Ostara

This weekend, I gathered a few families in my backyard to celebrate Ostara, the pagan holiday that celebrates the spring equinox. Ostara officially fell on Thursday March 21, but my daughter was camping with the third and fourth grades, so we pushed our celebration to Saturday so she could participate.

Ostara is a celebration of renewal, resurrection, rebirth, new beginnings, and balance. The word Ostara comes from the name of a western Germanic goddess, Eostre, the goddess of spring. Fertility symbols like rabbits and eggs adorn your typical Ostara altar. The holiday is essentially pagan Easter, minus Jesus.

For our celebration, everyone brought a dish to contribute to our springtime feast. I made a lemon tart, rosemary-ginger lemonade, and lavender lemonade, and Graeme helped me make a carrot cake. Folks brought shepherd's pie, spring rolls, asparagus and risotto, colorful salads, and many more delicious treats.

Sometimes when I'm between projects or waiting on notes from producers and executives, I brainstorm with crafts. Everything is writing, I remind myself as often as I can, and last week, writing was making elaborate flower crowns.

When guests arrived, they picked a crown, and we all looked like extras on the set of Midsommar. I threatened at least one friend with human sacrifice. "I'll sew you up into a bear carcass," I think are the exact words that I used.

Celebrating pagan holidays is one of the ways I'm coping with our crumbling democracy and the rise of American fascism. To be fair, I'm also coping in ways that include more obvious activism, but I am grateful to have moments of community-driven joy, where children and adults gather to celebrate the beauty and possibility of spring, and other wonders of the natural world.

My favorite part of any pagan celebration is making the altar, and this Ostara altar was extremely beautiful, and grew as new friends arrived and added elements.

When it came time for the ritual, we gathered in a circle, and began with two readings. First, my daughter read the opening paragraph of The Wind In The Willows, with this particularly beautiful passage about Mole's spring cleaning:

Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing.

Next, my daughter's friend read us a beautiful poem she wrote about Spring. The children and adults alike stood in rapt silence (except for my son and his friends who were busy wrestling on the trampoline), watching proudly as a child bravely shared her creative work.

The spring equinox is the moment when daylight and darkness are equal in length. In spite of our culture's vilification of darkness, I think of light as all we can see and dark as our more private, hidden selves. Each person in the circle had a pink candle to celebrate light, which for the purposes of this ritual was what the world notices about us. Each person looked to the person next to them, lit their candle, and said one nice thing they notice about that person. It was incredibly sweet.

Then we each lit a black candle to represent some hidden desire we'd like to manifest, or a part of ourselves that we are growing. The adults spoke of wanting to grow resilience, patience, vulnerability, joy. The children spoke of growing math skills, courage, and the openness to make new friends.

In spite of my insistence on hosting pagan events, I am always anxious and vulnerable asking people to participate in these rituals. There's an earnestness to pagan holidays that is hard to square with my sarcasm or sense of humor, but I contain multitudes. I was pleasantly surprised by how easily everyone participated and seemed to enjoy themselves. My mental health is vastly improved when I spend a day preparing food, arranging flowers and altars, and dedicating a few hours to community and beauty. I also think it's pretty great for kids to witness their parents talking about things they'd like to grow in themselves. None of us is finished growing, and these rituals illustrate that.

Nature's cycles are a gentle reminder that change is inevitable, darkness is followed by light, and death paves the way for new life. Ritual helps me to slow down and appreciate the miraculous beauty of the natural world and the community I've built. The world is dark right now. Dark and chaotic, violent, hateful, scary. But there is still a lot of beauty left to fight for. And that is worth celebrating.