Awakening

Awakening

May Day, and always I am torn between the Workers of the World Unite memories and the nostalgia for the world that, of course never was, or never was for me, the Merrie merrie month of May in which lads and lasses cavorted in bucolic sexual bliss.

Recent memories are of cold winds and incessant rain leading to localised flooding during May, which also happens to be chocka full of re-enactment events, there being the May Day (International Workers’ Day) Bank holiday at the beginning, and Spring Bank Holiday (the old Whitsun or Pentecost) at the end. In the middle, the various other excuses for regional quasi agricultural or religious fests involving Morris Dancers, May Poles, a lot of Real Ale and Cider consumption and hopefully a bit of old fashioned matchmaking.

The weather has been hit and miss at least for the last 20 years that I can remember, sometimes snow, sometimes scorching temperatures, never predictable.

All looked set to be the same last week. There were few ground frosts this winter, which meant that flowers which would normally be ‘annuals’ went on blooming and ‘came again’ rather than being killed off by Winter cold as any self respecting bedding plant should be. Such plants were blooming when they had no right to be blooming, and such anachronisms were commented on by television pundits, pointed to as evidence of global warming, that some flowers were out over a month before their time. This was all well and good, but the bulbs and corms were neither earlier nor later than expected and the trees bided their time , as did the May blossom which started to froth in the hedgerows on the first of May here- exactly as it should.
When I was young I always associated the beginning of the long hot summers of childhood with the breathtaking beauty of bluebell woods. What more magical experience could there be than to see the carpet of special and inimitable , indescribable azure under the softly greening silver birches; to smell the delicate scent before it comes into sight, to anticipate the squeak of the fleshy stalks when you pull a bunch for Mum, enough to fill both hands encircled around the smooth succulence of the cool peatiness of the bright green stems; to bury your face in the rustling fairy-hats and freckle your nose with the golden dust of enchantment
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They always wilted though, and the blue faded before your eyes, almost before you got them home and into the heavy cut-glass vase that the sunlight threw rainbows at so that they bounced around the walls, and David said they were fairies. Then you felt guilty and sad.

So a few days ago, the trees were still waiting and only the bravest of pioneer bells breeched the earth to signal back to those still below that it was time. Today , once again the suddeness of the Spring explosion took me by surprise, as it has done for the last 40 or so years. I mean, you know that Spring is coming, and you think it has come when the pussy willow pussies, the catkins quiver, the lambs gambol and the daffodils dance all the usual Spring strutting its stuff clichés, but then April flips over into May and the beauty makes you want to swear with the greatest profanities you can muster; it chokes you , overwhelms, drowns you. and there is nothing to do but to cry tears of love and joy and gird up those unexplainable emotions that can only mean that you know that the Earth itself is claiming you as its own.


In the days when ‘Summer is icumen in’ and all the May songs and rituals were made, in the days of the old calendar, May Day was actually on May 11th . Perhaps it is more comfortable for me to think of May Day as the beginning of Summer, rather than the bursting of Spring. That way, the midsummer solstice on 21-22 June does not seem so odd, bearing in mind August is considered the height of Summer. Time is something that has a life of its own, but I feel a need to tuck it up with hospital corners in order to make sense of where I am standing. I need the reference points , whether they be distance trig points high on a ridge on the horizon or a shadow on a sundial on the walls of the Antediluvian Buffalo Lodge on the corner of the street. But that’s just me.

I have no idea if the seasons are changing due to global warming or not, but I do know that throughout history festivals have ended up being in the wrong season and calendars have been hitched up like schoolgirls’ skirts , because the fault was deemed to be astronomical miscalculations. Of course, we have the solar system all worked out now and we know that our systems of time are right now, no need for hitching and nipping and tucking the days and months and seasons. Then of course, throughout history the alchemists, qabbalists astrologers & co all knew they had got it right too.

All I can say with this ramble is that it would be something of a crime to allow the absolute beauty of this May morning to go unremarked, even if there are no descriptions that are new and original. Then they do not need to be. It is there already, inside every one of us that the Earth has claimed and whose chest hurts with the annual thrust of the awakening of the Green Man, the quickening of his sap.