle grip of winter - a winter that seems to have lasted years
- retreats before the brilliance of Beltaine.
Samhain, the advent of the Celtic winter, commences on November
eve. Summer begins at Beltaine, on May eve. These are the two greatest
Celtic festivals, dividing the year, and sometimes our lives, in half.
In November, the harvest is done - fruitful potential is long spent
- its energy returned to the ground. Dissolution, disguise and death
fly before us, a reminder of our debt to time, change and the
necessity of doors that must close before others can open. Though
rightful, there is nothing comfortable about Samhain, it represents
the loosening of norms and entrenched ways of coping that bind our
world in place.
In the Celtic world, day emerges from the dark, the reason all
Celtic festivals begin at twilight on the day preceding. Just as the
drudgery of relating to this world must be undertaken before true
companionship can ever be found, so it is from the howling stillness
of Samhain that the magic dew of May Day is borne.
While territories dissolve in the bedlam of Samhain, Beltaine is a
celebration of containment, in the arms, the eyes and the boundaries
of the Other.
The sacred premise of Beltaine is love. Perhaps not the love that
may, or may not, be found in the captivity of marriage, but the love
between souls that regenerates all of nature. This is love
undisguised, the precinct of the hieros gamos, the sacred marriage and
love act that renders participants Creators as they share each other
and the divine without self-consciousness.
The moments in which soul touches soul render the world new,
dependent not upon what came before nor measured by what will come
after.
Beltaine is a time of "re-bounding," of clearing grievances, of
settling debts and the literal resettling of space by the repair of
fencing. To "rebound" in this context is to re-form, to find one's
own ground and contain it, to leave enough wildishness to thrive, but
enough safety to settle. Blessed is the soul that has the courage to
hold another when she or he is broken, to mediate the special energy
that accompanies hurt and to enfold that other in claimless love.
After the pyrotechnic appreciation of life has worn down, when the
incessant approach and recession of life, like a late-night bonfire,
holds one in thrall - is the reverie, the reciprocal perception that
we see as we are seen. Here is communion, here are our souls, our
lives at this moment, rotating under a starry sky on a small blue
planet. Welcome a brighter season, long may it stretch in our hearts.
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