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Happy Beltane everyone! Time to light that bonfire, put a garland of flowers around something, and crown the May Queen. Some of the more grown-up aspects of the holiday for us will have to wait a few days, because we have Trinity with us this weekend. Our religious holidays often have fertility aspects to them. You can celebrate them without actually doing more than putting an athame (sacred blade) in the chalice, but when you’re married to your magical partner it does open up the options more. Our hawthorn tree actually bloomed for Beltane this year, normally the weather is warm enough that the white blossoms come weeks ahead of May Day, but this year we had our May tree blooming almost exactly on schedule.

I’m up by myself this morning. The house quiet around me, though I relearned during the video shoot that the house is never actually quiet. It was a lesson I first realized when we kept loosing power a couple of years back. Once the power was out then the house was utterly quiet like someone’s breathing had stopped, so it was startling, almost anxiety provoking until you realized that the problem wasn’t some mysterious prowler noise, but the total absent of the sounds that fill a modern house twenty-four-seven.  The power outages that year let me know just how much daily noise there is, even when I think it’s quiet. On the day of the filming I was reminded of that lesson all over again. First there was this high pitched noise that the sound equipment was picking up. Everyone was trying to locate it and turn it off. I was in the chair getting make-up put on so I just got to watch people wander back and forth trying to figure it out. It ended up being the air conditioning. We were lucky that it wasn’t too hot a day since we had to turn the air off. Then about the time we get started a neighbor starts to use a lawn mower which gets picked up on the microphone. If it had just been our neighbor we could have asked him to wait a bit, but it was a lawn service which means that time is money for them. If we asked them to wait, it would throw their whole day’s schedule off and that means money out of their pockets. About the time that stopped, then the neighbor on the other side of us had a different lawn service start up. Ahh! The sound technician got that sorted out on his equipment, then the hot water heater in the room with us started up, and that we simply had to out wait. We ran around noticing sounds that are normally so quiet, so ordinary, that we don’t consider them noise. The day of filming was very educational in a lot of ways, and we now have a better appreciation for what silence is in real life and what level of silence you need for filming.