Beltane New Beginnings
G and I often talk about how being mature adults means making good decisions for ourselves. But good decisions are not always easy, nor do they always feel right at the time. Sometimes good decisions rip our hearts out to be tossed to the crows to peck at.
On Beltane, G and I went over to our ‘old’ house - now staged with bland furniture and the kind of generic art that looks like AI was let loose with a large format printer. Its heart too had been ripped out but we fell in love with the property’s potential all over again. There was a moment when we were standing on the edge of the wildflower meadow, full of tiny blue Prairie Flax flowers, watching robins flit from the orchard to the vegetable patch, when we turned to each other and almost in unison said, “What the fuck are we doing?” It was the prettiest house we’d ever seen. And it was ours - for a few more weeks at least.
But of course we fell in love with it again. We’d just spent two months making it look like a house from the pages of Elle Decor - scrubbing and washing and decluttering and polishing that wooden shack into a property so photogenic it made us believe we could have kept it like that all the time. But in the two and a quarter years we lived there, we’d never once given it that level of attention. That would have meant doing nothing other than cleaning and maintaining, and life is too sweet, too short and art-making too delicious to spend every minute with a mop.
In Druidry, Beltane is a threshold festival. When G and I hovered on the edge of that wildflower meadow then got in the car and drove away to The Bluff, we cruised through the doorway between our old life and our new one. I’d like to say we didn’t look back but of course we did and we both got upset and had a stupid stress-fuelled argument about a wooden pole. Said pole sits in the vegetable patch and had windmill blades on top but a gust of wind must have blown them off. Now it’s just a wooden pole sticking out of the ground. And we’ve emptied the garage of all our tools, so it’s tricky to fix it. G said we should remove the pole. I said we should just leave it. Pole-gate made for a silent drive home.
Beltane afternoon my wise daughter came to The Bluff for a cup of tea and I moaned to her about leaving the house. She raised her right eyebrow in the way she does when she’s about to set me straight and said: “Mum, you’ve said the same about every single house you’ve left. It’s not the house - it’s the love and the beauty you put into it that makes it special.” She’s right, of course. I’ve loved every single pile of bricks or wood assemblage we’ve lived in because they’ve all become a reflection of us as a family; every room infused with my quirky creativity, G’s serious tech skills and, when they still lived at home, the kids’ endless collections of stones or Pokémon cards or sticks picked up on walks. Now it’s my grandson’s collections that litter the floor: Lego bricks, drawings of Big Ben (his latest passion), tiny bits of brightly coloured plastic belonging to sets with instructions that Nana can’t follow. It’s the life within a house that makes it beautiful. The house itself is never the point.
So, selling the house is a good decision.
Selling the house is a good decision. (I have to keep repeating it to the point I absolutely believe it.)
Selling the house is a good decision. A painful one, a heart-pecked-by-crows one, but a good one. It will free up time, energy, and finances for us to try a different approach to this exquisite experience called life and that’s a real privilege.
I love the maypole as a Beltane symbol and if I’d been less emotional about leaving our old house I’d have thought about adding ribbons to the now windmill-less pole in the veg patch. Maypole ribbons begin as separate threads, held gently in hands, but through the dance become woven together into something communal and interconnected and stronger. My poetic self sees our impulse to move towards community like picking up a ribbon at the maypole. G and I are not just moving house, we’re joining the dance. And the dance began immediately. On the morning of Beltane I joined a local arts organisation with shared studio space where I can paint whenever I want. That evening I made it to a gentle yoga class where I finally relaxed and took to heart the teacher’s mantra, “It’s all a practice.” The following evening we walked down to town to say hello to the sea lions basking in the marina - now our neighbours, effectively - and stumbled across a Scottish ceilidh, complete with kilts, bagpipers, dancers who deftly stepped over crossed swords on the floor, and $6 glasses of wine. Cheap wine and music, what’s not to love?
