(Thanks to http://www.mythicjourneys.org/newsletter_apr07_sutton.html)
Yesterday was May Day – Beltane for us Pagans – by far the most joyous of our seasonal celebrations. For me it was especially welcome, because so far 2008 has been the year of the tarot card ‘the Tower.”
It started before dawn as I groggily got up with long time friends Don and Anna, to drive the winding roads up to Tilden Park’s Inspiration Point, where Berkeley Morris has danced up the sun for at least 20 years.
(Thanks to Berkeley Morris (www.berkeley-morris.org)
It was a perfect May morning as the light slowly grew and thin clouds in the east caught the sun’s growing radiance. The dancers became more and more visible until the first rays of light appeared over a shoulder of Mt. Diablo. They then stopped and we all sang in the morning, followed by more dancing.
I had not been able to join in watching the Berkeley Morris celebration for seven years as my teaching responsibilities had taken me far away. It was a wonderful symbolic homecoming to the area where the Gods first made Themselves known to me.
Many of us then drove to a home in Piedmont and enjoyed a sumptuous breakfast catered by a talented Pagan cook. (I’d give him a plug but don’t know him.)
That evening I joined other Gardnerians for a private Beltane Sabbat in Berkeley. It was wonderful knowing so many of us across the world were doing the same. With the arrival of summer, of flowers and fruit and abundant life, the eternal promise that no darkness is eternal, no loss is permanent is given a symbolic reminder for us all.
If you want to know more about the deeper meaning of Beltane, go here and here and there is even a nice diary on Daily Kos, here. (Or read my Pagans and Christians!)
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