MAY | A Seasonal & Personal Reflection

Plus an exercise and some prompts for paid subscribers.

What potent blood hath modest May.

- Ralph W. Emerson

Some say that the month of May was named for the Roman Goddess Maia, who embodied the concept of growth. Growth is truly the spirit of the month, as the green world bursts back into flourishing. May Day—also called Beltane after the Celtic sun god Belenus—is May 1. The sun god was said to marry the earth mother on Beltane and thus bring fertility to the countryside. The people celebrated with fire festivities and more personal fertility rites. In pre-industrial times, there was a rich link between the land and the people, one that was tended to and consciously acknowledged.

None of this is lost on me as my house lists on the market. I have felt married to this land since I first stepped onto it almost six years ago. On that day, while our then real estate agent was fiddling with the stuck lock box on the front door, I slipped into the garden and began weeding out the invasive species that had crept into the beds. It needed to be done. The house had sat empty for two years. The land told me its wants and I was its hands.

I thought I would be here, on this land, forever.

To be fair, I’ve thought that with each of my homes. I remember declaring I would be carried out of my first house in a wooden box.

Still, this land has always felt different. Special. Singular. There’s a place on the road coming in where, if you’re sensitive, you can feel something ineffable shift. You’re in a different place. So much so that it’s like the property has its own microclimate: what happens here, weather-wise, is often completely different from what’s happening a half mile up the street.

It makes no sense that we’re selling this home in the same way that it made no sense that the house seemed to have been practicing some sort of invisibility while it waited for us to find it. My current real estate agent, who had been looking for a home about the same time we bought “Lucky Landing” in 2019, was recently showing the video of the house to her husband. He wondered why they hadn’t bought it… or even looked at it back in 2019. The house simply flew itself under the radar till we came along.

A video of my house for prospective buyers to view. Isn’t it gorgeous?

And now it’s pushing us out of the nest, sending us flying from these mountains. It’s both incomprehensible and one hundred percent right. My bones know this. I have grown all I can in this rocky soil and the land no longer needs whatever special sauce I had to offer it. We are both ready for the most loving and amicable of divorces.

So this May, instead of lighting the fires of recommitment, I’m lighting white sage and speaking my gratitude and goodbyes. It’s making me philosophical. I’m noodling on the marriage of the Earth and Sky, an idea threaded through many cultural traditions.

Earth is our body. Sky is our mind and our spirit. Often times we segregate the two, as though our body is something separate from our definition of self. But to feel whole, we need to release this duality. When we are in balance, we are the marriage of Earth and Sky, of the material and the spiritual.