Everything Flowers from Within

On dancing in the Western Cape and Bealtaine blessings.

The man squats in the sand beside a dead cape cormorant, extending its wings and photographing every part - hooked beak, glassy blue eye, orange chin. He is thorough, as if someone assigned him this task. When he takes each wing by its tip, I think he might dance with it along the shoreline.

Why, my sisters ask, would anyone want to photograph a dead bird? There is a boisterous colony of live alternatives on the rock nearby - why not train his lens on them? I tell them I, too, am drawn to death, and might be tempted to stick my iPhone in a cormorant’s armpit. It is one of several times during our week together when we consider one another - sisters, who trace our roots to the same sandpit, but couldn’t be more different. Elizabeth Fishel said sisters are both our mirror and our opposite. If I am brave enough to take a look in the glass, what might I see?

Eyed by a Bulbul

Three sisters at the end of the Robberg Trail.

I am 15,000km from home, in the Robberg Nature Reserve in the Western Cape, a finger of land that juts into the Indian Ocean. My sister turned 40 last month and my other sister and I are visiting her for a week of celebration. We take a break from wine tasting to hike the Robberg Trail, and I can barely take two steps without stopping to look at something.

Flocks of red-winged starlings tumble through the trees, and a posse of speckled mousebirds hang upside down in the coastal scrub, exposing full tummies to the sun. A cape bulbul eyes me. It is scandalised, its white-ringed eyes permanently wide in disbelief. My favourites, though, are the sunbirds, fizzing through the fynbos with bright throats and thin, curved beaks.

A cape bulbul with its eye on me.

This protected marine area is home to hundreds of cape fur seals. From the cliff path, the sea teems with black shapes leaping, diving and surfing the waves. We spend hours there, clambering, squinting into caves and catching up on everything we have missed since we were last together.

Permission to Evolve

We talk about the years we were close and the times we drifted apart; the phases we went through (my bandana one agreeably the worst); the men we loved, and the courage of our parents who moved us to Zimbabwe for five years to live their dream. We are one another’s link to childhood, the ones who bore witness to the teenage years and can fill in the memory gaps. They are both formidable women who have built meaningful lives and overcome hardship. It is a unique thing to know so many versions of a person, to see the selves they tried on, and the evolution of their values. It is equally humbling to be seen and known as many different Bethanys, and to have permission to evolve.

This mirror reveals parts of myself that play small in my day to day life. Namely, my pleasure. I don’t mean joy. Joy is baked into my days and eaten as I go - the wooden car my son makes, a frame of honey, hours a day to write my novel, hazel woods, guitar riffs, debates with my daughter about books. No, I’m talking about pleasure, that is felt in the body and pursued for the sole purpose of enjoyment.

I take myself very seriously. I take my life very seriously. I am intense, with the capacity for deep conversation and an authenticity barometer that will not let me stray far from myself (hello Emmeagram Four). I love to trawl the dark, brood, explore metaphor and confront parts of myself that try to hide. I am drawn to the dead cormorant. But I remembered this week how much I also love to party.

This is Pleasure

Finding pleasure in Plettenberg Bay.

When I was 16, in the grip of teenage angst and questioning my beliefs, I drove with my best friend to a dead end road in the suburbs of Bulawayo. I turned the headlights on and the music up. We danced in the dust until we were exhausted, until laughter swelled like a tide then turned to tears. It was beautiful. Dancing makes heavy things light. It bypasses my overthinking and endless processing - it tethers me completely to the moment. This is pleasure.

So, my sisters and I dance, we eat nice food in fancy restaurants, we share bottles of wine and walk nature trails in beautiful places. In my downtime, I watch Bridgerton in the bath and read my book. I stay up late and wake early, determined to suck every day dry and fill it only with the things I want to do. I try on a lighter self, and it feels lovely.

