The Seed of Samhain in Beltane

Blessed Beltane! Today is the exact mid-point of the Spring Season, where we cross the gateway into the last leg of our journey to Summer Solstice.

This Beltane I am here with the land that raised me in upstate NY, saying goodbye to the house I grew up in and the guardian trees that watched out for me as I roamed the fields and the ponds.

I am sitting in such gratitude and grief. Holding the awe of my life and the inevitability of change and death as one.

Hand in hand, as Samhain echos itself through the landscape of Beltane. The seed of the opposite polarity is always held within the terrain of each spoke on the wheel of the year.

The morning of May 1st, when Beltane is often celebrated, I climbed up into the apple tree I climbed as a child. The apple tree who first helped me feel a sense deep in my body that plants and trees were alive.

sitting in my apple tree

I loved the way that tree spirit awakened something in me that I couldn’t name all those years ago. The seed of the longing to be intimately connected with the land planted itself in me, silently, while I swung in her branches.

It’s beautiful to be here with her in bloom this year. Something I haven’t seen in over a decade. This elderly tree still erupting in maiden-like blooms, celebrating the season of beauty.

If you listen closely to the land around you, you can almost hear the song being sung by the Earth.

The world rejoicing in the gift of beauty. In the awakening of Spring. Celebrating and centering beauty.

Honoring the uniqueness of the endless expressions of beauty that all come together to create the masterpiece of our shared Earth.

Beltane historically honors eros. Honors the lovers. Honors how love, desire, sensuality, and pleasure help sing the world awake towards the climax of Summer Solstice.

How reveling in beauty is just as important as honoring the harder aspects of life we’re facing right now, the grief, pain, the shock, the fear. How if we don’t, in fact, honor pleasure, we cannot know the full depths of Life.

Just as at Samhain when we honor the necessity of dying back and release as necessary aspects of the cycle of life, we now get to step into our heart-breaking love for the world. Which is arguably more difficult to feel.

When we love something with such tender vulnerability, the pain we feel for the impermanence of it can often be too devastating to bear.

In Brene Brown’s research she’s found that the scariest emotion for folks to linger in is joy. Because joy can feel dangerous. Because if we allow ourselves to feel joy, we have to acknowledge that it can be taken away, and that’s more scary than not feeling it to begin with. Fear, panic, or anxiety often flow into our bodies right at the heels of joy.

apple blossoms on Beltane morning

But the seasons teach of how to be with both. They teach that joy doesn’t negate the sorrow, and the sorrow doesn’t eradicate the joy, but can enhance it.

The Samhain that lives within the Beltane is here to help us soak in the ephemeral beauty of Life. Not turn from it. Soak it in because we know that soon enough Death will come. And because of this, we learn to lean into joy, into pleasure, into beauty and gratitude.

Beltane invites us to stay with this feeling of openness to Life, no matter how much Love hurts. To allow ourselves to stretch our hearts wide with such love and pleasure that we become transformed by the experience.

That we become the vessel through which Life is celebrated and honored, so that when change and endings present themselves, we can say we’ve lived fully in the beauty and pleasure of the moment.