Up the May!

Happy May Day and Beltane, celebrating the turn of the Great Wheel to the greening of the year. The trees are budding,the flowers are blooming, the lambs are leaping, the frogs are spawning, the ponies are foaling on Meldon Hill, and the Jack of the Green is dancing at the crossroads to bless us with the land's fertility....

Last May we held a traditional May Day Procession here in Chagford, complete with Jack in the Green, Obby Oss, piper, drums, green men/women/children and a deer man or two: the requisite blending of the sacred and the rude. The next Procession is planned for 2017, and we hope it will be even rowdier than the first -- but for the year inbetween, it's a quiet affair: just a few friends gathered in a field to maintain the rite's continuity. Perhaps Jack will come to join us all the same: toasting the land and re-affirming the bonds of our human, and more-than-human, community.

Go here for a post about the lore behind the Maying, and go here for photographs from our Jack Procession last year (accompanying a post about folk pageants and "wild time").

Then fill your house with May flowers (hawthorn tree blossoms); hang primroses over your doors and your cows; and down a toast to the Jack of the Green, and to the wild deep within us. Up the May!  

"The month of May was come, when every lusty heart beginneth to blossom, and to bring forth fruit; for like as herbs and trees bring forth fruit and flourish in May, in likewise every lusty heart that is in any manner a lover, springeth and flourisheth in lusty deeds. For it giveth unto all lovers courage, that lusty month of May."   - Sir Thomas Malory (Le Morte D'Arthur)

The Green Woman drawing above is by Brian Froud. The first photograph was taken by Ashley Wengraf; the third and sixth by Ruth Olly; the pony & foal by Lillian Todd-Jones; and the others are mine. Run your cursor over the images to see the picture captions.