Is it just me, or does the phrase May Day swing wildly between hopeful and ominous? Perhaps it’s more a connection of our current moment, a taut thread revealed beneath the surface of this year, although I can’t be sure…
In her recent essay, Katy Simpson Smith explores a similar meeting in Eudora Welty’s work and life as intertwined with her own. Confluence. Two rivers merging, inexorably, magically, disturbingly. Fate gently takes the reins from Chance.
I’ve always been curious about this concept of word twinning, and its sensuous duality of meaning: to contemplate the delicate balance and slippage of seeming opposites.
kneading | needing
seeding | ceding
May Day | mayday
Of late, I’ve been experiencing this yoking all around me, this time that I can only equate with living life magnified. I’ve noticed that everything I loved before, I hold all the more dear and that my darkest fears loom even larger.
Between the unknown and known, there is a distinct space, of fate taking the reins of seeming chance. In yoga, it is known as the dance between karma and lila, of action and play, and how we are always invited to participate fluently between both.
The question becomes, what will you create?
Consider the humble lily of the valley: both the delicacy of its bouquet but equally a highly toxic, fatal flora. It is symbolic of all the tiny things that invoke sweetness commingled with the bitter. I experience a similar foreboding each time I venture out to the grocery store: what was once banal is now fraught with anxiety. Mayday
Historically, the tradition of May Day has been one of passage, a celebration honoring both the fertility of the world as well as the laborers themselves. On a personal note, the month is swollen with this doubleness as it marks both my birth, as well as signifying my labor as a mother. In and of itself, it is magical, and yet the process of alchemy always produces dark in conjunction with light, a potent keepsake for we need one to see and appreciate the other.
Frederick Buechner reminds us that these are the moments one is called to listen to one’s life: to see it for the fathomless mystery that it is…because in the last analysis all moments are key moments and life itself is grace.
It is the irony of the earth deeply inhaling, while the virus chokes the breath from those most afflicted. What I’ve come to understand is there is no normal life or no new normal life. Rather, there is only life and in this collective pause, in the process of slowing down, we have the opportunity to notice, to connect, to participate. It’s still life, and we keep going.
May Day