Life and Love

Once again, May begins. As I have written in the past, this is Beltaine, one of the pivot points of the pagan year, along with Samhain (aka Halloween). Where Samhain is about darkness, decay, and death, Beltaine is about light, life, and love. This is the time when everything is in flower--high spring as it were.

As someone who would like to see us return to a more natural, organic way of life, more connected to our world, our bioregions and ecosystems, the changes in the seasons are important to me.

Industrial society seems to pretend that we can divorce ourselves from the life around us. When we pave the earth with concrete and asphalt, and live in buildings where we are sheltered from the weather--and the natural environment--in wood, glass, brick, and steel cocoons, we lose touch with true reality. When we live our lives from numbered grids on pieces of paper, claiming this is the day, the month, the year, we lose touch with the true seasons. Meanwhile, the earth changes around us. We get inconvenienced by 'weather events'--rain, snow, and hail put crimps in our plans. We can try to avoid this by traveling in steel and glass enclosures such as cars, buses, taxis, trains, and planes, and, indeed, there are people who enter their vehicles in enclosed garages, drive to somewhere, pull into a parking facility, and never have to experience the 'outside world' at all.

However, our activities are beginning to have repercussions. There seem to be a lot of 'extreme weather events' happening--hurricanes, tornadoes, rapid cycles of 'unseasonable weather' that many believe are linked to climate change. I'm even wondering about all the earthquakes and volcanoes that are occurring. Mother Earth does not seem happy with us.

We have lost our connection with the earth, we have lost our connection with nature, and I fear that we are losing our connections with each other.

It's time to rebuild those connections. Time to let in life and love, to touch the earth and the people around us. Time to be physical, sensual, organic, connected. Time to spend some time in nature. Time to get away from the artificial world constructed around us. Time to spend time with those you love. I can't think of a better way to begin May.


Quote of the Day: "All things are interrelated, and a change in one entity ultimately affects all others, however spatially distant.
"The interrelatedness of all things in a living, organic universe implies the need for humans to be sensitive to the rest of the natural world in order to maintain its harmony." - Judith Todd