The Goddess Blesses All Forms of Love <3

Beltane Approaches

May Eve, the holiday that celebrates the burgeoning fertility of spring! In ancient times, it was the joyful festival that reveled in wild sensuality. The Maypole, that upthrusting rod, was crowned with a ring of flowers that slid down as the ribbons twined in the dance.

But how do we celebrate sexuality and fertility in a time when everything is so much more complex? 

Heterosexual baby-making is no longer the only standard for what sex should be, thankfully! Today we want to honor gay sex and give thanks for the progress we have made in legalizing gay marriage. We’re loosening the constrictions of gender, pushing its boundaries and expanding its definitions and possibilities. We honor sexuality in its multiplicity of varieties that give pleasure and connection, not just physical fertility.

And we also know that sexuality can be a place of pain and wounding in a world where it is often the arena of abuse and harassment.  

How Do We Celebrate Beltane in the Era of #MeToo?

I suggest we broaden our definition of love. 

Long ago I wrote a children’s story for Beltane, “The Goddess Blesses All Forms of Love.”  It’s in the book Circle Round: Raising Children in Goddess Tradition that I co-wrote with Anne Hill and Diane Baker. 

The story speaks of many kinds of love—not just gay or straight, but the love of friends, the love of parents for their children, the love of friends, the love you might feel for a faithful dog or a beautiful garden, or even for a really good meal. Or for cooking a really good meal and sharing it with friends, or for growing the vegetables, or for feeding the hungry. In the story, each ribbon of the Maypole represents a different color, a different flavor of love.

Even full-on sexual passion comes in many flavors—and not just vanilla or kinky. There’s rip-our-clothes-off-because-we-can’t-wait-another-minute love and there’s languorous-Sunday-morning-in-bed-with-the-New-York-Times love. There’s licking-mangos-in-Tahiti-on-the-beach love and who’s-going-to-pick-the-kids-up-from-Soccer-practice love. 

A New Paradigm of Loving

We live in a culture that obsessively objectifies sex, but doesn’t truly value sensuality, pleasure, the body and the web of life that supports our fleshly existence. We are still immersed in a deep paradigm that locates value somewhere outside the physical world. Where once that meant God and a heaven that superceded the importance of this life, now more and more it means the abstraction of profits on a balance sheet that override the sacredness of earth, water, and life.

So expanding our definition of love can be a radical act. When we love something or someone, we want to cherish and protect them. We don’t stand by to see them desecrated or destroyed. This can be applied to our loved ones, our friends, our pets and to the Earth herself. 

Circle Round to Envision an Expanded Ideal of Love

On Monday, April 30th, I will be facilitating an online Beltane ritual and you are all invited. We will be casting, together, a big love spell. It’s not the “Bring Princ/ess Charming into my life” kind of spell—although it could work for that, but instead it is a spell to expand the boundaries of our vision of love, to honor those things we cherish, and to commit ourselves to work for them, fight for them and care for them.

Meditations on Love

In preparation for Beltane, regardless of whether you will be joining the online ritual or participating in your own solitary celebration, I encourage you to join me in a practice I have taken up lately: select one kind of love to meditate on each day. 

Today I’m going to think about my love for the earth. 

Yesterday I focused on the deep healing abilities of my body. 

Tomorrow—maybe my love of a good story.

I look forward to joining you in circle to cast this Beltane love spell together! All the details and registration are HERE.