To Celebrate May

Hello Friends,

May First. For workers all over the world, this is International Workers’ Day, a celebration of labor. The celebration began in Paris, 1889 as a way to honor the Haymarket Uprising in Chicago, May 1886. The Uprising was an event of gatherings, rousing speeches, fire, and much bloodshed. The Uprising helped usher in better working conditions and the eight hour working day.

May Day is celebrated in most places except in the US, where it became the watered down Labor Day, and moved to September to divorce it from its radical origins.

May First is also Beltane for many Pagans. Beltane is the cross quarter between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice. It is a time when herders blessed their livestock, by running them between fires as they headed out to summer pasture.

It is also a celebration of the fecundity of spring. You know, eggs, rabbits, flowers, sex… Therefore, I used to jokingly refer to the confluence of Beltane and May Day as “Happy have sex with a worker day!”

However you choose to celebrate, and for whatever reasons, I wish you a joyous May.

Here’s a Beltane poem I wrote several years ago:

Today, I stand for beauty.I stand for apple blossom and finch.I stand for sun, and wind, and sky.I stand for the shaking of the fig tree,And the growing of the lettuce and the pea.

Today, I stand for beauty.I stand for music to lighten the soul.I stand for healing balms to comfort wounds.I stand for kind words in the tempest,And a scrap of bright cloth in the mud of war.

Today, I stand for beauty.Heart open to the world.Today, I conjure hope. And strength.With the courage and the love to carry on.Leap the fire with me,In Beauty’s name.

Wishing you a joyous May. There’s a little gift for you in the post script below.— Thorn

A free short story as a May Day gift to you: Haymarket: A Jane Bannon Short. If you’re in the mood for a May Day novel, check out By Sea in my Witches of Portland universe.