One of the reasons I love anchoring my emails to the seasonal waypoints is that it gives me a tangible reason to pause and reflect for myself. I like to consider what’s going on for me, and the world I witness, with each letter, in a way that feels alive and of this moment. Sometimes I forget to take these pauses, especially around these cross-quarter days (Imbolc, Beltane, Lammas and Samhain) which often sneak up so quickly and don’t always have formal rituals around them in the ways the Solstices and Equinoxes might.

Beltane, however, feels like a point in the year that has always held significance for me. As a teenager at a boarding school in Oxford I yearned to go with friends at the crack of dawn into town to take part in the May morning celebrations, where hundreds of people would gather on the High Street and Magdalen Bridge to listen to the choir from Magdalen College sing from the tower. Finally, one year when I was about 15 or 16 someone asked me and I was able to go. The lasting sense-memory I have from that experience is of being so unbelievably tired all day having woken up at 4.30 and lived what felt like an entire day of excitement before lessons even started. Around ten years later, while I worked at the museums in Oxford, I would get to see the aftermath of the celebration as I traversed the town en route to work from the train station. Most years a group of Morris dancers would come and dance on the lawn in front of the museums, as the final stop on their route I think, and the staff would come out to watch. May also saw the return of the swifts to the tower in the building we worked in, and I think I knew, even then, that there was something of magic in that morning.

As a student in Edinburgh my May celebrations took on a fiery flavour – the Beltane celebration was the night before the 1st. We’d go up to Calton Hill, find a spot with a good view of the bonfire, enjoy the festive atmosphere (read: get drunk) and watch the sun come up. Nowadays the festival is a proper event with tickets, but I don’t remember it being like that twenty five years ago – I remember it feeling slightly feral – but maybe that’s just the nostalgia for youth.

For two decades of my life, as a teenager and in my 20s, May day – Beltane – was a regular part of my year, despite not really paying much attention to the other seasonal celebration days. And then, with moving house multiple times, switching careers in my 30s and being busy non-stop, it took a pandemic to re-connect me to these cycles and rhythms that my body so desperately needed. But I am still searching for the Beltane rituals that feel appropriate for my life now, in my mid 40s. Perhaps my next home will offer me new experiences.

Beltane is often heralded as the start of summer (which always feels a bit premature to me as a UK native – aren’t we still wearing coats and complaining about the wind?) but even for summer agnostics like me, it definitely marks a shift into the lightest part of the year, when Spring reaches its pinnacle. Unlike Imbolc and the Spring equinox, where the early shoots of growth are tentative and cautionary, there is no doubt now which direction the energy is flowing.

And yet I am stuck. My partner and I were supposed to be moving into our new house this Spring, but delays mean we still don’t know exactly when we’ll be going, only that it’s most likely to be deep into Summer. This limbo of not having a date fixed yet is driving me crazy. I am someone who, if they have an appointment/meeting/something happening in the afternoon, will not be able to settle or focus on anything else all morning. This is what it has been like for me since January – stuck in a limbo of waiting for the afternoon appointment but on a grand scale.

I lament to almost everyone who will listen that I have been on pause, that I have not felt able to start new things, because I don’t know if they will be disrupted by the inevitable maelstrom of packing and moving. I look around and I see people full of the energy of spring and I wish that were how I could be. For once in recent years my internal season seems to be matching the season I am living in, but I can’t quite connect the two. I can’t bridge the internal/external divide, and I spend much of my time frustrated by myself and the situation I feel I have brought upon myself. (I am self aware enough to know that perhaps I could alter this, that nothing is fixed, I am not without agency in some parts of my life).

The other day, on a zoom call with a beautiful human, while I wore a rapeseed-yellow sweatshirt I had impulse bought on Vinted, in honour of the fields that surround our house, she noted that perhaps the Spring in me is finding ways to emerge anyway. And I let that be enough for now.