May Day, may day

Today is May Day, the first of May, a date that may have more holidays than any other. Here's a partial list courtesy of Garrison Keillor.

May Day in many countries is a celebration of Labor Day and as such has also come to be associated with communism; It's been a celebration of spring and fertility in places like Egypt and India; in pre-Christian Rome it was the time of the festival of Flora, the goddess of flowers; in medieval England, people gathered flowers to "bring in the May" and erected a maypole bedecked with garlands. It's also the date of Beltane, a Celtic calendar festival celebrating the start of summer, known for its bonfires, and has been revived by neo-pagans all over the world as a major religious holiday; it's known as Lei Day in Hawaii; and Walpurgisnacht is celebrated in parts of rural Germany as a kind of Valentine's Day.

I used to think that things were real, and change was something that happened to them over time. Now I think that change is real, and things are events that happen over time. Change is the constant and things come and go, appear and disappear. —Brian McLaren

Some geologists predict that North America will become part of a future supercontinent, that Europe and Africa, Asia and Australia will all coalesce together as they did when Pangea existed, and then the hillside on which my little house stands will be long gone, buried under layers of strata, or on the floor of a mighty ocean. – Ed Simon

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,

And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

– Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass.