The one where Carrie finds herself in the Woods.
Happy Beltane Everyone! Now I’ve got your attention-this short epistle is all about sex, and animism and inter-loving…
The lush growth and energy of Spring is here in abundance. Out in the Dartmoor Atlantic rainforests the infamous nocturnal Ash-Black slugs (largest land slug in the world) are mating, their penises entwined in a hanging double helix.
Plants too, are joining in the mating game with Bluebells, Wild Garlic and Alexanders bursting forth with colour and delight. Nowhere is the coming together of the sexes more exemplified than the Cuckoo pint, or Wild Arum Arum maculatum. This wonderful (and poisonous) plant with around 200 country names like Lords and Ladies and Jack-in-the-Pulpit emerges each Spring, its pointed tip thrusting up through the soil – a verdant green cone that opens to reveal a hood or sheath called a Spathe and a central purple-brown spike called a Spadix. They resemble the vulva and the penis in union together, but they serve an even more elaborate purpose.
The Spadix heats up by as much as 15 deg. and starts to emit a pungent fecal aroma that attracts the Owl midge flies who then become ensnared by the Spathe in fine hairs at the base of the Spadix where they stay overnight pollinating the female flowers before they are released in the morning to visit another Arum. Nature is just so ingenious, so absurdly miraculous, audacious, and well, real!
And to think we are part of that crazy continuum too. I feel my body as one with that profound animistic relationship with the living world, with plants, insects, birds, sunshine, fungi, rocks and sky. I am inter-being, I am family; I am reminded that I am also my ancestors, and I am the forest, primordial crucible of creation, of love personified in flesh. I am conjoined with all the thronging, humming, rising chorus of fecundity, growth and change. The Cycles of Life are relational, we are relational beings. Surely that is what a Beltane celebration is – the joy of new life after the death of the old. The tortured prophet died and was reborn on the 3rd day of Ostara; the flowing of Oestrogen, fertility and renewal that follows, the pagan rituals associated with concupiscence. The path to access this unstoppable force of regeneration is through the instincts and intuition, softening into the heart, into trust and surrender, into the body – into Mary Oliver’s “soft animal” alert like a deer, maybe a deer preparing to give birth, timing the event with the new lush growth of grass and Bramble.
So Sisters and Brothers get out in the forest and enjoy the sex and rebirth happening all around you.
