Integration & Celebration

By Rev. Carol Bodeau

Dear Friends,

Have you ever witnessed a traditional May Day celebration? Most of us are familiar with the traditional Maypole dance, in which groups of dancers (often children) gather in circles around a Maypole that is bedecked with long ribbons of many colors. The dancers, alternating one-to-the-next dancing clockwise and counter-clockwise, weave these ribbons around the pole as they wind around one another in a festive dance designed to celebrate the arrival of the summer season.

What most of us do not know is the deeper meaning of this dancing. These dances are part of a tradition celebrating the earth-based holy-day of Beltane, the late spring fire festival of the Celtic peoples. It is still celebrated in much of the British Isles today, and by Celtic people in other parts of the world. This holiday is really a fertility festival and the weaving of the ribbons in the dance is, well, meant to be a fertility ritual. Think of the symbolism of the May-pole for a moment…yep, that’s what it represents, literally. And the ribbons are meant to represent the weaving of the feminine principle around the masculine.

By earth-based peoples, this dance is considered to be a very powerful symbolic act, and it invokes a sense of fertility, creativity and new life being formed.

The other important ritual of the Beltane season is fire blessings, which are performed by either jumping over, or running between, bonfires. Traditional folks used to (and some still do) run their livestock herds between large bonfires on Beltane night (April 30th). The spirit of fire is, like the spirit of Beltane, associated with fertility, creativity, and inception.

“But what if I’m not earth-based?” you might ask. “Why should I care, other than historical interest?”

The core message of Beltane, to me, seems to be one we could all learn from: when you integrate the so-called ‘feminine’ and the so-called ‘masculine,’ cool things happen. Often we can reframe these two states as:

• active and receptive

• doing and being

• movement and stillness

• daytime and nighttime

• yang and yin

These seeming opposites are in fact mutually inclusive parts of one whole, and must both be present when we hope to incept, and create, anything new. So the weaving of the Maypole ribbons also represents the weaving of these parts of ourselves, the still and reflective part with the active moving part; the part of ourselves that receives intuitions in the darkness of night with the part of ourselves that takes conscious action in the light of day.

So this week, I hope you can take a little inspiration from this traditional folk holiday, and weave a little creative magic in your own life.

Bright blessings,

Rev. Carol