I participated in my first ritual to celebrate Aphrodite (in this lifetime) when I was a teenager. I only remember bits of the ritual but one of the things that we did was a guided meditation where we communed with Aphrodite. In that meditation Aphrodite gave me a rose and I’ve felt connected to her ever since.
One of my favorite things to do on Beltane is dancing the maypole. It’s so playful and so much fun and can be quite empowering. A couple of times my band, KIVA, played for Beltane festivals and sang some songs from the 1973 Wicker Man movie which was a great deal of fun as I’m a fan of that film. (For more on Wicker Man music, you can check out this post from Melanie of Crow Women.)
I wrote Aphrodite’s Flowers sometime in 1989 and recorded the song in 1990.
What inspired me to write this song was while I was house sitting for a friend. Being away from my normal environment is often helpful for new ideas and creativity for me. I was thinking of people I had crushes on or felt love for and wrote this love song to Aphrodite and those loves.
We recorded the video in 1990 at a beautiful and magical garden in the DC area and spent most of the day there. At times we had an audience and we got some applause. The videographer, Barry, was a friend of our group and I didn’t get the tapes from him for quite a while and then it took me years (lots of things going on in my life) to get them transferred to a digital format. Barry has since passed away.
The video had degraded before I had it transferred to digital and is “lossy” so the quality is not great but I still love looking back at all of us as youngsters and how healthy and beautiful we all were. We had no idea what a blessing it was that we had our health and wellbeing as many people don’t when they are young. The photos were taken by one of the dancers, Nemea, who took a picture of me holding a rose to my nose which was the opening image I added to this video. The other two at the end were taken by a dear friend who died before the turn of the century, Richard Hood. He was a great photographer and we did a whole photo shoot at the same gardens at a different time with him. I have included some more photos Richard took of myself, Diana McFadden and Nicole Cooley in this blog.
The only people who are still with the band today that performed in the video are Diana McFadden and, of course, myself.
One last thing… I sing 3 times in the song – My life is a flower or Our lives are flowers “whom Aphrodite hath touched.” I don’t know why but the “olde timey” way I wrote that just felt right at the time. Sometimes the words come out a particular way and I feel it’s important to let them be as they are conveying a particular energy or feeling even if they are not always grammatically correct.
This song was released on the album “The Healing Art” which was my first recorded KIVA album released in 1990.
The faerie light within your eyes
fills me with wonder and delight
The touch of your angelic hands
fills me with joy and laughter bright
Chorus:
Spirits of the sea and earth we are
Mistresses of moon and sun
We are the earth and the sky
As the lightning makes us one
Changer and changed, the weaver of the mists
Always spoken in a dream
Dream of midnight blue and of ancient heather
Starlight form and crystalline tear
ChorusBedrock softens as we discover each other
Aphrodite’s Flowers by Ariana Lightningstorm ©1989
Glistening, starry eyed amazed
Your beauty deepens
My heart lingers
Hear it singing in holy love
Chorus
Carry me, oh carry you, through the night
Our tears falling like gentle rain
Telling a sad story of lifetime’s sorrows
We are a peaceful respite from pain
Chorus
My heart does the telling in this love
My life is a flower whom Aphrodite hath touched
Carry me, oh carry you, through the night
Our tears falling like gentle rain
Telling a sad story of lifetime’s sorrows
We are a peaceful respite from pain
Chorus
Our hearts do the telling in this love
Our lives are flowers whom Aphrodite hath touched
Our hearts do the telling in this love
Our lives are flowers whom Aphrodite hath touched
For more information about Ariana, including her collected articles here on Pagan Song, her bio, and links to KIVA’s and Ariana’s sites on the web, check out Ariana’s page on Pagan Song.
Many more posts about Beltane can be found on this page on Pagan Song.
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