The month of May is a strange time of year for me. On the one hand, it’s Beltane, and I fully endorse the old European standard that the seasons begin at the cross-quarters. I can feel the new energies coming in at those times, the shifts in the stars, the weather, the land. May means flowers, increasing warmth (and sometimes actual heat), outdoor festivals like our local Flower Mart. On the first of the month I found myself hearing Julie Andrews sing “The Lusty Month of May” inside my head as I showered to get ready for work.
It’s also a month of birthdays, as many people I’ve loved are Taurus folks born in this month, including the beloved grandmother who was my primary caretaker, my father, the priest who mentored me when I was a teen, and my ex-husband, too. But on the other hand, it’s a month of deaths: My father, my ex, and a dear friend, for starters; Jim Henson, who died in 1990 on the same day that my ex-husband died in 2017; a mutual friend of my ex and mine, an older man who was both a member of my church and a Kemetic pagan, who also died on that day. My ex-husband managed the neat trick of living to his birthday and then dying the following day, right in the middle of the month.
Festivals I observe in May begin with Floralia, a week-long celebration of the Roman goddess Flora. Flora is not just a pretty maiden frolicking to the sound of madrigals; without the season of flowering, what would grow? She blesses our our herbs, our fruits and vegetables, as well as the flowers that provide us beauty and fragrance to nourish the soul. In the Naos Antinoou, we also honor her as the goddess who raises slain heroes from the soil as flowers, like Hyacinth in ancient Greece and Michael Brown of Ferguson.
The middle of the month, besides being occupied by the birth and death of the man I was married to for twenty years, is dedicated to Mercury and his mother Maia in both Greek and Roman practice. As a writer and library worker, I certainly want to give Mercury his due, but Mothers Day is fraught with all kinds of negative emotions for me. Suffice to say I am not one of those lucky people who has or had a good relationship with their mother, and I seem to have failed as a stepmother as well.
Buddhism talks a lot about impermanence, and for that matter, paganism does, too. Blood and dirt and layers of decay lie under all those pretty flowers, the lustrous fruits and vegetables, the leafy herbs. Every blossom has a season and then it dies; many of the juvenile birds I see won’t make it to adulthood, won’t even feed another creature’s hunger. Why does it have to be this way? Neither Buddhism nor pagan traditions offer an explanation; Christianity would blame the Fall and human sinfulness, but I look to Julian of Norwich, whose feast the Anglican churches celebrate today, who says that God told her, “Sin is behovely, but all shall be well.”
There might not be a good translation of “behovely” into modern English. Different versions of Julian’s Revelations have used “inevitable”, “opportune”, “fitting”; it is part of the picture, it fits into the story. The blood and the flowers, the births and the deaths, Flora and Mercury and Julian of Norwich and Brendan the Navigator, the Irish saint who sailed off across the Atlantic and into Paradise. It is all here, it is all behovely.
Take pigeons, for example. Pigeons have a bad rep, but they are technically feral rock doves. Their ancestors were domesticated for thousands of years, for their meat and for their companionship. Doves belong to Venus and Aphrodite, so that includes the humble urban pigeon and the fancier mourning dove, one of my favorite birds with its soft subtle colors and hollow crooning call.
You might be surprised to know that a bird I see frequently and all over the city is the Northern mockingbird. This is entirely my headcanon, but I can’t help thinking a bird whose scientific name is Mimus polyglottis, and who can imitate everything from another species of bird to those obnoxious car alarms that go through half a dozen noises, has to belong to Mercury. They are clever and also fearless, whether of humans or of other birds; threaten a mocker’s territory at your own risk.
A Nest Made of Words 