In a box marked "Halloween" many years ago, lie Baron Samedi, a skeletal man and woman dancing to mariachi on a Day of the Dead tin piece, a strand of pumpkin lights from the 99 Cent Store, an iron black-cat candle holder, and other items of death and darkness.
Blessed Samhain, I see on a friend's Facebook page. Samhain, the older holiday, way before there were K-marts, TVs, cheap store-bought costumes or Christianized culture. Samhain, summer's end, the onset of the dark, the Celtic new year. The time to celebrate the end of harvest, hunker down for the cold season, light a bonfire, toss an apple peel and contemplate our future, look back to connect with our ancestors.
Ancestors. Do they hover around in some sort of after-life? Or -- contrary to our narrow and linear view of Time -- does everything that ever existed or will exist actually take place all at once, giving us more access than we are disposed to admit we have to the beings who lived in the "past" and the "future"? Or are we simply not as separate and distinct as we like to think we are and other beings past, present and future live in us and flow through us? I wouldn't know. But I do know: "I can feel them."
More than that, I "talk" with them. They have helped me heal. They have come to me in my dreams with critical aid and information. My mother and I are terrific friends now, beginning a year or two after she died seven years ago. My father, 32 years later, still pops in, "Always standing behind my left shoulder, so real that I feel like if I turn around fast enough I would see him," a phrase I've wrapped in quotes because I remember my shock the day my mother said those words to me, when I had been experiencing the very same thing (right down to his being behind my left shoulder). My grandmother Dora, encouraging patience. My grandmother Helen, urging me to get up off my ass. My grandfather Louis, helping me find the balance between freedom and responsibility.
Did I make all this up? Sure, in the same way we make up everything about our life and our world. We choose our yarns, sit down together, and knit our own stories into the continuous fabric that we call History. Then we write about it and teach it as though History is some sort of standalone Fact. History is what we have created!! The strands that "were" knitted by my parents, by their parents as young immigrants, by their parents in their shtetls shops and fields, by their parents in the desert, their parents in slavery, their parents in caves and tents, all those strands are still here somewhere in my sweater. My sweater connects to your sweater. It connects to a Celt stirring an iron pot, an Iroquois sitting on the floor of a council tent, a lone archer stalking her food by moonlight, a poet contemplating his crossing of the river by the Brooklyn ferry. It connects to my great-grandchildren, to an action taken by someone a millenium from now that was set in motion by something I said or created or did -- some stitches I added -- this year.
I take the box, cross out Halloween and write: "Samhain". I will unwrap and pin up these invitations to my ancestors. And to yours. And to the future we are inventing. Come in, all of you, put your feet up, let's mingle.
A wonderful Samhain, full of mystery and wisdom and guidance and music and feasts of all kinds. May we all spend some months connecting with those who have passed over, and those who will come after, preparing alone and together to get it right as we invent our future.
