on the eve of All Hallow’s Eve

We’ve reached the time of year when there are more leaves on the ground than on the trees. There are more leaves than water in the bird bath. Leaves, like Halloween spirits, daily fly through the air. The moon is, technically speaking, past full, but not so’s you’d really notice. There’s snow in the overnight forecast, with a prospect that it will have melted before Trick of Treaters start their rounds. Tomorrow’s the big night and the Better Half has a Treat bowl ready in the front hall and, as usual, has masterfully carved a Jack O’Lantern. (I reserve my fine motor skills for things like tying dry flies to tippets.)

leaves aren’t all that flies through the night air

Photo by J. Harrington

Come Wednesday, November brings Native American Heritage Month, so we’ll be touching on that theme off and on. Explore Minnesota has a web section on the state’s Native American heritage. I’m assuming the Governor will again issue a proclamation on November 1. In the interim, feel free to read up on land acknowledgements.

We’ve noted elsewhere in these postings that, as near as I can tell, we live very close to what was once a boundary or buffer region between the territories of the Dakota and Ojibwe peoples. I’m still looking for resources that may help me better understand the history of the land on which we’re living.

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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