Like many of my conversations about the Beltane Fire Society, the one I will share with you now begins on a bench in the Meadows. It was 2022. The leaves had just begun to turn and the air was not so cold that the metal was uncomfortable to sit upon. Beside me was C’tri, hot chocolate in one hand and characteristic pragmatism in the other; we were discussing my recent selection as that year’s Cailleach.

We considered this a moment, this distinction: what does it mean to be, versus embody? We reviewed other words we’d heard in reference to being the Cailleach of a BFS festival. There was “represent,” “depict,” “portray,” and “characterise.” The language hinted at there being something to step into, be that a role, an idea, perhaps even a vessel.

That year, after drinking from the Fountain of Youth (a gift bequeathed to me by an escargatoire of snails) and standing beneath a tower of Obsidian warriors, my Cailleach—another important linguistic distinction we use!—glided coolly into Samhainn and, by springtime, had transformed into my May Queen. I quickly learned that the language we use around the May Queen is different, more straightforward: one is the May Queen. To be selected for the role is to become it. There are likely many reasons for this, potentially rooted in the fact that in Scottish history the Cailleach is a Goddess and the May Queen a figure of folk traditions, but these are reflections for another time.

Maybe because I began my journey as the Crone, whose reflective nature runs beneath all my BFS decisions like an underground stream, I was deliberate about the language I chose for the May Queen. The language felt important: to introduce oneself as the goddess figure was to introduce your approach to the role. If one were to champion the May Queen, for example, it would position the Her as one that needed defending. I settled on “serve.” I serve as the May Queen. In those early days, I saw the role as characterised by service: namely, service to our community (and our wider community of celebrants), service to the ritual and performance that is Beltane, and service to the many facets that make up what we collectively see the May Queen as, be it neopagan Goddess, folk caricature, or something new entirely. But as I’ve grown into the role, I feel as though service does not fully capture what it is to be the May Queen of the Beltane Fire Society. I see it now as a role of stewardship—I serve in the role of steward.

You may wonder what the difference is between service and stewardship. There are many precise definitions, to be sure. Service is the act of helping and supporting; stewardship is the responsible management, care, and protection of entrusted to me. Both, to me, are underpinned by responsibility, but stewardship is to be a part of rather than assistant to. Stewardship is relational, cooperative rather than hierarchical. Yet these definitions are too clinical, I think, for what I am trying to say.

When I think of stewardship, I think of a phone call I had with one of my many wise Aunties right before my first Beltane. I was a White. I had been weeping about the many difficult changes I was going through in the run-up: accepting the death of my younger sister, accepting that I was so far away from all I had ever known, accepting endings I had desperately clung to, accepting that my PhD would be so much harder than I could have imagined. She told me: “Alix, you are being reborn. If we are lucky, we do this often in life. A baby does not come quietly into this world—they kick and they scream. All we can do is be thankful for the many doulas of our lives who help us in that transition.”  To be the May Queen is to be both the newborn and the doula. She is born on the Acropolis anew each year, and She is the doula of the world being born again. When She opens her eyes, Summer arrives with a strength and a song; when She closes them, Winter prowls in like a wildcat. And so the cycle continues.

This understanding of stewardship—as both the birthed and the birther—has shaped each theme I have chosen for our community. What do we steward into this world? What do we resist as a new one struggles to be born? In my first year as May Queen, we played at the boundary between science and folklore, discovering that the membrane between them was far more porous than many expected.

In my second year, we asked what it means to be a festival of seasons when the seasons themselves no longer resemble those at the festival’s inception. What does it mean to be the May Queen when May is changing before our eyes?

In my third year, we rewilded: ritual, runes, landscape, language, joy, and participation—just to name a few. Looking back, I see now that I was exploring a cycle of decolonisation. One must first uncolonise our ways of being before we can decolonise them, and ultimately, re-indigenise ourselves and the world. This is no easy feat. Stewardship is not merely about care; it is about remembering that what we shape also shapes us. To steward wisely is to take part in the world’s becoming.

Most importantly, to steward something—especially something as profound as the role of the May Queen—means making decisions that serve the long-term health of what is being cared for. True stewardship is not possession, but love. And sometimes, love requires letting go.

With an uncertain political climate in both my country of origin and my country of choice, I cannot guarantee that I will be able to remain in the role through 2027, our 40th anniversary, as I had intended. I am guaranteed but one more festival in Edinburgh. When I close my eyes and think back to my first year as May Queen, I remember feeling many things—excitement, wonder, awe, to name a few. But I was also afraid. Not because I doubted my ability or my vision, but because there was so much expectation—from myself, from the community, and, it often felt, from the wider world that shared in our ritual. I learned to “do it afraid,” but this is a lesson that takes time. If I cannot stay in the UK under tenuous immigration laws, I would not want my successor to bear both the weight of expectation and the demands of the 40th anniversary simultaneously.

You, my next-in-line, deserve time to explore the edges of the role—to test its boundaries, to resist where resistance feels necessary, to find where joy hides—and, most importantly, to dwell in the sheer possibility of being the May Queen. All of this must come before the added gravity of that milestone year, so that when it arrives, it does so on ground made fertile by your own discovery.

So, in lieu of serving another year as May Queen, I choose to steward the role in another way: by offering to be one of the many doulas of Her becoming. There is so much to the role—too much for any one person to uncover. In the same way our community is populated with Cailleachs whose wisdom those newly stepping into the role can draw from, I will be a well of knowledge for you to draw upon. If you need a weekly meeting in the run-up, I can offer you that; if you desire a grounding presence to walk behind you in the Procession, I can offer you that; I can paint you, help you design your dress, share where I have stumbled and how those stumbles became lessons—or, if you prefer, I can step back entirely and come only when called. This, then, is the next phase of my stewardship to the May Queen: to ensure the health of the role by helping my successor in whatever way they need.

The privilege of stewarding this role has always been immense. I feel a deep sense of sadness as I face this transition. I wonder: who will I be when I am no longer the May Queen? What will I do? Where will I go? And then I remember back to three years ago as I sat cross-legged in my childhood bedroom, phone in hand, having just learned I was selected as the 9^th May Queen of the Beltane Fire Society. I wondered: who will I be as the May Queen? What will I do? Where will I go?

In questioning such things, I recall a discussion with C’tri on that same bench four years later, this time with the cherry blossoms whirling round the Meadows. We leaned back onto the cold metal and let the wind tug our hair—a Beltane ritual (one of so many I have come to cherish).

“You know,” I said, closing my eyes and feeling the metal bars against my back. My body remembers my first Beltane, where I carried the Sun. “It doesn’t feel so scary to me anymore.”

“Which part? Performing in front of so many people?”

“No,” I replied. I found myself smiling. “Not performing. Just being seen as Alix.”

I am the doula and I am born again.

To all who have shared this journey with me, in any capacity, I thank you. It has been a pleasure and privilege serving as your May Queen. It has been the adventure of a lifetime stewarding this role.