Across both the european landmass and Turtle Island, the Earth’s axial tilt provides changing seasons that my ancestors recognized with ritual and celebration. Similarly, local friends just returned from Japan’s annual Festival of Blossoms, where their steps were cushioned by cherry petals. They also walked the Kumano Kodo Pilgrimage Trail, in use for over 6,000 years, surrounded by trees of all kinds. Connecting to the unique gifts of each place and season is an important touchstone for people so often caught up in strictly human headlines. Each place calls us to their particular requirements for reciprocity. Here, my annual Beltane bonfire cleaned away the skeletons of last winter’s holiday trees that friends always bring over for our goats. While fire transforms spiky branches devoid of needles into soil-enriching ash, I remember these friends who remember our goats. I remember this connection, with gratitude.

In Edinburgh, a huge industrial city far removed from our Rocky Mountain goat field, Gaelic seasonal festivals like Beltane have held people close to their grandparents for ongoing generations of grandparents’ grandparents. And now, long after the deforestation of the Scottish landscape that created the impoverished social conditions of Shakespeare’s MacBeth, the Beltane Fire Festival connects urban people with their ancient forests. If we are what we eat—how could we be otherwise?—hazel nuts from long ago live in the flesh and bones of human descendants. This year’s festival Rewilding theme was grounded in seed-sharing, and also invited participants to discover various ways to embrace the wisdom of earth’s ongoing wildness.

Groups like the Myoinn—wildcats—the Coven, the Aquarium, and the Pyrosphere practiced together since February’s celebration of Imbolc and explored their wilder lives from different perspectives. With character development and costuming and active community participation, people restored and regenerated multiple alternatives in creative communion with the fertile world. Reclaiming our wilder natures, people acted out opportunities for truth beyond the sterile, isolating lifeways that industrialization and technocracy have left us. When mysticism is turned to dogma, and once-creative symbols are prescribed as government policy, danger rises. But in celebratory rituals of communion with all of wild earth, we remember our joy and our fierceness. Then we can move on to participate in the tasks of our planet with energy and deep gratitude for the ways our service mirrors the many gifts of Earth’s ever-evolving ecological mycelia. As participants in this year’s International Workers Day/May Day rallies across the U.S. attest, we celebrate our mutualism and recognize our planetary belonging.