One of Beltane Morris side’s posters 🐦⬛
Beltane - the first day of Summer
And wasn’t the first day of summer lovely this time around?
At least it was for me, here in the wilds of Shropshire. It was serious shirtsleeves weather, I got hot, even caught the sun just a tiny bit!
Since November last year it’s been very windy - like 50mph gales every week - as well as very wet, and damned cold and dank most of the time. The wood-burner every day and the central heating evening and morning, just to get by. Working from home, as I do, you need to keep the place warm, sat still at the laptop doesn’t generate much body-heat!
I chose this ages ago, and I wouldn’t work any other way, but cold, dank winters are not too easy, especially as my body gets creakier!
Nature Ways
The birds are working late too. It’s possible there’ll only one brood of chicks this year - we had three broods last year - and the ash trees buds have only just broken into leaf, again on 1st May, so well behind the oak trees this year. Goodness knows if the old adage will be true this year. You know it?
If the ash before the oak then we'll get a right old soak. But if the oak before the ash then we'll only get a splash
After this winter’s wetness, and a wet spring, I hope it does! We really could do without a right old soak this summer. As it is, and because it’s still cold, I wonder if we’ll get many butterflies?
We are getting lots of bees here in the garden though. The other day, we counted eight different varieties of bumble bee, and some honeybees too. Where we sit by the pond we have two soil-mining bee holes and have watched the queen come to care for her eggs.
They’re fascinating to watch. And don’t be scared, they won’t harm you.
Renewal
The flourishing of the trees in their new spring-green frocks, the busting into leaf and flower, the luxuriance and feelings of abundance of the season really lift my heart. The garden beginning to burst into colour, and the daily changes I notice as I go out each day for my Earth/Sun Connection, thrill me.
What renewals are you feeling right now? what is renewing in your life?
Don’t forget, we have to let go of things past their sell-by date in order to make room for the new. Each change of the seasons offer us the chance to do just that.
Time is often a big constraint for each of us. There’s so many things in our busy modern lives. They take us so much room and so much time. How can we fit anything new in?
And just how do we let go of things we’re really inly doing because of old habits. We grew out of those habits long ago, but we feel other people still depend on us to keep on doing those things. How do we disappoint those people?
Meanwhile, inside, that ache for renewal is gnawing away at our vital organs. Our hearts are desperate for change, for the chance ot fulfill all those dreams we stored away for so long.
Watching the leaves burst forth, the bees buzzing, the butterflies fluttering, the birds feeding their chicks, the baby foxes playing in the sunshine - all these things make the ache hurt worse while they also fill us with joy. It can be like being torn apart. What to do?
I’ve been there. It was horrible, I felt I was being torn in two.
In fact, its my own memories of how bad it was for me that spurred me into creating the Get Connected course, doing the webinars (more to come next week! And the following weeks.), and to start creating the Ancestral Wisdom Hunters’ App. Time pressure, peer pressure, money pressure - just three things that create hell for me, and I suspect they do for you too.
Time was the big one that held me back from Renewal.. How to get enough time. And still keep the daily job going, look after the garden, and the house, and my students and clients.
Before, I worked with lovely, supportive courses, carefully curated into lessons and a schedule. Students signed on at Samhain each year, went through the course, signed on for the next level. Very orderly, I knew where I was, they knew where they were.
But life wasn’t like that anymore!
Like everyone, I have to grab time, perhaps while doing something else, on the train, in the car, vacuuming the house, doing the wash, or the garden. Could I create a meaningful course, and an App, that would give people what they want, and that could still be as open and self-paced as that?
Phew! It blew my mind for a while 🤯.
I called in the tylwyth (my spirit family), asked them to sit with me and brainstorm what I might do.
First off, I asked them if my ideas were good one, worth doing, what was wanted, and would do the job. They said yes! That was a great stat, but I heard the “But” in their voices LOL. My initial ideas needed some work, adjusting and refinement. And I needed to learn some new skills.
OK, so I set off last year to do those things. As always, lots of learning new skills is about learning what not to do! It’s about letting go of old ideas to make room for new; and about asking, listening and hearing what I’m told, and the questioning it! Never taking anything for granted without checking it really does do what it says on the tin. And that what it say on the tin is actually what I want and need.
We got there. Refinements are still going on, they always do with me, but the bones of the ideas have fleshed out well and are working with the new students who’ve taken them on.
I’m so thrilled!
The working out of the ideas, their success, is like the buds on the trees braking into leaf. And the happy students are like the happy bees, foraging pollen in the new-opened flowers I’ve given them.
And the moral of the story? Always, always ask your tylwyth fto help and guide you. You do not have to work alone. You have an ancient and wise spirit family to help you achieve your desires.
Like my logo says …
Solo? Really? No … Not Really!
Connecting with my Tylwyth
For my Beltane celebration journey I had a party with my Tylwyth.
It’s been a while since I invited them all together into my sacred space. They’ve been helping me get the Get Connected course together since before Midwinter, and then helping with the new App - Ancestral wisdom Hunters - as well as with all the usual things I need with students and clients, the garden and the writing. in fact they work very hard with me, helping and supporting, it was way time-and-a-half that I made a get-together for us all.
