“Cancel work today. Go and enjoy May Day by doing something that gives you great pleasure. Try to be outdoors all day if you can. Leave formal meditation alone and let your natural joy find its best outlet.”
~Caitlin Matthews,The Celtic Spirit
Yesterday was May Day, the first day of the month that welcomes summer into our lives. Or so says the Celtic calendar. Here in Minnesota we would be hard-pressed to see signs of spring much less summer. But the calendar read May 1st and so I imagined the many places in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland where people danced at dawn to welcome in the delights of summer. I did this while pealing off my flannel pajamas and donning the same number of layers, minus one, that I have worn for the last eight months. Can you hear my weary voice?
Generally, I am unscathed by weather. It drives certain people in my family nuts that I say with regularity that ‘My favorite season is whichever one we are in.’ There is truth in it. It keeps me living in the moment and not projecting ahead too far to what is yet to be. But yesterday’s gloom piled on gloom did fray my edges. I forced myself to walk outside in the morning while the mist gave me a free facial. It actually was enjoyable though cold and wet. While walking I squinted my eyes to see the tiny buds on lilac bushes and trees. Minuscule, chartreuse sightings opened something deep in my heart. I offered them a blessing….one for them and one for me….that their hope, and mine, would not be stifled much longer.
May Day is celebrated, of course, not only in those nations that flow with Celtic blood. The Scandinavians also honor this day. And it has also been celebrated by those whose
political views swing far to the left and nearly off the grid as a day to lift up issues of social and political injustices. The morning paper was filled with stories of those protests and marches, some that got sadly out of hand. Sometimes our fervent passion for change or new life takes us places that can be dangerous, even hurtful, though I want to believe, perhaps naively, that this is not the original intention.
May is the month when we open ourselves to the passion that lives within, the passion for re-creation, the madness of love. (Cue ‘It’s May!It’s May! The lusty month of May!) The Earth and its people are ready to fall in love all over again with whatever it was that stole our heart and then buried it deep in the winter snows. I imagine those who live even further north in this hemisphere than I do, those whose lives are cloaked in precipitation and darkness for so many months, as they celebrate with fullness the joy of the green born of the rain and the brilliance of the sun that will shine upon them. Who wouldn’t want to dance and sing at the coming of the month of May and the promise of increased sunlight?
Yesterday I did not do what Caitlin Matthews suggested. I did not ‘cancel work’. But I did spend a fair amount of time outside and I ended the day dancing which always brings me great pleasure. But on Sunday, I will join with others to welcome spring at the annual May Day parade hosted by In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater. This yearly gathering of creativity, art, social justice, imagination and hope is a tradition for me. It is the yearly shot in the arm of what can happen when a group of people choose to live out loud and thumb their noses at the cold, the darkness that can overwhelm. They do this by doing what people have done for hundreds if not thousands of years. They gather to mark the change of seasons and the welcoming of new life.
On this first Sunday of May, as I watch the parade and that band of people who give their lives to creating both small and enormous works out of the simplest things, I will be filled with the goodness and promise of another summer whose time will come. Eventually. This will be my ‘few days late’ May Day celebration. Like the winter that does not want to let go, my timing may be a bit off. But I will get to it in due time. I will welcome the promise of May, which is also my birthday month. Even more reason to celebrate…….each and every precious day.
It’s May! It’s May!
