Flowers Refuse
Beltane and blueberries, Dionysus and asparagus
On the first of May I stuck the shovel with the pointed tip into the earth and dug a handsome hole. Actually, I dug four handsome holes, and I planted four bare root blueberry bushes into those holes: two highbush varieties and two lowbush-highbush hybrids. I gingerly spread out their roots in place and covered them back up with earth. I pressed my hands down along the sides of the newly planted shrubs, both to seal the contact between the roots and the soil and to send down a wish that they would root and thrive and bear fruit where I’d planted them.
The first of May is traditionally Beltane in western Europe, a pre-Christian holiday celebrating the beginning of summer with huge bonfires and parties. Positioned opposite Samhain on the wheel of the year, it is another time when the veil is thin. At Beltane, though, the world is coming to life - it’s all heat and hard work and new growth and fucking and baby animals and also eggs.
Danica Boyce explains the ritual of “bringing in the May” at Beltane, in which young men and women would go out to collect boughs of trees to decorate their door frames and stay out tromping around all night - who’s to say what they got up to? - and come back in the morning. It’s the season that feels like a new crush, someone you want to be around all the time but when you are around them somehow you can never get the words to come out right. The rush of blood to the face, the stinging feeling where your fingers brushed that you carry around for days.
Someone I had been friends with several lifetimes ago, when I was in my early twenties, passed away unexpectedly in the first week of May, last week. A person I knew well at the Beltane season of my life - the time of parties and staying out all night and new growth and so much unknown possibility. The season when it felt like anything could happen. He was about to turn 40. We were no longer close and hadn’t spoken in years, but I keep thinking about what life was like then, more generally, age twenty-three or so, bringing in the May almost every night.
I’ve been reading a lot about Dionysus in Sophie Strand’s incredible book, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine. She’s interested in the glimmers of Dionysus before the Romans wrote him off as the god of wine and debauchery - a trickster god who showed up to upend the social dynamics of the status quo, who made merriment and joy chaotic - a force that could lead to revolt and revolution. Strand calls him “a vegetal god,” embodied in the vine that comes back relentlessly only to be composted and to live again, anew in a new ecological context.
I have a book of myths from 1950 that I like to cross-reference for fun, to try to read between the lines, through the many layers of different patriarchal cultures co-opting older myths for their own purposes. This is a snippet from the entry on Dionysus:
“His female followers, known under many names as Bacchae, Lenae, Maenads, Thyiads, Clodones, Bassarids, and Mimallones, ran wild on the mountains, singing, shouting, screaming in intoxicated fury, tearing animals to pieces, and carrying serpents, swords, and cymbals in their hands: their disheveled appearance, their bloodshot eyes, and the snakes twisting and writhing in their hair did little to add to their attractiveness.”1
May we always be so repulsive to the powers that seek to subdue us.
It doesn’t feel like an accident to me that the day of Beltane is also May Day, the real Labor Day, the day to celebrate workers and workers’ rights and also the long and ongoing struggle for those rights. This fight is constantly being composted and adapting to new contexts, new attempts to crush its spirit. This Beltane/May Day season, writers are striking for what seems to me to be extremely basic rights and protections. The AI component is new, but the need to organize and support one another in solidarity is ancient. My hope for the writer’s strike is that it be imbued with Dionysian energy of joyful striving that has the power to make lasting change.
Here in semi-rural central Illinois, where I live surrounded by cornfields, the beginning of the growing season means the gargantuan machinery of conventional agriculture lurches into motion. On the first of May, seven people were killed by a dust storm caused by the dry, bare ground being tilled in preparation for planting monocrops of corn and soybeans. This is a horrible tragedy and to me it is a particularly awful and preventable outcome of the way that conventional agriculture is done in this country. There is also the slower ongoing tragedy of ecological devastation of this way of farming and long-term health costs of spraying most of the Midwest with pesticides.
There is one field that I love, though. I’m not sure why this happens, but as soon as it starts to get warm this one field is covered in lavender blooms of henbit. It starts in one corner and spreads until all at once the whole bare earth is covered in a carpet of soft purple. I go past it every chance I get until the farmer tills it up, but then I do not despair - these flowers only wait quietly in the earth to come back next spring.
A flashback:
It’s 2019, my first summer in central Illinois. I've already written about my crushing depression from this time period so I won’t get too far into it, but basically I’m spending a lot of time sobbing on the floor. I’ve called the Illinois Department of Agriculture for the third time because a neighboring farmer has been spraying pesticides around our house in a 20 mile-per-hour wind. I am bobbing on a sea of grief that I have brought with me from Atlanta, that I carried around for so long - I am not only weeping about the chemicals.
One early morning I go for a run on the endlessly straight county road and at the cornfield next to my house I see the vivid blue and purple flowers of morning glories climbing the eight foot-high stalks of corn - hundreds of them along the road vining upwards and turning their heads to the rising sun. Every attempt has been made to eradicate these flowers. They’ve been tilled up, mowed down, sprayed repeatedly with poison, they’ve received no irrigation except for the rain - and still they not only grow, they absolutely thrive. Seeing these plants refusing to stay small, refusing to respect the borders of the cornfield, of commerce, gives me life in a way that few things ever have. Perhaps we could call it a Dionysian energy.
FLOWERS REFUSE. FLOWERS REFUSE!!! becomes what I say to myself over and over again - a chant, a prayer, a gratitude list that never ends.
My wish for this Beltane season is this: may we grow like the morning glories. May we see through the layers of story and convention to something true beneath while the veil is thin. Not one universal “Truth,” but something that we can feel is true beyond time, the seed of the myths. May we weave our stories together under the ground and may every generation after us see the fruiting bodies of that mycelial tapestry.
Unsolicited Recommendations
My only recommendation is that you read Sophie Strand’s book and that you tell me all the nature gossip that’s happening outside your window. Here’s mine: a juvenile bald eagle sat in the redbud tree in eyeshot of my desk while I wrote this. I’ve seen barn swallows and indigo buntings; birds of summer here. I’ve planted Korean peppers and kkaennip from Humbleweed Farm. I’ve planted yarrow, stinging nettle, and mugwort from Delight Flower Farm. Today I’m planting three baby bur oak saplings, a keystone species for this bioregion. The asparagus I planted last year is growing faster than I can harvest it. I feel lucky and blessed and deeply sad and joyful all at the same time.
Thanks for being here. See ya next time.
Myths and Legends of All Nations by Herbert Spencer Robinson and Knox Wilson. Garden City Publishing Co., Inc. 1950.