The Feast of Samhain

I've hosted The Feast of Samhain/Day of the Dead for 15 years (except for Covid)!  Hard to imagine it's been that long, but Samhain is a liminal time between the worlds......so time itself is relative then.  We've done so with a potluck feast, wine and ale, sometimes mead,  lots of pumpkins, pomogranates, and an Altar that I and Guests made for our Beloved Dead.  And we remember, and celebrate them, with the many stories friends have told of those they remember, and what they did, and what they loved.  I pulled out a lot of poems over the years, and for me at least, the PARTING GLASS became the Theme Song.  

 

The long table is set with flowers, and illumination is only from candles.  The Altar has many photographs of those we remember and invite to the Feast.

      What is remembered lives.

 Always the place of honor is set at the head of the Table for the Beloved Dead, with the best of the Feast and the best of the Wine. 

 

 Names are written on papers on the Altar:  the following day I burn those papers, so that they may carry the message of love and remembrance to those who have left this world. 

 

I regret that this year for the first time (except for 2020 and Covid) I will not be holding the Feast of Samhain: 

 it's my hope that next year will see it again, illuminated by  Spirit, Memory, love and candles.  My gratitude to all who shared it with me.

"So fill to me the Parting Glass, Good Night, and Joy be to you all."

Poems for the Day of the Dead

Florence on horse, Griffith Park, 1928

 Girl and Horse, 1928

by Margaret Atwood

You are younger than I am,

you are someone I never knew
you stand under a tree
your face half-shadowed,
Holding the horse by its bridle.

Why do you smile? Can’t you
See the apple blossoms falling around
You, snow, sun, snow,
listen, the tree dries
and is being burnt, the wind

Is bending your body,
your face ripples like water
Where did you go?

But no, you stand there
exactly the same,
you can’t hear me,

forty years ago you were caught by light
And fixed in that secret place
where we live, where we believe
nothing can change, grow older.

(On the other side
of the picture, the instant
is over, the shadow
of the tree has moved. )

You wave,
then turn and ride
out of sight through the vanished
orchard, still smiling

(as though you do not notice)

GHOSTS

Where do the dead go?

The dead that are not cosmetically renewed

and boxed, their faces familiar and serene.

Or brought to an essence, pale ashes in elegant canisters.

I ask for the other dead:

those ghosts that wander

unshriven among our sleep,

haunting the borderlands of our lives.

The dead dreams,

The failed loves.

The quests, undertaken with full courage

and paid for in blood

that never found a dragon, a Grail, a noble ordeal

and the Hero's sacred journey home.

Instead, the wrong fork was somehow taken, or the road

wandered aimlessly, finally narrowing

to a tangled gully

and the Hero was lost, in the gray and prosaic rain,

hungry, weary, to finally stop somewhere, anywhere

glad of bread, a fire, a little companionship.

Where is their graveyard?

Were they mourned?

Did we hold a wake,

bear flowers, eulogize their bright efforts

their brave hopes

and commemorate their loss with honor?

A poem?

An imperishable stone to mark their passing?

Did we give them back to the Earth

to nourish saplings yet to flower,

the unborn ones?

Or were they left to wander

in some unseen Bardo, unreleased, ungrieved.

Did we turn our backs on them unknowing,

            their voices calling, whispering impotently

            behind us

            shadowing our steps?

                  Lauren Raine   1997

Sometimes a man stands up during supper

and walks outdoors, 

and keeps on walking

because of a church 

that stands somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him
as if he were dead.

And another man,

 who remains inside his own house,
stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,

so that his children have to go

far out into the world

toward that same church,
which he forgot.

Rainier Maria Rilke (Translated by Robert Bly)

         On Meeting Shari After 22 Years

I see your  father's  gesture
(how is it possible, to remember him, after all these years?)
yet there it is renewed, a play of shadow and light
 flickering across your face.

You were a Milagro
that inhabited me

for a little while 
and then grew on without me.

What shall I call this door,
opening today between our lives?

Multitudes have passed this way. 

For that moment
I see them in your eyes,
then I pay the bill, finish coffee,
and descend into the subway, waving goodbye.