Here’s my process. You may like to adapt it for yourself.
I polished up my Earth/Sun connection, lit my Hearth Fire, Heart Fire, in my sacred heart-space, swept the Threshold clean and bright, and sent out the call.
I filled my heart with love, felt it overflowing into my heart-space, and threads of the love reaching out over the Threshold calling to my spirit family, my Tylwyth, to come and join me.
They came, one by one, with a gift … wildcat, wolf, badger, bear; all my cats past, present and future ; my ponies Jewel and Dollar; my German shepherds, the two Woofahs; my Dad and my Mum; and the otherworldly folk I’ve worked with all my life, Merlin, Gwyn, Pan and Elen. And the Spirits of Place where I live, the house-spirit, garden-spirit, the spirt of the Stretton Hills, and my Guardian, the spirit of the Long Forest. That’s 27 of us including me 😊, so it was a big party.
We sat together. I asked them how things were going from their point of view. Was I holding the right path, doing the necessary things? Was there more I could be doing, or easier ways of doing things? was the order still appropriate ro did I need to juggle jobs around to make things go better?
I got lots of good advice, some useful adjustments, and lots of support than I’m pretty well on track and on target.
I spilled how I worry I’m not doing enough, they laughed, said that’s a real human thing, and one thing I do do a bit more and better, is to Chill! LOL, they’re dead right about that 🙄, chilling is not something I excel at, though I’m real good at helping others do it! Like Alice in Wonderland, I give myself lots of useful advice but rarely take it 😅.
They asked me if I felt I was getting enough support and advice from them, was there anything I needed from them?
I said I could do with more energy and stamina. They reminded me that it’s a good while since I was 25 yrs old! And they said how pleased they were I’d splashed out on myself and got the Droid to mow the paths for me, stop breaking my own back with the lawnmower and to remember three bones in my spine are already broken. Ouch! I hate that. I want to have a body that does all it could when I was 25. That got them all together in a chorus singing, “Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end …” Bastards! We all laughed together.
We wound up the party, I ushered them out with a leaving gift from me and a kiss.
I was lone again in my sacred space. Time to dowse the fire, tidy up and go back to my own everyday life.
But the knowing in my heart was so, so strong - I never need to be alone. My tylwyth are always there for me, just a call away. And knowing they will never, ever, invade or encroach on my own sacred space.
They’re real, true friends.
Are you always connected to your tylwyth too?
If you want to be, just Get Connected - it’ll change your life.
Beltane Rites
Time out of mind, Beltane rites have been about Sun Up.
All my life, I’ve followed Sun Up rites, where Father sun first kisses Mother Earth. Pretty well all of the British Morris sides celebrate Sun Up with dances on their favourite hilltop, and they still do. One of my favourite sides is the Dartmoor side, Beltane Morris, and the video below is this year’s celebration on Haytor, one of the the highest points on Dartmoor. It’s also the easiest for people to get to, to come and celebrate.
High Willhays and its sister Yes Tor, at 621 and 619 metres respectively, are the highest but it’s a good 3 miles walk from East Hill on the edge of Okehampton, the nearest place to park a car. And the walk is across rough and often boggy terrain that’s part of Okehampton Army Camp’s firing range, so is often, rightly, out of bounds as it’s not a good idea to trek there in the middle of practice war!
I’d hoped to be there in person this year but unfortunately it didn’t happen. Planning begun for next year. As I’m a good 4 hours drive away now, and celebrations begin at about 4.30-5 am in the morning it means an overnight stay, but there’s places nearby it just means getting organised.
Being there, with the Morris side, and a whole pack of people who have this stuff in their bones is a wonderful feeling. If you look in the crowd, in the video, you’ll see people have brough their kids, and babes in arms, so it looks like the tradition is still here to stay. That’s good.
Every year, I meet more and more people who are fed up to the back teeth with “normality”. They want more, believe there is more to life than business, job and making money, they just don’t know where to find it. Hunting down your Ancestral Wisdom can be a long job. There’s a load of people out there, offering you rituals, circles, festivals, workshops, courses, but people who come to me say they all feel somehow “unreal”.
When you’re on the top of Haytor, in the mist, at 5am, with Beltane dancing all round you it feels intensely real! It’s loud, wild raucous, rough, earthy wickedly funny often, and it just floods you with energy. It’s like being hard-wired directly into Mother Earth’s energy. And as we greet the Sun Up - even if we can’t see it properly through the mist! - we get the full double whammy.
For me it’s even more intense than going to a Tina Turner concert! And that’s raw, and rough, and wild enough. But up there on Haytor, I’m surrounded by Family. All the people there, we share the feel of the love of Mother Earth and Father Sun. And we know that Summer is a cummen in.
Here’s a taste of it. You’ll get the feel. and, as you see, we all get to join in!
Up the May! Up the May! Up the May!
End with Joy and Laughter
And just to round this newsletter off, we’ll sing the Hal an Tow with Will Fox of Beltane Border Morris at Haytor on Dartmoor at dawn on 1st May 2019.!
Like I said, it’s wild and raucous. It brings us all together. And it’s fun 💥
And, as will tells us at the end, “Right! Back to yer beds!”