Without us trying, without any fanfare, our new life has already begun. The ribbon is now in our hands. We’re trying not to trip over it as we duck under then over our new neighbours, weaving our communal dance, but it’s all a practice. Leaving the house is a practice. Downsizing is a practice. Bringing beauty into our lives is a practice. Druidry is a practice. Beltane comes round every year, asking the same question: Are you ready to begin? And this year the honest answer is, Not entirely, but I’ll give it a go. I’ll practice.
Picking up my art practice after a season away from a studio feels awkward - like meeting a friend I haven’t seen for years and not knowing whether to shake their hand or give them a big hug. But I’ve practiced art for 20+ years, I’ve been in this ready to begin? position many, many times. I know what to do: I show up. I trust my hands will grab hold of the Awen1 ribbon and we’ll weave magic together. And it’s important I begin soon because making art is how I make a home. Looking back at the art I created in The Grove of our old house gives me pangs of grief for what I’m leaving behind. I re-connected with my Druid roots there. That patch of land was my warp, lending me strength. As I said, good decisions don’t always feel right.
None of us really own anything. It’s all borrowed. We all leave in the end. As I say goodbye to our old house, I’m dwelling on how fortunate G and I were to be custodians of that land for a short while. We’ve left it in a slightly better shape than when we first moved there and that’s really all this planet asks of us: To protect her, maintain her, not destroy her. And to practice that over and over.
May the Awen ribbon find your hands. May you remember, it’s all a practice, and may you love what you weave and weave what you love.
Much love
J x
If you’d like to read more about Awen, I’ve unpaywalled this essay from the time I made the art featured above:
Much love to y'all on your new transition! <3
It is both beautiful and heartbreaking to revisit the Awen essay in this context.
This weekend we planned to take my dad to the Mariachi Festival, which he loves, and right as we were about to leave, I suggested we use the bathrooms before we left in order to avoid the porta-potties, and he didn’t make it to the bathroom. He wet himself and peed all over the floor. He was humiliated and we had an enormous mess to clean, and I couldn’t help wondering what his apartment must be like. Is this why he doesn’t let us in when we pick him up (even though we pay for his apartment)? He said he’d been having “issues like this” for a while and needed to see a doctor, but he just hadn’t made an appointment at the VA yet because he’s had so many other health problems.
It’s made us confront the fact that he may not be able to live on his own, even though he desperately wants to. And it made me realize again that my father had never once bought a house or rented an apartment on his own. He lived with his parents during college until he met my mom, who found their first home, decorated it, and managed everything about it. Later they moved into her mom’s house and rented it while my grandmother lived in a smaller house behind it. Then when they divorced he moved back in with his mom, and when she died he inherited her house. He got married again and moved into her condo. Then divorced again and moved in with my brother. My brother moved away and my dad stayed there. And so the pattern has gone, with him moving in with me and then me finding an apartment for him nearby once he was able to live (mostly) on his own again.
And he has nothing. He has downsized his life to the point where he can’t afford to live without help from my brother and me, and even his pots and pans were things we bought him when we moved him into the apartment we rented for him. And now we have to start planning for the almost inevitability of him living in some kind of VA assisted care.
But is that really downsizing? The big difference I can see is that my dad takes care of nothing. He didn’t really take care of me as a kid. He didn’t take care of my mom. He didn’t take care of himself. He didn’t take care of the heirlooms he inherited from his parents. And he’s never taken care of any place that he’s lived, so squalor and entropy set in wherever he goes.
You are the opposite. You leave places better and more beautiful. You tend to life and GENERATE beauty! And yes, you’ll do it again because that’s what you do, and maybe you won’t have fifty pounds of plums to take to the food bank now that you live by the coast, but I can only imagine what wonders will come out of this new place and new community (of sea lions and new peers at your shared studio space).
And you’ve made a difference in my life. I was despondent all morning, obsessing about my dad. And then this beautiful series of things you wrote refreshed me. You may have lost your garden, but you still tilled my heart and planted seeds of new perspective in my mind, and I’m sure I’m not the only metaphorical garden you tend to and enrich with your creative wisdom and insight.
Somehow you’ve helped me navigate both the heartbreak and the potential beauty in life’s necessary transitions. It was exactly what I needed today.
Thank you.