Sully in One-derland

It's a very odd thing when your partner has to go away for a long period of time and you're deprived of all the usual benefits: company, a sounding board, someone whose schedule, willy-nilly, helps determine yours. My partner of more than 22 years is literally on the other side of the globe, and it's taken a week to find a not yet totally acceptable interim rhythm. Work is getting done, but not as organizedly as I would like, and the lack of his breathing in our king bed is very bad for my night's rest. Even sleeping pills lose their effectiveness sometime during the night, and every house noise seems doubly ominous. A cat fight outside the house at about 6 a.m. today was almost a relief, as I could immediately identify the sounds of feline disagreement and stop worrying about them.

Beltane as a temporary single is a particularly odd experience. I quite joyfully cleaned and re-decorated my altar yesterday, on May Eve, burning some amber resin (with opened window so the fire alarm wouldn't put the kibosh on the festivity). But it's disorienting to have no-one with whom to share a chalice of pomegranate wine, or to spoil with some May Day treat, caloric or otherwise.

Still, self-discipline is not exactly foreign to me, so it's stay on the wagon in terms of starches, sugars and alcohol (one glass of wine a day, max), and keep plugging away at the long list of things to be accomplished before my beloved's return. This will be the longest time we've been apart since we married, nonetheless, it will pass quickly, these intervals always do. It's up to me to make the most and best of it, so that we join each other again from strength as well as in mutual want and need. That's the message I take from Beltane this year. Ground yourself, re-create yourself, because you are always a unique "one" in partnership as well as part of two, and if either partner loses themselves, the union is weakened, becomes uneven, lopsided.

"Tine Bealtaine!", everyone, to quote the Celtic. And if you've never heard the track of that name by the Pagan band Omnia, I highly recommend you remedy that oversight!