Happy Festival

While here in the northern hemisphere we have just celebrated the arrival of winter and communion with the ancestors at Samhain, in the southern hemisphere the spring festival of Beltane has just been celebrated. To mark that occasion here is a photo of a Beltane ceremony held in a forest in Bourgogne, France, this May. Here the May King and Queen are caught in an off-duty moment:

We can see how important it is for us to celebrate festivals, how deeply embedded is this need in the psyche, in the recent story of the Russian astronauts who have just completed 17 months pretending to be in in a spaceship, in preparation for a Mars voyage. One of the unexpected findings of observers was that the crew, unprompted, decided to celebrate festivals together, such as Christmas and the Chinese New Year.