Happy Beltane (May Day)

Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis)

This is Beltane (or May Day) in the northern hemisphere, Samhain in lands below the equator. As we in northern lands drift from winter into springtime, our kindred in the south are moving from summer into autumn..

It was a long winter here in the eastern Ontario highlands, and nights are still cool so it will be another week or so until colonies of bloodroot are well and truly up and blooming in our forest, but early specimens lift their gold and white heads in protected nooks here and there in the woods.

The shy white bloomers with their golden centers are dear to my heart, and they are something of a seasonal marker. Encountering this one glowing softly in its flickering, stone-warmed alcove last weekend, I was overcome, and I felt like kneeling and kissing the good dark earth where the flower made its home—it was that perfect. Ignoring my painful and protesting knees, down I went on the dead leaves, and I stayed there for quite a while, nose to nose with the little wonder and as happy as a clam.  In feasting my eyes on the little flower and focusing my attention on the moment, I discovered another fragile blooming within. Getting up again was quite another story.

The experience was one of the wild epiphanies I love so much, especially in springtime when the north woods are just coming to life, a moment of kensho, one of those fleeting intervals of quiet knowing and connection that I like to call "aha" moments.  Forget the fancy stuff - this right here is the ground of my being.

Happy Beltane (or May Day), everyone. May there be light and blooming and fragrance in your own precious life, in your own part of the great wide world. Wherever you make your home on the hallowed earth, may all good things come to you and your clan at this turning of the wheel in the Great Round of Time.