05/07/2024
Happy Beltane, the ancient Celtic festival that celebrates the return of long days, warm sunshine, blossoming flowers and burgeoning life, and Happy International Workers’ Day, the holiday that celebrates the centuries-long struggle for ordinary, working people to have the leisure, sustenance and resources to enjoy all of the above.
Here on the ranch the female dogs are all in heat, the male dog is losing his mind, we have a new bull we hope is busy with our three cows, two new baby goats were born this morning, and the birds are all singing their little hearts out! It’s Beltane, all right—the time to acknowledge that the life-force is strong within us all!
In Reclaiming, our activist Pagan tradition, we like to celebrate this day by honoring s*xuality in all its loving and pleasurable forms, fertility, creativity, sustainability (or better yet, regeneration) and community. We like to see the multi-colored ribbons of the Maypole as representing the vast diversity of s*xual expression, of gender identities, of ways of creating and contributing, and they weave together in the dance into a strong, unified fabric of community.
What if we lived in a culture that truly honored that life-force, that believed s*xual pleasure in all its forms is sacred, that the Goddess blesses all forms of love, that s*x within a life-long, committed relationship is a beautiful thing, but a wild, one-night stand can have its good points, too! What if we honored play and joy and experimentation, granted young people the right to try out different attractions and identities and ways of being, even to make mistakes, and our morality was only about consent and kindness?
At this moment when our basic freedom to control our own s*xuality and reproduction is under assault, when we have lost basic rights that were won fifty years ago, we might appreciate the significance of this day that celebrates both work and pleasure, for they come together in our struggle to assert our basic human rights to make our own choices about our bodies, to share fairly in the abundance of the world, to live lives that are about more than survival.
As the song says, “We fight for bread, but we fight for roses, too!”
Happy Beltane! Happy International Workers’ Day! Solidarity forever! And pleasure, too!