Hibernation over Manifestation

Tomorrow, back in Sligo, I will celebrate Bealtaine, the crossover point from the dark half of the year to the light. The feminine principle of Giamos that allowed me to dream and honour a fallow season yields to the masculine principle of Samos - blossoming. In the years I have been observing the Celtic wheel and celebrating the festivals, I have been consistently stumped at blossoming. This physical manifestation of inner work is a hard thing to commit to. I am more comfortable in the dark half of the year; I’ll take hibernation over manifestation any day. So, this year, I am asking my party animal self to dance me through the summer. I abandoned her in a nightclub many moons ago, waving a cigarette and giving it stacks, but I could do with that confidence and the way she laughed things off. I know my sisters enjoyed her this week, a more grounded version fuelled by naturally occurring energy.

This is another dance to which I must learn the steps, and the music is only growing louder. We have blackcaps building nests beside our house, and theirs is a frantic, determined song. The forest on three sides of our home is in leaf, and it appears to have stepped closer in a giant embrace. Birds chorus from its branches, bees hum, and, when the sun sets, pheasants clatter onto their perch, and the most welcome visitors of all - a pair of long-eared owls - croon from a stand of pines.

I will wake early on Bealtaine to rinse my face in the dew and welcome this greening energy. I will consider the hinge of the Celtic year that calls feminine and masculine principles into right relationship, and I will live lightly for a while, knowing the time will come again to enter the dark cave of winter.

I have enjoyed Mari Kennedy’s Bealtaine teaching on sovereignty as it relates to mythology and history. Sovereignty is a loaded word, but I love how she explains it as, ‘living from the inside out - leading with the feminine, enacting from the masculine - at a time when those forces are wildly out of balance on the planet’. I wholeheartedly agree.

Self-Blessing

Hardy flowers in the coastal scrub on the Robberg Trail.

At this time every year, I return to a piece by Galway Kinnell:

Extract from Saint Francis and the Sow

By Galway Kinnell

The bud

stands for all things,

even for those things that don’t flower,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness,

to put a hand on its brow

of the flower

and retell it in words and in touch

it is lovely

until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.’

This act of self-blessing says my dreams, my pleasure, and all the dance within me can find its expression in my family, my community and my work. It says flourishing can be retold, and the world needs more people who step into the light half of the year with treasure gleaned in the dark.

During COVID, I connected with my sisters, mother and sister-in-law by teaching them simple recipes over Zoom. We gathered the ingredients in advance, then went step-by-step through the stages of cake making, flatbread baking and shortbread testing. They still use those recipes, and I do not think there is a single neighbour on my mother’s road who has not tasted one of her cakes. Granadillas grow in my sister’s garden, and she confessed to not knowing what to do with them. When her friends came over for the evening, I baked granadilla and coconut cake, and in this way, we add flavour to one another’s lives, and the flourishing of one can be for the good of all.

The Power of Seed

Paula Meehan, in her poem Seed, goes into the garden after winter and finds lupins she grew from seed in the autumn, ‘holding in their fingers a raindrop each like a peace offering, or a promise’. She goes on: ‘I bless the power of seed, its casual, useful persistence, and bless the power of sun, its conspiracy with the underground, and thank my stars the winter’s ended.’

I love this. She calls them ‘forgotten lupins’. This, too, is blossoming. The blossoming of an introvert, perhaps, or one who isn’t quite sure the thing they have to say is worth saying, or the one who keeps failing, or can’t figure out who to be, or, having figured it out, is scared to see it through. Blossoming is dandelion who evolved to grow close to the lawn to outwit the lawnmower; it is a bluebell carpet where no-one walks; it is daisy closing every night only to open its bright face to the morning. There are many ways to flower. So, we bless the power of seeds scattered where they fall and trust whatever blooms. We gather the selves we abandoned along the way and invite them to the party. We enter Bealtaine with ease and turn to photograph the cormorants on the rock.

May you know pleasure this Bealtaine, and bloom with abandon, whatever that looks like.

The hazel stick sign that welcomed me home from South Africa.

(PS - I have a very simple Bealtaine ritual that I am happy to share with you. Please get in touch, if you would like to celebrate this threshold, and I will send it to you.)