Beltane!

Well the three month journey is finally over, it's Beltane. All that hard work for three short hours! It's been a really challenging journey getting this far. We've had a group full of strong personalities, many of whom like to have their opinion even when the decision is made. There have been tears, traumas and tantrums but there has also been light-heartedness, laughs and love. We could have given ourselves an easy ride when we chose the group but instead we chose the people we felt were most appropriate to turn in to a strong group of warriors, and on the night, we'd done just that.

The Boy normally avoids Beltane but as I'd worked so hard with my group this year, he took the night off work so he could come up the hill. He even got up early and came to give me some moral support (and take lots of pictures) whilst we did the set up during the day. Obviously, this photo is courtesy of him as I was performing during the night! He's been amazing! I was going to use this photo I took of him but decided to use one of the action.

After a challenging run up, the night itself had it's challenges as well. White is a bad paint to use, it never gives even coating, it cracks and crumbles. In tests at home we'd tried a new paint and it had worked really well but come to the getting ready space and the same problems came out again and despite how upset I was by it, the group still decided to express their thoughts, just what I needed before the performance!

We took a different route than usual from the getting ready space and it was lovely as we doubled back on ourselves and it was the one point in the whole evening when I got to see my group behind me. Once up the hill and waiting behind The National Monument to start the performance I lost all my body heat. It's like my body was telling me that I'd had a challenge getting this far, why should I get an easy ride for the performance itself. As the drums and adreniline kicked in, I was sure the shivers would stop, when they didn't I had no choice but to use all my strength to hold them in and keep myself still. I made it round the hill and the good point is, shakes don't show on photos! This is M, with her fire hoop. If you want to see what we looked like, this is us as the night kicked off. I'm back row, second person in.

There are parts of the night I don't remember but from those that I do, it was amazing and oour group really did us proud!