May Day: Take Action, Trust Pleasure

It's May Day, time for another big day of actions which we hope will be powerful and successful. If you're out on the streets today, I applaud you and good luck! If you’re looking for a march or a rally near you, find one here. If you can't join a protest, I hope you'll take action in some other way. (Here’s some suggestions). It’s time for a massive show of opposition to Trump and the MAGA attempts to undermine democracy!

May Day is simultaneously Law Day and International Workers Day, two things which might not at first glance seem to go together. But at this political moment, when both workers and the rule of law are under attack, they seem very much aligned.

But May 1st is also a much older holiday: the ancient Celtic Feast of Beltane, the celebration of summer’s beginning. This was the time to bring the livestock up to the summer pastures, and plant seeds in the warming ground. The great powers of fertility and regeneration were visible in the buds bursting open, the flowers filling the air with sweet scents.

May Eve, in Northern Europe and Scandinavia, was Walpurgisnacht, when the wild Witches ride the wind. May Day was celebrated with Maypole dances, feasts and bonfires. Cattle were driven between fires to rid them of pests, and young people leaped over the flames to display their vibrant strength. Today, for Pagans, that is, for those whose spirituality is rooted in the sacred cycles of nature, it's a time to honor sensuality, beauty and pleasure, and sexuality in all its myriad forms.

On this May morning I can't help but think that so many of our current ills can be traced back to our attitude toward pleasure, something we tend to mistrust, as it can so easily interfere with making profits and Getting Things Done. And sexuality is even more suspect—that wild animal force that can so easily take hold of us and override rational control. For many, sexuality is a place of wounding and pain, because too often in this world it becomes an arena of power and control rather than respect and delight.

We’re still living in a world shaped by transcendent philosophies that locate the sacred—that is, what’s really important—outside of this world. For some, it’s religion, for others, capitalism, that places value on something disembodied and abstract, and leaves the world, the body and nature drained of worth. This life is not the one that counts—only the Next Life. This forest of living trees is valued as timber; this fertile earth is merely dirt.

Whether the transcendent Value we worship is some narrow view of a God or some bottom line of profit, we sacrifice our time, our labor, and our joy to its service, and let it determine the merit of all we do.

What if we had a different arbiter of value? If we truly valued this world, our embodied selves, nature in all its diversity and changing cycles? If we asked, not “Can I make money from this?” or even “What would God say?” but instead “Will this increase the amount of beauty, pleasure and love in the world?”

So, here's a Beltane meditation for you all. Sit down for a moment, take a breath, and close your eyes. Ask yourself, “How would this world be different if we saw sex as a good thing? If we truly valued the erotic—the sexual, but more than that, the embodied sensual experience of being flesh and blood, animal, in an interconnected web of animals, plants, birds and trees, all valued for being themselves, for contributing to the rapturous beauty of the world?

How would our culture be different if we raised our young people to understand that sexuality is a beneficent, albeit powerful force, that can frighten us because it brings us back to our wild selves and shatters all our illusions of control? Imagine if we told them “It is your birthright to feel such intense ecstasy that you fall deeply in love with the world. Your body is meant to resonate with chords of pleasure and sing the praises of all life. You don’t have to be gorgeous or handsome, to have perfect breasts or a sixpack, to perform a particular gender or to accrue massive wealth or power. You simply have to learn how to focus your attention on another, to value and cherish them, to take joy in exploring how to give them pleasure and to glory in the ways your pleasure and theirs can build and reinforce each other, wave upon wave.”

We would raise our children from an early age to share, and to know that their bodies belong to them, their boundaries are inviolate, their desires are precious, their unique gifts are a blessing to us all. We’d teach them to understand how different trees respond to fire, to notice how the birdsong changes through the day and the seasons, to treasure the smell of earth after rain and the pleasure of mud on their hands. They would play with stones and feathers and shells.

And the work of the world would still get done, because when rewards are fairly shared there is pleasure in using our minds and bodies to feed, nurture, repair, heal, restore, regenerate, add to human knowledge and capabilities or create something new. We would truly honor the workers of the world, prizing the farmer, the teacher, the nurse, the firefighter far above the hedge fund manager or the crypto-billionaire, and statues of heraic child care workers and selfless garbage collectors, not generals, would grace our parks.

Our guiding criteria for everything we do would be “Does this add to the beauty of the world?” Our cities would be filled with lush gardens and hidden nooks for romantic trysts. Our wildlands would flourish with all the glorious biodiversity of nature. We'd have a lot more homes and places of healing and learning, a lot fewer prisons and wars. We might understand that those traits we've assigned to women, of caring and nurturing and receptivity, and those we’ve delegated to men, of aggression and assertiveness and innovation, actually belong to us all. They come in unique combinations, and each one of us has the right to be who we are and determine which roles we want to play in the theatre of the world.

This is a utopian vision, I admit, and hard to hold in this time of such callousness and ugliness. I offer it to you as another lens through which to view our current predicament. When you take a stand for reproductive rights, when you support the right of transgender folks to be themselves, when you march to protect immigrants or safeguard healthcare, when you raise your voice to stop all the horrific ugliness of this moment, know that you are standing up for the true potential of the world.

And remember how different it can be, will be, when we learn to truly value the intricate, evolving, exquisite beauty of life itself.

Happy Law Day. Happy International Workers’ Day. Happy Beltane.

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