Blessed Samhain! Happy Halloween!

visitors from another world?

Photo by J. Harrington

We're comfortable with this festival marking the end of Harvest, but much less so with it signaling the beginning of Winter. But, if it's not planting season, nor growing season, nor harvest time, what is there but Winter? Our discomfort probably has something (everything?) to do with the reality that we relate more to hunting, fishing, gathering cultures than to the agrarian ones, although we realize they're not mutually exclusive.

For much of our adult life, Autumn has been a time of leaf color change, grouse hunting, hunting waterfowl during their migration and, while we lived in Massachusetts, an ocean full of striped bass and bluefish fattening up in the near shore along the coast and heading South toward warmer waters. Fall offers a time of change, or restlessness, "harvesting" both wild and domestic resources before the mean, lean days and days ahead. If we're lucky, days for sitting by the fire and hearing or telling stories of days past.

at Samhain, bonfires are often lit

Photo by J. Harrington

The belief that Samhain or All Hallows' Eve is a time when the boundaries between the worlds are thinnest and most easily crossed fits well, we think, with a change from a season of growth to a time for storage providing sustenance in a time with little growth, a cold and quiet season. In this world, death and life are two points on the same cycle/circle. Science tells us atoms are continuously recycled. It tells us nothing about spirits or sparks of life. Offering treats to those of the younger generations can help assure they'll reach maturity to care for the rest of us, both the young and the old, with few or no tricks.

Samhain

By Annie Finch (The Celtic Halloween)

In the season leaves should love,

since it gives them leave to move

through the wind, towards the ground

they were watching while they hung,

legend says there is a seam

stitching darkness like a name.

Now when dying grasses veil

earth from the sky in one last pale

wave, as autumn dies to bring

winter back, and then the spring,

we who die ourselves can peel

back another kind of veil

that hangs among us like thick smoke.

Tonight at last I feel it shake.

I feel the nights stretching away

thousands long behind the days

till they reach the darkness where

all of me is ancestor.

I move my hand and feel a touch

move with me, and when I brush

my own mind across another,

I am with my mother's mother.

Sure as footsteps in my waiting

self, I find her, and she brings

arms that carry answers for me,

intimate, a waiting bounty.

"Carry me." She leaves this trail

through a shudder of the veil,

and leaves, like amber where she stays,

a gift for her perpetual gaze.

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