The
Darkness Begins
“Winter
is the time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying
out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the
transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its
crucible.”
Katherine
May (Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, p.14;
Riverhead Books, New York, 2010)
It’s
easy to recognize October in Alabama. The sun comes up late and goes down early.
The mornings are cool and the afternoons hot. It’s a time of clear blue skies,
and bone-dry ground. My garden is spent for this year. Soon, I will cut it back,
cover it with pine straw, and wait for spring.
Autumn is the pause
between summer and winter, between manic activity and slowing down. We’re
heading into winter. Katherine May describes the season in her beautiful little
book, Wintering: “Doing those deeply unfashionable things—slowing down, letting
your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting—is a radical act now, but
it is essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to
shed a skin. If you do, you’ll expose all those painful nerve endings and feel
so raw that you’ll need to take care of yourself for a while. If you don’t,
then that skin will harden around you.”
October is liminal time,
a space between a scream and a yawn, when we take stock of where we’ve been,
where we are, and where we’re going. As the days shorten and darken, we try our
best to push winter off—to repel and deny its coming. But by the time Halloween
rolls around—and Halloween rolls around now by the first of October—we’re beginning
to feel the cold winds blowing down our necks. The inflated spiders come out, the
RIP headstones sprout form the ground, even though we’re still watering our
lawns and praying for another month of green. Our yards become display cases for the Hallmark version of Halloween—with skeletal remains strewn around and
cash flowing into the coffers of big-box stores for orange lights and eyes that
blink on and off in the dark. No longer the Christian version of Hallowmas,
when the devout honored their dead saints, we now party with candy and trick or
treats.
In the Gaelic traditions,
Samhain marked entry into the “dark half” of the year and was “celebrated with
bonfires and burning torches.” (May, p.56) Divined predictions of future love
and loss were made; by torchlight, one could see across the veil, which was
very thin at this threshold between seasons. Unfortunately, we’ve
sacrificed the holy and hallowed for the superficiality of lights and spray
webbing. Capitalism has prevailed.
It's time to take down our
books of ghost stories and gather the family for reading by the fire as the
darkness gathers around us. Let’s head into the dark-half of the year with our
eyes wide open, and with the ability to smile as well as scream. Maybe we can
simply leave all our negativity on the summer side of the veil and begin this new
year in the twilight of October. All Saints be hallowed, and all ghosts of past
hurts banished. Enter here with trust.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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