Halo'd Eve ~ Festival of the Dead

It was the wind that gave them life.
It is the wind coming out of our mouths now that gives us life.
When this ceases to blow, we die.
In the skin at the tips of our fingers we see the trail of the wind;
It shows us where the wind blew when our ancestors were created.
~NAVAJO POEM

We come now to the gates opening to the dark half of the year. By the old Celtic reckoning, the last day of October marks "summer's end," known as Samhain, and the beginning of winter. It was a time of gathering the last harvest and bringing the animals down from the highland pastures to the safety of the valleys and stables. It was a time of lighting indoor fires to keep warm and to give courage in the growing darkness.

It was also the official beginning of the storytelling season. It was thought that the wood, as it crackled and popped, was releasing stories and one blessed with the gift of gazing into the fire could tell them.

Many of these stories were about strange or magical things that happen to ordinary people when they come into contact with 'other-worldly' beings. The fascination with ghosts, fairies and witches is clearly not just for children and harkens back to an ancient understanding that this is a 'thin time', when the veils between the worlds of the living and the dead, between ordinary world and the invisible world of spirit, can gaze at and feel one another.

Told by the light of day these stories would hardly be believed and few would take the time to listen. But spoken at night ..... around a fire .... even the most outrageous things become plausible.

Why? Because a story needs the darkness in order to light the inner fires of imagination. Darkness is mystery and some part of us is forever curious about things we don't understand. Some insight into these mysteries often occurs at liminal times, when things are "betwixt and between," neither here nor there, not one thing or another. A liminal time is a 'thin time' like the pre-dawn quickening just before sunrise or the sigh of silence just after sunset, a time neither truly night or day.

The Scottish have a lovely word for this light and it's feeling, it's called, the gloaming, and many stories tell of the surprising and unexpected things that happen then.

I am sitting on the warm, sunlit side of a red rock canyon, looking across into the dark maw of winter that grips the snow-covered, deeply shadowed side. An archetypal yin-yang symbol etched in the landscape, if I ever saw one. Wind whistles through the gap, a cold wind telling stories of winter and darkness coming all too soon. Higher up, the sun strikes the ridge and stains it with a red-orange stare, then a few minutes later sets behind the far mountain, instantly cold. The contrast is so sudden it leaves me breathless. The sky turns to juniper berry, the ephemeral color of twilight. A feeling of anticipation comes, for a state of grace just waiting to happen.

As I sit, I hear a sound that I cannot believe, a sound that was somehow masked by the light and noise of the day. It is the sound of crickets singing. Somehow, a few survived a week of snowstorms and night-time temperatures in the teens to sing this bright song in memory of another summer now gone. And yet......

It is Halloween.

Have you ever watched the light fade from the eyes of one who is dying? It happens just that fast; one minute they are here, and the next, they are so gone. But where ? Where do they go ?

This is a question that has haunted us for as long as we've called ourselves human, and one we all wrestle with at some very scary point in our lives. Halloween is the festival of collectively confronting this mystery. It is a festival of the felt sense that the dead, the ancestors, are still somehow with us and can communicate with us.

But what is it that they might tell us, from that place we are all so afraid to go?

Return to http://www.katesgaze.com/