Dancing in the In-Between
A Bealtaine Tale
What are your life circumstances streaming for and through you? What is shifting and morphing in place?
Traditional Beltane is recognized as the first of May in the Julian calendar of the Western world. The actual cross-quarter alignment falls on the day when the Sun aligns at 15 degrees of the sign of Taurus. This solar alignment follows the tradition of the Equinox/Solstice solar calendar but is also connected to the moon. The Celtic traditions and the Vedas honor this alignment on the closest lunation to this solar position. Therefore, the exact celestial alignment of Bealtaine falls on a different day every year. This forms a window of opportunity, a liminal space between all worlds, between the human collective’s projections onto the 1st of May and the actual astronomical alignment on the 4th or 5th of this month. This three-day window brims with portent.
“Three days of… what?” Manifestation happens through threes on this world. Magic wells through this window like a tidal force. It shakes us off our feet and shifts us, whether we will or no. What is offered to us within this celestial wave?
Once upon a Bealtaine window, a young girl wandered through her neighborhood, seeking life beneath and behind the pavement. Local trees were dancing. The spring rains had arrived, thank all the good things. Some flowers had come and gone. Intermittent frosts had been ruthless with various buds and blossoms. The natural world, as she knew it, felt strange and shifty. “Nothing is as it seems,” she whispered to the land and the trees. “Of course not!” they giggled.
The aspens in the back garden fluttered their “gleekl, gleekl,” tremblings through moments of sun and gusting wind. She could feel the rain as it made its way over the mountains, carried in pregnant cloud formations due at day’s end. The girl rejoiced to hear waking in the songs of the trees, the morning chorus of birds, and the small creatures that frequented her human habitat. The rousing and budding of Imbolc had turned as the Wheel does ever. Through the root systems of the world, she could feel Samhain and the gathering in of the Southern Hemisphere. “What an amazing planet,” she gasped into the dawn. “Thank you for the opportunity, the adventure of this life!”
The girl was used to the shifty trickseyness of life these days. She embraced what humans call the unknown with all the gusto of her youthful flexibility. “Oh, look, that root rose up to trip me, and that stone wants to support my next step… or is it the other way around?” Her laughter graced the dawning of yet another day. While the neighborhood rose from sleep, choosing between real and reel life, bound my habits and rules she shrugged off with ease, she waited in the stillness. With each breath, she wove herself deeper between the worlds. Or, rather, she felt the threads of her embodiment as they were woven. Warp of nature and weft of her essence enmeshed into wholeness as she observed the miracle.
Dancers flung themselves into contortions of joy through a streaming in the distance. “Is that real, or am I?” she chuckled.
“This body can’t do that now,” she sighed, if it ever could. “Oh yes,” she remembered. That reflection has shifted, has it not? And yet, in the liminal light of Bealtaine, ‘away with the fairies,’ as others might say, arteries and veins, muscles and bones, dance the light of joy.
May we all be lifted and carried as the light that we are. May we allow the Great Mother to shape our destinies.
