words and photos by Lige Menard
Humbled and in awe am I to share this FOMO.
If seasons are like generations, then May is a cusper. A special month that sits right at the edge of Tranzitions. A time of fertility in nature. A time of youth in blossom. Yet digging deeper, one really finds that behind the store front of prom level youth and home garden growth, May is a month of the great maternal. Historically Earth goddesses are celebrated in May, with the focus being divine fertility and the soil of the womb… not just what blossoms forth. There are very adult overtones of sexual intercourse and birth ritual intertwined like ribbon in the mythos surrounding MayDay or her Swedish sister, Midsommar.
Here in the 409 my youngest baebee, K-Bill and I set forth on MayDay to the Beaumont MayPole Festival. Which is held annually in the breathtaking, peace giving Beaumont Botanical Gardens. My child was on the hunt for Mother’s Day gifts, and I was on the hunt for some gosh dang truth and understanding. I’m always a seeker.
Greeting us in passing at the gate was local artist Ines Alvidres and her dear madre. Truly, Ines’ smile is like springtime, warm and comforting. We soon were to discover that she had done the artwork for the event. An Alvidres MayPole print is worth acquiring if there are still some available post-festival. We snagged ours from Grace Mathis who was womanning a booth with her mother as her partner and backup. I couldn’t help but feel the unbroken tether of mother and daughter weaving a magic around me. To walk the gardens amongst such women was a blessing for a salty old dog descended from Catholics and heathens.
The crowd began to gather at the MayPole. We communally knew the hour was coming near. We stood in solemn witness as youthful, feminine innocence dressed in white made procession to the Pole. We were told of how the festival founder, a local elderly steel magnolia whose name magically escapes me, traveled across Europe in her youth. She kept seeing pole after tattered ribbon pole in the middle of village after long-yeared village. Her curiosity spoke to her. She inquired of locals as to the pole and its fabrics’ meaning. She learned some of the storied lore surrounding MayDay and of the MayPole. She learned of the promised blessings for bountiful harvests. She brought back old-world ritual with her when she returned home.
After the greyed and majestic queen bee spoke, a waltzy piece punched up on the PA. The sound had an organic feel to it. I’m undecided if the music was digital or needle scratch. Certainly, the piece had a timeless, but if you had to put one on it… 1800’s feel. Haunting…like a heavy memory.
The girls began dancing slowly and in fixed positions. It was light and cheerful. Soon, they each took one of the evenly placed, varying colored ribbons that streamed down from the top of the centered pole. They hung like skeletal remains of a long-abandoned circus, until the girls incorporated them into their dance, giving the ribbons transferred energy and life. The music started to build in momentum and tempo. The girls on que started moving in opposing concentric circles with each tiny dancer holding her ribbon and weaving in and out of the flow of the opposite circle. The effect began to knit the ribbons in a symmetrical and tight pattern down the vertical length of the pole.
The circle of floating lovelies grew smaller and smaller as free ribbon became shorter and shorter. In the end, the matriarch emcee approached the pole and gifted it with flowers before tying the ribbons into a bow with the girls silently clustered around her. When she finished, so did the ceremony. The crowd dispersed. We had made our passage through the rite.
Free from the ritual, my attentions returned to K-Bill and hims/herms task at hand. Young Bill had narrowed down the mama pickings to just one booth.
K-Train selected a piece made of copper and sea glass in the shape of an octopus for his mother, and another piece in the shape of the tree of life for her grandmother. Branches spread up reaching towards the sky, and tentacles spread down going with that deep deep under flow.
I feel like I should maybe shut it down and continue forward not. Yet a seeker gon’ seek and it’s time for your Paul Harvey Rest of the Story.
It was not always young ladies in white that gathered for the dance. There was a time…when it was gay hearted boy childs. They would sing of the tree, of the boy, of the seed. The pole itself is openly a phallic symbol. It rests in the center of the soil that is the village green. The pole represents the axis mundi, or center of the world. The place where the earth meets the sky. An outty symbol affixed over a navel center. Early Catholicism placed the center of the universe at Delphi. Prior to that so did the Greek. Prior to that, it’s purported that even older and more ancient goddess worshiping faiths practiced deep in the caves under Delphi. The idea being they are not just older but deeper dwelling. The earth was the great womb for much of early humanity. Plus our best option for prehistoric climate control. The ribbons represent sexual union. A weave where two become three. These interpretations are up for discussion but are commonly accepted amongst scholars. The Maypole itself is said to spring from Germanic tree worship. Yet I ask you, what is greater, the soil or the tree? The tree stands tall. The tree is strong. The tree faces the elements and grows ever towards the sun. The soil is vast, the soil nourishes. The soil gives life. We all return to the soil’s womb in time. Without some mother’s earth, we are all but dust and seed in the wind.
Like an old hag with her bag of bones, I try to discern meaning and truth, but more by reading the shared moments around me. The prom kids were walking about dressed to the nines with an eye for photographic memories. They were celebrating a different rite of passage. Yet one attached sadly, and way too often, to union and intercourse. I thought of the girls tying ribbons down the pole like tubes on an age old phallic symbol. The archaic then and there seems still very much referential in today’s here and now. I’m going to “wrap it up” by saying that I’m glad the darker parts of passed down ritual have diluted over the span of generations. There’s enough sacrifice in life as is. On that subject I know a thing or two that I will not share here, but lemme tell ya, ain’t nobody gon make a WickerMan outta me.