In a little under two weeks we will be celebrating the Beltane festival. Beltane, the last Spring festival and the threshold of summer, is a high-energy, passionate and burgeoning time, full of growing light and warmth. It makes me want to dance with joy! I can feel the sap rising and the pulse of the earth growing stronger. I can feel it now.
We become more aware of the sensuality of the world and of our own physicality, feeling grounded, earthy and bodily focussed. Of course, this is the great fertility festival, and the Horned God and the Lady of the Land come together to create the climactic moment which creates new life for another season. This poem by fin de siecle French poet Paul Verlaine is layered with this physicality - it is sensuous and sensual and very much with the rising energy of the here and now:
‘Sap which mounts, and flowers which thrust,
Your childhood is a bower:
Let my fingers wander in the moss
Where glows the rosebud
‘Let me among the clean grasses
Drink the drops of dew
Which sprinkle the tender flower, –
- Paul Verlaine, Spring
