The Beltane Table
Moving is never easy. But a transatlantic journey with only two suitcases is even harder. I was packing up the contents of my room in Darroch Court, astonished at how much stuff I’d amassed in just one year living in Edinburgh. I guess all those fantastic charity shops on the walk home from class were just too tempting.
A lot of my possessions went back to the charity shops – including a dozen plants I’d been cultivating all year. I hoped they’d find homes in sunny kitchen windows with nice old ladies to look after them. My towels, sheets, extra food, and household things were going to furnish my friend Susan’s new flat, where I’d also be staying for the remainder of my time in Edinburgh (or, where my suitcases would be staying while I traveled). Still, I was left with a pile of random stuff that Susan wasn’t interested in, not really suitable for the charity shops: candles, incense, essential oils, charcoal tablets, trinkets, costume jewelry, fairy wings, clay, watercolors, acrylic paints, brushes, stickers, glitter, beads, colorful fabric, hippie clothes I no longer wanted…..
The Beltane Fire Society met on the Meadows every Monday night in the summer to drum, dance, spin fire, and socialize. A ragtag group of hippies, punks, ravers, carnival performers, visionaries, dissidents, neo-tribalists, and everything in between, someone would appreciate my stuff. I packed it into a bag to bring along on my usual Monday night out.
On my way across the Meadows, I noticed an odd table. There was nothing odd about the table itself – it was a perfectly ordinary black wooden table, solid and unobtrusive, the kind you’d usually find in a pub. The kind I’d once tried to steal from the student union in an embarrassing episode months earlier. What was odd about this table was its location in the middle of the Meadows, just off the path. It seemed like someone had been carrying it someplace, gotten tired, and left it there to pick up later. I didn’t give it much thought, except as a convenient place to dump out my bag of goodies.
“Hey everybody!” I shouted, “Free stuff!!” Several people came to have a look, and I went to chat with my friends. When I turned around later to see how my little giveaway was going, I was astonished to see people swarmed around the table, in the process of decorating it with my acrylic paints! Soon everyone was involved in adding their own designs in an organic, spontaneous work of art! When there were no more paint brushes, people used twigs, grass, and their fingers.
Latecomers who stumbled into the middle of the group project asked a bevy of questions:
“Whose table is this?”
“Where did it come from?”
“Why is it here?”
Nobody knew. It was a mystery.
“Who brought the paint?” Myshele (that girl over there).
“Did she know the table was here?” Nope!
“So somebody just happened to have paint, and the table just happened to be here, and somebody started decorating it?”
That’s exactly what happened!
By the end of the evening, the table was a masterpiece of abstract art, with every surface covered in an explosion of color. I made my contribution, painting a spiral on one side, only to discover someone else had painted a similar spiral on the other side at the same time!
I ran back to my flat to grab my camera and take pictures, which I passed around at a party two weeks later. The crowd at the party were Scottish country dancers, none of them remotely connected to the Beltane folks.
My friend Matty was looking through the photos and exclaimed, “Hey! That’s my table!” He recognized certain details of the design and was sure it could be no other. One of his flatmates had taken a table from a pub months earlier, but when the lease ended they had to get rid of it, two weeks ago. So they left it out on the curb and called a charity shop to pick it up, and assumed that’s where it had gone. He had no idea it had mysteriously found its way to the middle of the Meadows and become a huge canvas for the mad Beltane people!
As far as I know, the table now lives in one of the fire-spinner’s flats…