May Day! May Day!

May Day! May Day!  To those on the seas this phrase is a call of distress. To Celtics past and many today it is a day honoring the return of the fire of rebirth on Beltane.  To Nashvillians and many Tennesseans, it marks the day the rains came.  I was out of town that day but I recall thinking this is Mother Earth’s distress signal.  She was weeping, pouring out her pain and as a result so many experienced such loss. 

I don't mean this callously, but I recall thinking: Mother Earth knows loss.  She experiences loss every day as her oceans become increasingly acidic, her rain forests are cut and given over to palm oil companies and her mountain tops to coal mining.  Her animal children are hunted in caged pens and called pests.  Yet if it weren’t for the internet I would know none of this. 

Mother Earth was crying, “May Day. May Day.  Oh dear Children in Middle Tennessee, I've taken all I can take.”

The rivers overflowed with liquid love as she cried and tried to wake us up.  I imagine God saying “Honor your Mother.  Meet my Divine Wife.”

We call the Masculine the provider yet Mother Earth’s body is the brown bed from which all our provisions rise, the crops, the trees, the plants. Mother Earth’s brown body is the vessel in which the metals for our technological gadgets reside, the gravel and rock for our driveways, the mulch in my yard, the asphalt on which I drive.  I take her so for granted. 

Call it an act of God, Mother Nature, weather patterns or random chance, but when crisis happens like we had hearts are laid bare.  This laying bare also lit the May Day fire of Beltane with the rebirth of community and passion in Nashville as thousands volunteered and created movements of love and good.

Since our crisis two years ago, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes and Japan’s tsunami have occurred.  And Mother Earth’s crisis continues.  Will we offer her our hands, hearts and minds in gratitude and praise for continuing to let us live ‘at home’ even when crisis subsides and we go back to our negligent ways?

On this May Day, may we answer the call of May Day by rebirthing the fire of passion and compassion in our hearts and minds in relation to all our relations starting with Mother Earth. 

Imagine the Shift!

-Dawn, The Good News Muse, 1 May 2012

dawn@imaginetheshift.com