beltane

This week was Beltane, the ancient festival of fertility. Since my partner’s death on summer solstice in 2021, I’ve begun tuning into the Celtic holidays, slowly creating my own small rituals to honor them. For Beltane, I like to light a fire (camping is ideal, though I didn’t manage that this year), and beyond that, I pretty much focus on bats. 

Yes, bats. I know not everyone’s a fan. But I had a specific interaction with a bat two years ago that solidified them as my Beltane animal guide. It was 2022, and I’d taken my daughter camping in Vermont at the end of April vacation. We were driving home around midday on Beltane, and as we zoomed along the interstate at 70 mph or so, what should fly toward me but…a bat.

Did I mention it was the middle of the day? Did I mention I was going 70 mph? I saw it fluttering along ahead of me in batlike fashion and had several seconds to ponder is that seriously a bat before I whipped by. But it was a bat, no question. Flying down the middle of the highway in the hot sunshine—not the most typical presentation. 

So of course when I got home that night, I did what I always do after a noteworthy animal encounter and looked up the meaning of bats. Sometimes I have to google my way through a lot of nonsensical websites to find anything that clicks (now I have a couple good guidebooks that are more reliable), but there’s always that moment of resonance when my body says yes, that in recognition of why this particular animal came to me at this particular time. With the Beltane bat, it was when I read that bats are a keystone species. Keystone species are a wonder in themselves—animals that are crucial to the survival of an ecosystem. Bats tick this box by propagating plants. How do they do this? They eat the plants and poop out the seeds. Like Johnny Appleseed, except with poop. 

I found this so beautiful. It landed with me on several levels, but to sum it up, the message of my Beltane bat was this: God wants my shit to grow flowers. 

When we think of fertility, prosperity, it tends to be pretty picturesque. What I love most about the imagery of the Beltane bat is that the focus is not on perfection—quite the opposite. The only thing in nature more inherently gross than poop is a rotting carcass. (Unless you’re a vulture. Which is part of why vultures are such a beautiful bird to me—they transmute death into life.) 

The Beltane bat reminds me that it’s the ugliest, messiest, most painful moments of my life that foster my growth. And I don’t say that lightly. The day the Beltane bat flew by me, I was still in my first year of deep grief over the sudden death of the man I’d planned to grow old with—I had all the shit, none of the flowers, and I sure wasn’t saying “oh goody, I’m so happy my beloved died! Now I get to grow and evolve!” But I was aware of my growth and evolution. I didn’t “accept” Phil’s death, but I agreed with it: yes, this happened, it’s what’s so, and I’m going to live in reality and feel what I feel, instead of trying to hide from it or pretend it away. 

In hindsight, those were my first flowers—those moments where I said, “I agree with reality,” howled with my heartache, but didn’t numb out or try make it go away. At first, it was challenge enough just to stay present, to stay alive. Eventually I had more moments of proactivity, where I reached out to initiate a change of direction in my life. And over time, my shit has grown flowers. Doesn’t make it all better. Just means there are flowers now too.

The fertility I’m celebrating this Beltane isn’t that of the beautiful blossoms with their fragrant faces lifted to the sun, but the dark, dirty soil from which they grew. To me, that’s what makes this a day for women to celebrate. It reminds us to honor our awfullest moments for the possibilities they fertilize. It’s a celebration of how we reach within ourselves, face what hurts without running away, and gradually, as one season follows on another, transmute death into life. 
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Even as we light a fire, we remember where all new life begins: in the dark.