Seeds and sparks: marking Beltane and all the inbetween-ness of it all!
The train window is pinned open. We’re climbing through Scotland on the hottest day of the year so far, 25 degrees in April, and I’m sweating into the blue scratchy-fabric seats of one of the world’s most scenic railway lines. Between Glasgow and Oban, the lochs shimmer like silver tongues and tall trees cloak mountainscapes. But it’s not the views that hold me in this moment—it’s what’s floating through the air.
Dandelion seeds.
Thousands of them. Not drifting, not falling—dancing. Carried on the wind like soft snow or tiny sparks from a bonfire. They gather on the window ledge, land on the edge of my sleeve, tumble into the aisle of the carriage, and settle on the iron tracks below. My eyes close for a moment, and what I see is not seeds, but sparks. Small, glowing flecks of light. Belonging to something bigger. Reminding me of something older.
Today is Beltane. I had been reading about this Celtic marker in the year. A day of fire. Of fertility. Of thresholds.
Over the last year, while learning from Indigenous knowledge systems across the world for my PhD, I’ve also found myself returning to the stories of this land—my land. The island on which I live, and where my ancestors were Celts. Folk wisdom has become buried under centuries of erasure, of colonisation, of forgetting. And yet here it is, in the air, riding in on the breath of dandelion seeds.
Beltane is one of the eight symbolic moments in the Celtic wheel of the year. A festival of bright fire, it marks the doorway into summer, a celebration of the sun’s return and the fertility of all things. It is a festival of protection and renewal. In older times, villagers would extinguish their hearths and gather together to kindle a sacred “need-fire.” Cattle were moved between two fires to safeguard them for the months ahead. People danced, sang, and drank under the stars, celebrating the abundance of the earth, life, and each other.
There’s something tender about that—about gathering around a central fire to begin again.
And I suppose that’s what I’m doing now. I’m on my way to Iona, to begin a week of sacred rest with a circle of women. It’s a week that honours what lives in between. The space between doing and being, winter and summer, memory and becoming. And I feel it—this in-between-ness—deeply. Not just in the calendar, but in my own bones and muscles. I think so many of us in the world feel it. And I am never quite sure if it is sacred or terrifying (or both!)
And it feels a bit cliched writing about dandelions. Did I ever notice dandelions before my work with Project Dandelion? As a child yes, as an adult maybe not. Another spark of light forgotten. But these dandelion seeds remind us that nothing is fixed. That everything is floating, transient, transforming. That we are all, in some way, sparks in the sky. Seeds on the wind.
And Beltane reminds me that in the midst of change, there is a rhythm older than collapse. That we carry fire with us. That even in the hottest April, even with the world trembling under the weight of what comes next, there is still a place for dancing. For pausing. For returning to the sacred and the slow.
I will be nearly entirely offline for the next few days. Writing, studying, reading, swimming in the sea, and most of all, resting. Because there is so much to do. But unless we stop once in a while we forget why we are doing any of it. And for me, we do it for the sparks and the seeds - the hope of what might yet be birthed.