Now it is the end of autumn, I lay my body down.

A hush. The hill is still humming with the day’s warmth, the sun sinking into the far shore of the lake. For a moment, I can see it, as though with other eyes, submerged, rippling beneath the waters in arcing liquid wings of flame and dusk, flexing, alternating, a thousand of them, wings sprouting from the round, warm body settling into the depths. Then the vision is gone.

I creep silently along the shore, my bare feet numb and rustling through the long, dried grasses of autumn. The mud is moist and rough on my soles, each step sending echoes of energy sliding up my calves.

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Jeff and I are moving on to Series 5 and 6 of Doctor Who, featuring Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor. I was determined not to like him. And I don’t. I don’t dislike him, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t like him. He’s just kind of… there. He’s quick and somewhat smart and occasionally even hilarious. But ultimately the Eleventh Doctor is, well, kind of shallow. And maybe that’s a good thing. The Tenth Doctor went dark, very dark, and lost pretty much everything a person can. I related to him intensely, grieving and soldiering on as each companion left, one by one. I’m not sure I could have withstood another season of that kind of intensity.

One thing I will say, though, is that I’m bored with people dying. I woke up at 4 AM this morning on a caffeine buzz flashback, and that’s the thought that kept rolling over and over in my hyper-wired, sleep-deprived mind. Because when it comes to the Eleventh Doctor, no one’s ever really dead. I’ve given up trying to count the number of times Amy or Rory are supposed to have died. They never really do. They never stay dead.

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The significance of Beltaine reaches beyond merely being an agricultural festival focused on fertility and fecundity in service to the community, with romance acting as a bit of grease we can indulge in now and then to keep the Wheel turning. The holy day at the height of spring is also a day of ecstasy in the original sense, a day on which the attraction of life-force can pull us beyond ourselves and into communion with a larger Mystery, beyond tensions that might keep us too rigidly locked into unhealthy or hampering community bonds once they have outlasted their benefit.

Along with Samhain, the other hinge of the year, Beltaine serves as a liminal time, a time of thresholds and permeable boundaries. The great ecstatic mysteries of sex and death dominate both these holy days.

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More to the point for me is this question: why is the ancient “wheel” better than the modern one? For me, there are obvious flaws in the modern “wheel,” the approach that most contemporary religions take in answering the basic questions about life, the universe and everything. The most important and obvious flaw being their denigration of the earth and the natural world, or in many cases the mere fact that they haven’t much to say on the matter. They feel like “square wheels,” so to speak, that at best make for a bumpy, uncomfortable ride, and at worst get us stuck in ruts, our hard edges jammed firmly into the yielding earth and unable to move. And so I turn to ancient religions to learn how to soften those edges, refining the square into a smoother circle …

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