"Past Desire, Hope or Change, I Rest in You, A Seed" (1994)
The air has a fragile, and Magical, quality at this time of year, and particularly on this collection of Last Harvest Festival/Going into the Dark days. Samhain, Dia de Los Muertos. Even though Halloween has reduced the sanctity of this day, honored and celebrated across millenia and across many human cultures, to a highly commercial party, still, there is some felt spirit of a hidden sacredness, a specialness about these days even among the most unimaginative of souls.
The Witches New Year, November 1st, has always seemed to me a different way of looking at the beginning of a new year, a new cycle. The traditional placement of the New Year is at the Winter Solstice. Yes, the return of the Sun does seem a most appropriate beginning.......... the Sun/Son is born again, the adored Child is born. But........... this time of Ending, of the Going into the Darkness of winter also has its own kind of sanctity and appropriateness, depending on one's perspective.
It is the beginning of the great Rest cycle, the return to the great Underground Realm our various ancestors conceived of throughout many times and cultures. The Realm of Hecate, Hella, Maat, Ereshkigal, Fra Holle, Hades, Pluto, Anubis, Cerridwen.......... and so on. And going even farther back, to a time before humans even had names to personify their deities, going back to the Caves "of forgotten dreams", they believed they were going back into the generative, mysterious, incubation of Mother Earth's Womb. They saw that all life seemed to return there, after summer's explosion, returning to rest, returning to ultimately be reborn.
So, from that perspective, perhaps this time of "going into the Dark" might be seen as a true beginning, because it is a time of listening, listening and awaiting conception that has not yet arrived, at the Roots, at the Roots, at the Roots.
https://youtu.be/s0t6mws2vgY?si=v8-BQns5xV1C4GiC
