Gallery: Beltane Fire Festival 2013
Celebrate our instinctive connection with Nature, her fertility, and ours. Huh? You say? But isn’t that very idea pornographic? Isn’t sexuality bad, evil, what drags us down into the mud of our biology when we’d like to stay up in the clouds? After all, we are two parts, body and mind, with mind by far superior. In fact it’s the only part of us that’s really real, right? Descartes sure thought so: “I think, therefore I am.”
Our degradation of both Nature and our own bodies is not only philosophically sourced but deeply intertwined. We treat both like machines, and try to control them rather than celebrate them. Rather than ride the horse bareback, allowing it free rein to gallop into the rising sun, we curb it, bend its neck to our will, medicate for pain so it can run faster, treat the horse as one more trading commodity for what we call “money”! — that most abstract of matters, that which does not matter. Not like matter does, the soil of our very cells.
Origin: 1175-1225: Middle English mater (e), materie <Anglo-French, OldFrench mat (i) ere, materia <Latin materia woody part of a tree, material, substance, derivative of mater mother.
Matter. Matter means Mother. No wonder matter matters.
Beltane celebrates what matters.
Meanwhile, since our industrial age further enslaved our bodies and our minds, the International Distress Call for help signified by the phrase “Mayday! Mayday!” has also come to denote May 1st as a day when global workers’ protests flare. In the U.S. it’s called the International Workers’ Day, and has its roots in Chicago.
May Day marked by global workers’ protests
On this beautiful, verdant Beltane 2013, let us both celebrate and protest, in equal measure. Not one without the other. Both.
Let us open our hearts to allow the sweet juice of life to flow through us, so that it we may generously share our aliveness with others, especially the poor, the downtrodden, the ones sacrificed at the altar of our human greed.
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