I am not a religious person although I once tried to be. I am not Christian nor Atheist nor Agnostic nor Pagan. I am just myself and I have my own beliefs. I observe major religious holidays in a secular way, as a day to spend time with family and friends, but the days that resonate and have meaning to me are ones that are determined by the stars and the moon- not by man. This includes the solstice and equinox days as well as the cross-quarter days. And May 1st is traditionally the cross-quarter day between the vernal equinox and the summer solstice; it is Beltane.

Today was the midpoint of Spring and as such makes me think of things growing and greening and becoming fertile, both literally and metaphorically. I also think of cross-quarter days as turning points, rounding the turn between the first day of Spring and the first day of Summer, and therefore I see them as days of transition and of change. So those were the things I thought about this day as I visited an old well near my house. I pulled a copper penny from my sock, where I had placed it for luck, and breathed my breath upon it and dropped it into the deep still water.

Then I went for a walk through the woods. I forgot my camera, of course, and so I could take no pictures of the white trilliums that are beginning to bud nor of the blooming trout lilies with their nodding yellow heads. I cannot show you the singular and nameless pink flower I found growing in the roots of a great beech tree and you cannot see the raccoon that foraged through the leaves, his coat the very same colour as the bark on the still-leafless trees; you cannot see how he vanished from sight between one breath and the next. I cannot share the image of the pileated woodpecker who flew from trunk to trunk above me and who called after me with his half-mad laugh, nor the flash of the meadowlark's white rump and she startled up from the grass. But I saw all these things; you'll just have to take my word for it.