Monday, October 31, 2016

Samhain, again

I have spent, in the basest sense of that word, hours
of my God-given life working on a document required of teachers here in Jersey.
That I do these things speaks to a cultural insanity, and mine as well.


And here it is a year later, and I'm doing it again.



Do ghosts "exist"?

I've lived  long enough to know that they don't.
I've lived long enough to know that they do.

That odd, inexplicable events happen, and happen daily, is evident to anyone paying attention. The shame is that so few of us are paying attention to the natural world, we miss the rhythms and the mysteries that  envelop our modern minds every moment.


Tomorrow is All Saints Day, to celebrate the sanctified among us, as though following some moral order could save us from the coming dark, a world in which wasp larvae eat hornworms alive, from the inside out, and humans die monstrous deaths lying in ICUs with multiple tubes pierced into the body, hoping that like St. Sebastian, we will miraculously recover.



If you need a video to be convinced ghosts exist, you don't truly know what it means to know that the dead are among us.

The question of ghosts is not an idle one. We follow spirits of our own making all the time. We follow rules and rhythms of our own making now, wrapping ourselves in a sad cocoon of  hubris, wiling away our hours fulfilling nothing more than deadlines upon deadlines without a hint of irony.


I'm headed out to a mudflat in an hour or so, under a wet and wild early winter sky, to rake up a few clams, alive as I am, and as alive as I am, I will be as dead as those clams will be tonight in less than a lifetime.




Until you believe in the ghost you will be, you cannot truly live.
Originally posted 2 years ago. I like rhythms.







1 comment:

Kate T said...

Another turn in the wheel of the year, and today I can see the ghosts of the old ones - hear the rustling in the leaves. My students seem so young and I feel so old today.
But all things must pass and the darkness will turn to light as we reach for Imbolc - until then I will follow my urge to gather those I love about me, eat food together, drink, tell stories, keep the old ones alive with our tales of their lives, their faces - and watch my own daughters grow into women who sense the turning of the year. The Irish witch is strong in each of them - different in each of them. Amazing to see.
Happy Samhain - stay warm. Tell the stories.