Do you know the Way… to May Day? 🌼

So, once again — out of nowhere — it’s May Day!

Once again: we were still in February, or focused moment-by-moment in April — OR… Or we were already looking ahead to June. Uhh… hrm.

So we missed it. Or rather, we just didn’t anticipate it.

We didn’t anticipate… as the game-show wheel of the calendar spun with percise clacking — clack, clack, cl-ack — that one day, IN one day, April would end.

The day after, as Spring finally makes itself known… that day has a name. A name all its own. Actually, it has more about four.

Maybe four different meanings for the same name.

So what is May Day? It falls on the first day of May, therefore the day where it becomes May. April showers bring May flowers… Spring cleaning… et cetera, et cetera.

It’s a Springtime celebration of renewal. Return of the life and color. Or, depending on who you ask… a day of labor uprising, a day of protest for workers’ rights.

Or a lot of you probably also jumped to the classic movies and cartoons… where aero plane pilots yell out the same thing as they fall. “Mayday, Mayday… I’m going down!”

That last one never made sense to me… did it to you? Growing up, most of us notice that it’s also spelled as one word. At least according to comic books.

What does that mean?

I don’t know! You can look it up just as easily as me. Nowadays.

But if I had to guess, I would say that one is more connected to the thing… As those are both modern conceptions. Whereas the spring celebration thing? Oh, that goes back. That goes back centuries… and maybe even millennia!

What I do now is there was an ancient Celtic holiday called Beltane. Celtic or other pagan.

Yet we still celebrate aspects of it. Anyone who’s participated in what we now call a “May Pole dance” — or wore a crown of flowers — is carrying on this obscured tradition. Whether they know it or not.

In a lot of pagan theology, there was the “Wheel of the Year.” It was a symbolic representation of seasonal cycles.

Beltane was perhaps the most revered point on the wheel. Because it represented when all natural life is reborn.

So Springtime was far more that just a relief, or a pleasant experience. It was rebirth itself… repeated every year.

For the pagan Greeks, it’s when the life-bringing deity Persephone returns from her six-month banishment below the Earth.

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So, take one moment today… this week… this month… and thank the rebirth.

Thank God — or, more fittingly — the Goddess. What incredible fortune!