On Luscious Wildness & Salty Freedom: A Sea Witch’s Ode to Beltane

No one would have crossed the ocean if he could have gotten off the ship in the storm.
- Charles Kettering

I’ve been contemplating the more wild and untamed aspects of our collective human spirit lately. I’ve been journeying towards fierce wildness and fickle recklessness. In exploring the dark, craggy, salty depths of the oceans of the collective heart, I’ve been deepening and expanding my inner contemplations of true freedom, and what has revealed itself to me, pearl by pearl, is how honor and deep and abiding respect for all life, provides us with an effortless compass for living. When we surrender ourselves to living heart aligned, and heart forward, honor is in all we do and we are at one with integrity, at one with life.

The celebration of Beltane approaches. This sun-fire festival is a full half-year turn of the wheel from Samhain when the ancestral veil is thinnest. At Beltane, the veils are also thinned, but they are the curtains that protect the realms of the fae, our etheric kin. We offer them sweetness and play at this time of the year, and offer them our truest thanks for tending the budding shoots and unfurling tendrils, bringing green life back into our lives. Be careful with the fae - they are known for trickery and will play with those that aren’t true to their own hearts. Be careful.

Beltane is a festival of fertility; of sex and sensuality. Of meeting under the budding trees, of drinking dewdrops at dawn while adorning soft nakedness in bright flowers, and of celebrating the fecund Earth in all her ripening glory. I adore all of the bounty and beauty this human life has to offer us. From a drop of honey on the tip of your tongue to the last rays of light at sunset, just to live can be exquisitely sensual, soft, and beautiful.

In preparing for my upcoming Beltane podcast, I was powerfully struck by this moment in time. The world is being awoken, an emergence is upon us; we are facing the delicate fragility of our human walk and meeting the sheer force of reckoning that is the natural world. We are drawing on our collective resilience, our communities, and the kindness we have when fear and threat purges us of egoistic pursuits and false narratives. We are also being offered exceptional beauty. The air is clearing. The mountains are being revealed. The animals are returning. The Earth is stilling. Death, our lifelong companion, makes itself known to us acutely at this time, and for a great many will take their hands and transition them from this waking life. My prayer is that all who passage are able to transition clearly from this plane, welcomed home lovingly by their compassionate ancestors. May their lives not ever, ever, ever be taken in vain. May our memory of this time and those who passed as a result of it, serve as a constant reminder of what happens when we willingly ignore our Earth and her voice; and what is possible when we collectively pause even for just a month or two.

Wildness, ever at our door, is turning the handle and peaking in. She is right there with us. All the time. Waiting patiently like the loving mother she is for her confused, frightened, and selfish children to awaken from their dreams of separation and confusion, cease their reckless pursuits of wanton destruction, and simply turn towards her and take her hand in loving and wild, evolved partnership.

There are so many who love the Earth and her precious few remaining wild places. I am one of them. My love for all life here is unyielding. I love the mountains, meadows, trees, and stones like I love my own beating heart. I love the lava that flows from volcanoes, the rich peaty soil of the Moors. I love every leaf of every plant I tend in my home. I love every ephemeral cloud and every distant star. I love every wasp, spider, and every blessed weed. I love the moon in all her gravity and her celestial brilliance, and I love, deeply, the oceans she dances with. Up and down. Out and in. I am a land-locked, salt-loving, shell-collecting, part-aquafarian whose shimmering scaly tail is revealed as soon as her toes brush the water.

Mother Ocean in all of her life-giving benevolence and abundance, does not suffer fools. If you behave with recklessness she will school you. If you forget her power or her strength, either she or one of her trillion children will greet you to remind you of who and where you are. If you pollute her and treat her with indignance, she will forfeit the abundance that enriches our lives. I adore her magnificence. I have been held under waves so big, turned over and over again, that I thought I’d never return to the surface. In my youth I played with her power and learned my lesson: if you honor her wildness, if you stay present with her spirit, she will reveal wonders, sensations, and kin to you so beautiful and unique that they can only be described as a dream.

She carves out cliffs and softens glass. She carries voyagers who partner with the wind across the planet in search of mystery and distant shores. She conjures black waves as high as mountains on her surface when storms roll by her. And if you honor her, during these times, if you find the quiet places within yourself where her songs can be sung as you batten down the hatches and embrace her shaking and rattling you around, you will be cleansed of all in you that is false. Once the waves have passed, a blessed truth will be revealed: you are her child, too. Perfect, watery, and filled with strength. Waves will wash over you, yet as her child you have her knowing. You are capable of weathering any storm, as long as you are willing to greet them. It is with honor, patience, and commitment that our capacity for resilience is forged, and the ocean is an elemental reminder that it is not only fire that forges strength.

Surfers, dolphins, sailors, and seals do not hide from the wave that approaches; they partner with it. They feel it around them and within them, they seek to understand it. They do not seek to change its course but honor it, and in doing so are carried onward by a force that must be experienced to be believed. Ocean waves are the vectors of an ancient love of family. A wisdom transmission between Grandmother moon and Mother ocean. It almost feels, when you encounter ocean waves, that you are for a fleeting moment, held by the goddesses of old, reminded that they carry you as they have carried your kin for thousands and thousands of years. Carried with strength and power that disappears as quickly as it arrives.

So this Beltane, may your recklessness be replaced with honorable, fierce, and luscious wildness. May you find within you all you need such that every choice you make honors your plant, feathered, furred, and finned kin. May you celebrate in the fertile richness of our precious planet Earth and may integrity be your guide and your guardian. And if you happen to be a sea witch, may your crown be woven from shell and weed and may you swim and bathe and relish in the lengthening of the days, so you and your sisters can sing in the sunset with the sirens, selkies, mermaids, and all who swim in the salty sensuality and deliciousness of your world. May you celebrate Beltane whether you are on land, or in sea.

In honor of the salt, I bow to you, as I bow to the whale and the conch.

With love always,

h. x