Absence makes the heart grow fonder. If the Spring Equinox is the subtle stirring of an initial thaw, Beltane (May Day or May Eve) is a luscious, tumescent awakening. Beltane cherishes the power of the Sun as it warms the Earth into Her season of fertility. This is no fleeting, adolescent crush. This is that heart-pounding, ecstatic moment you first find true love; the moment you know this is The One (capital T, capital O); the moment the flirtation quickens and grows into the kind of life-affirming love you can trust enough to build your life around. Love that we all share with Goddess and God in this season of reincarnation and generation; a tidal pull far too delicious and compelling to resist. This is a time for lovers in the most Sacred sense.
My brain struggled to process what my eyes were seeing. It was the scale I couldn't quite grasp. It was as though a child had flung his toy road grader down in the sandbox when he got called in for dinner. But this was a real road grader, impossibly huge. It wasn't just stuck in the mud, it was buried in it. It was in the ditch, and rotated ninety degrees on its long axis, so that the axles were perpendicular to the surface of the road. Only half of it was still sticking up out of the mud. There was no need to ask myself who had so carelessly thrown this thirty-foot-long, five-ton behemoth down in the mud like that. This had Wally written all over it.
We are inclined to define things by their opposites in these splitapart times. Me, I’ve been noticing the cleavage between number people and word people. I am number literate enough to, say, slog through reconciling a checkbook or reading a P&L. And I did survive a career in auto parts where the whole world rests on the part number. I had committed thousands of part numbers and industry benchmarks to memory, each one of which vanished overnight when I left that job.
How do people live without a cat? No, really, it’s a serious question. Who licks the butter knife? Surely people don’t just . . . wash them. And who fucks up the curly ribbon at Christmas? Nobody gets to sit down and wrap Christmas presents without it turning into a game/battle with the cat, do they? I ask because I have recently endured almost a year of forced catlessness, the first since I was a young’un, and discovered I hardly knew how to live. This year, when I was talking to myself I was really talking to myself and had some concern for my sanity. For the rest of my life I was able to delude myself I was talking to the cat.
A pagan's response to the defamatory article Rabbi David Wolpe published in The Atlantic, December 25, 2023 entitled “The Return of the Pagans.”
Rabbi Wolpe;
Like many pagans I was hurt and angry when I read your article in The Atlantic. I forgive you because it’s obvious you hadn’t thought it through.
At first I thought (hoped, maybe) it was a satirical piece. A Jew vilifying another religion about being tainted with and by money is ironic to such an extreme it made me hope that maybe you just had a misguided sense of humor and had whiffed it. Given that Jews have been vilified for the taint of money and usury by Christians since before the crucifixion and all.