This Love, A Forever Gift {Beltane}
Here in the Northern Hemisphere, Spring is awakening. This is Beltane, a cross-quarter day and fire festival, midway between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice. Beltane has different dates: calendar on May 1, Solar on May 4 (Sun at 15 degrees Aquarius), and Lunar on May 7 (Full Moon in Scorpio).
As I write to you, I’m looking out the window at the flowers, grass and tiny new leaves…and the birds. I love the birds in Spring. We have an osprey pair that nests nearby and they are just breathtaking as they soar and sing. Spring is bright, alive and well here. I pray that the vitality of the season moves through all who are suffering and feeling alone, isolated or ill in any way.
Beltane is a celebration of the Lovers - the thrill of union with another. This year, there is a different tone to that love. Rather than a rush of romantic love at first sight, I feel the energy has evolved to a more mature love…less romance novel, more real life.
This Beltane’s love affair feels more like the 2nd, 3rd or 4th love informed by experience, tempered perhaps by time, loss, betrayal, loneliness, coming apart and returning to self, learning to love and treasure, save and savor this one life with all its beginnings and endings. This is a responsible love, an enduring love, more than glamour or fantasy, yet still shimmering with the real and the mysterious, the sacred, the intangible yet deeply felt and known beloved…
It is beyond the enchantment and after the excitement of a fireworks kind of lust. It is a love, accepted with full awareness of the complexities and, yes, also the compromises with compassion for your, their, our humanity. It is finding contentment in the eternal flame - in a beloved partnership with that which endures the test of time.
Rather than dancing with wild abandon around bonfires of passion and ecstatic drumming (or maybe you are?)…over here, in my heart and home, I am wrapping myself up in the comforting presence of the beloved, the light of the eternal flame, a love that will see us through this time of Great Turning, and hopefully, yes, Awakening. It is a slow burn that warms the soul. Invite this love into your heart and allow it to melt away any self-imposed ice, resistance, or separation.
I invite you to feel into the partnerships you have experienced in this lifetime - with parents, friends, lovers, children, faith communities, schools, work places, colleagues, homes, self, Earth, Spirit/Source/God/dess…and so forth. Feel into the threads that continue weaving you into the Great Mystery of Love.
Here is a mudra for Beltane that you can practice alone or sitting in front of your beloved, knee to knee, heart to heart - a mudra that will help in the awakening of the life force of love:
PRANA MUDRA:
Extend your second and third fingers out, while touching your thumb to the tips of your fourth and fifth fingers in each hand. Turn your palms upward and draw your hands close to your sides, with elbows pulled back. Practice a few rounds of breath of fire - rapidly breathing in/out through your nose. Cultivate the life force within you, stoking the fire, awakening an enduring passion in and through you (and between you, if practicing with a partner).
We will do this mudra in tomorrow’s practice @ 9:30am. REGISTER: www.bendwellnesscenter.com/class-registration.
“Come with me into the woods where spring is
advancing, as it does, no matter what,
not being singular or particular, but one
of the forever gifts, and certainly visible.”- Mary Oliver, Dog Songs
Blessed Beltane,
May you love well,
Jennifer
Beltane - May 1
Solar Beltane - May 4, 2020 @ 5:51pm PT
Lunar Beltane, Scorpio Full Moon - May 7, 2020 @ 7:04am PT
