You are Nature's Creativity

Beltane Blessings ~

Everything that is blooming around me is yellow: forsythia and daffodils. Neon splatters and tiny green buds. Yellow that eclipses doldrums and composts winter’s afterbirth. Yellow that clears the eyes of any illusion of darkness. It feels fitting to connect with you all at this moment in the Earth’s transformation, something holy and new about to emerge from the mysterious cocoon of creation. 

Beltane reminds us that we are all a product of Nature’s innate creativity. 

Traditionally Beltane rituals center around sexuality, fertility, and fecundity. Our ancient ancestors gave libations to the Earth, made love in their gardens, and practiced erotic divinations at this time because it is what the Earth inspired them to do; because it is the sacred impulse to breathe life back into our bodies and spirits at this springtime revival of color, scent, and nourishment. Through pleasure rituals we not only call our spirits towards creativity and abundance, we also enact cleansing rites. Beltane is a fire festival which calls back the light of the Sun, initiating the Summer season, and also summoning the brightness that indwells within each of us to return and fortify our beings. By jumping through a Beltane fire (a traditional practice on Beltane eve) one was shedding their Winter skin and anointing themselves with a lacquer of fresh lust for life itself. This spiritual lust ensures that the next chapter or phase of growth is fed by an authentic fire, an inner fire that is sparked to life by the external organic world, an acknowledgment of our basic symbiosis. To celebrate Beltane is to reconnect with a renewed warmth that moves like motivation through the body, a body dancing in-tune with the Earth’s own rhythm. At this time we can be inspired to create wildly, to celebrate when the feeling strikes, and to honor the impulses to center our pleasure. 

Beltane is one of my favorite pagan festivals because of its ability to connect us deeply with our unseen kin and their creative wisdom, as well as being an invitation to tune into the sexual aspects of our nature from a place of ritual, sacred rite, and devotional practices. At Beltane we reconnect with our ancient relationship with sex and sexuality, which is so much more than carnal relations alone. While highlighting physical pleasure as a joyful part of our animal nature, the sexuality we can explore at Beltane (and anytime we care to) is the sexuality of feasting, of sensing the Earth’s breath, of rolling around in a wild place, of whipping cream, or getting lost in a painting. The sexuality of Beltane encourages us to penetrate the deep wells of spirit in our own bodies, and to commune intimately with our local landscape. This olde sexuality is raw, like snow melt flooding over river banks, and it makes the heart quake, like the first buds on the branches of the apple tree. 

All of these energies point towards a basic practice: animism. To celebrate Beltane is to strengthen our intimate connection with organic cycles, cycles that we embody, cycles that have their own lore, that have feathers and teeth. This time of year, opposite Samhain on the Celtic wheel of the year, is a liminal time - a time for communing with the spirits of the land and hedge. Beltane is an ideal time to pay homage to the spirits you encounter daily, but with whom you rarely communicate directly with. Make offerings to your garden, to your home gnomes, to the trees that remind you of your own root systems. Journey to a wild place, to the hedge wherever you may find one. Commune with whatever is flowering; blackthorn and hawthorn, wildrose, dogwood and cottonwood, hedges that were once boney brambles that are now coming back to life, commanding their spirits to resurrect from a deep restful slumber, to make medicine, leaf and fruit once again. If you listen, if you pay them respect and offer gifts, they will teach you about the wild medicine of Beltane. 

Beltane ritual suggestions: 

~ Create an organic and compostable altar out of doors in reciprocity with the spirits of your local landscape

~ Recite poems and sing songs to the Earth to celebrate its changes 

~ Bake or cook something pleasure soaked and share it with folks you love 

~ Safely have a Beltane fire for leaping through, reveling about, purifying your spirit, burning away Winter’s burdens, or simply celebrating this moment of turning 

~ Pleasure yourself or generate pleasure with those who excite you most 

How will you be honoring this moment in the Earth’s cycle? What pleasure magic will you be conjuring to awaken your senses and fortify your spirit? 

Please do share…