I spent last Saturday snuggling under the Abingon Oak, in the Community Circle cast with a hazel staff. Improvising descants to mantras, sung to harmonium and drums. Hugging, blessing the outgoing May Queen and the incoming May King, each tender and robust. Swigging water – sparkling and still – from others’ proffered water-bottles (having arrived without); slurping curry from the vat; chewing delicious sour-dough baked and apportioned by a mentor in women’s health; visiting the wood-chip toilet that reminded me of other firepits, other shrines, other wells in Sutherland 600 miles north; building the Beltaine fires for leaping. Holding holy space for electing, choosing of Sire and their Dame, each in the sweatlodge of their con-gendered contenders.

Then once the Masculine and Feminine wigwams-of-wood were lit, cheering as the May King escorted their new Queen through and over the fire-pit, followed by us their regal subjects – singly or paired, jumping skipping cartwheeling,

Declaring intentions; releasing that which we were ready to let go into the purging flames.

Each time I leapt with a god, I stumbled nearly headlong on landing, recovery reliant only on a strong male hand holding me fast. As the fires abated, I made further, more stately goddess passes, alone or accompanied; surer-footed. Once holding firmly on my shoulders the younger of the May King’s daughters. In dedication to those mothers among us who bear children.

Once accompanying the Holder of the Hazel Staff, he who had greeted me as “ever Brighid” that morning, remembering our Imbolc ceremony 2020. He who honours the marriage of Oak and Beech in each of us; the heart-healing properties of Hawthorn; the fiery ferocity of the Great Stag; and the flame-wings (I would add) of Phoenix and Red Kite.

Speaking of Red Kite: here’s a year’s worth, remembering sighting her on the April 2025 Road Trip North, via Lincoln and Edinburgh, and recalling World Drumming Day atop the Gog Magog hills in Cambridge, April 2024






 oh! a Red Kite!

Once there were two of us in the car and I said oh! a Red Kite,

there over the steeple and bearing down on the churchyard;

scavenging sky as if to descend, the holy dove breath ghost

following the drumbeat as thirty, forty of us stood encircling

the space where the crystals rang the bright white light we

beamed into Cambridge where the associate professors sought

healing and hope from a thousand laboratories, granted by

benefactors and donors and patrons and kinship bondings;

and the Red Kite was there again at Deeping St James and out

over Berwick or was it Edinburgh, all days different like the other;

and still

white black russet it patterns the sky with astuteness, with ease


© Kathy Labrum McVittie 17 April 2025