How can I tell you
that I am casting my love
like a daisy with petals partly plucked,
a firefall of dandelion seed
into the wind
into the world

as you must do as well

Lauren Raine (1990)

Flora with Florence (1917)

old photos,

escaping a tin box:

They are stories with wings

 butterflies, or white moths

fluttering at the glass,

ephemeral, half-glimpsed stories

lighter than air, 

these unknown memories

quietly escaping,
through 

an open window

Florence at 92

Hecate

  

Samhain (And the Day of the Dead)

"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

Samhain Celebration

And here it is again,  the Approach of Samhain, also celebrated here in Tucson as Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead.  As always, I make up the Beloved Dead Altar .  I make up invites to the Feast of Samhain and make a great big lemon cake, which gets frozen, along with enough vegetarian chili to feed an army. I try to figure out where to get a turkey to bake.   I ask people to bring different things and hope that we don't end up with 20 casseroles.  I play "The Parting Glass" (the theme song) to get myself in the mood.  I buy a lot of candles.

Mostly, though, I remember those on the list, the list that gets longer every year.  So many now that I am in my 70's, so many memories, so many ghosts.  People, animals,  places.  How strange, to be old enough that places as well can be gone........... and I think beyond that as well, thinking about the Shrine for the Lost:  The Sixth Extinction I made last year,  how painful that was to see those long, long lists of recently extinct and vanishing species.  

There is such a poignant, numinous, bitter/sweet quality to October, to the Going Into the Dark time of Samhain.  Everyone feels it I like to think, for all that the sanctity of this time has been so sadly commercialized and trivialized with Halloween and "trick or treat".  

I always include pomogranates along with the pumpkins on my altar, to remember that this is also Persephone's Feast Day,  when that liminal Goddess returns to the Underworld, no longer the Queen of Spring but rather now the Queen of the Dead, the place of endings that become again beginnings.  The important underground realm that comes with the sacred night of Hallowed Eve, the realm where life goes into the Womb of the Earth to rest, to regenerate, to heal and sleep, to await new life in the spring.

Remembrance for Samhain

My mother and my brother used to sit together to watch the sun set here. 
  They are gone, but I remain.

So on this time of the "thinning of the veils" I create this very personal  post, in which I remember some of my own Beloved Dead.  I will join a few others on the night of November 1st to eat, drink and remember the Beloved Dead around a little fire pit this year, and I have my "list" of those I wish to remember on the Feast of Samhain altar I made.  As I get older the list gets longer, and the need to praise them becomes more important, more poignant.

“Grief expressed out loud for someone we have lost, or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them. Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.”

                     ― Martin Prechtel, The Smell of Rain on Dust

Amy Sefton - who created "Madam Ovary", brilliant performer and artist,  one of the kindest  and most generous souls to walk the earth, kind to me in my often fiery chaos.  I wish, Amy, I had had a chance to say goodbye.  May we meet again in green summer, when the pipes are playing and the banners flying, wearing our best bodices.  

Jeaneen Vogal Ph.D.   - you turned up in my life, a psychologist and a friend, when I needed someone desperately  to talk to and work with to unravel my family history.  You  turned up like an angel and offered me talk, tea, appreciation for my art, therapy I never could have afforded in exchange for what I could offer, my art.  You gave insight into so many things.  Even a couch to sleep on when I had no where else to go, and no one to tell my stories to.  Thank you so much, Jeaneen, for a healing hand in the dark.  

Charles Spillar.  Friend to so many, community organizer, supporter of the arts, helper of artists and of veterans,  preserver of the Valley of the Moon - my friend too.

Joanna Brouk,  my  oldest friend from the halcyon days of our youth in Berkeley.  One of the first, and finest, synthesizer composers, lost and then found again when we were
 much older, always missed.

Abby Willowroot, founder of the Goddess 2000 Project, an artist who brought images of the Goddess to thousands, and organized a community Arts Project that did, indeed, as she said:  "Make a Goddess on every block".  We travelled to Bali  together.   She inspired so many, although she was not always an easy woman to know.

My brother, Glenn.  So intelligent and sensitive, 
so overwhelmed by the harshness of the world.

Carol Christ,  a truly Great voice for the arising of the Goddess in our time. 

 Missed by so very many, although her work will remain to speak eloquently that which must be spoken of.

Frank Barney,  Creator and Co-Creator of Brushwood Folklore Center - a beautiful piece of land and forest that houses a Center that has brought together thousands of people over the years in Celebration of nature, ritual, music, Magic, and Fellowship.  A true Home for me over the years and the many blessed summers I spent there.  I can't praise Frank enough for his kindness, vision, and love of people and the land.

Ursula Kroeber Leguin,  mentor and muse, her words and her worlds
will linger with me and inform me until the day I die. 

Jeff Rosenbaum,  Creator and Co-Creator of Starwood Festival, the biggest
Pagan festival  on the East Coast.  He believed in me, when I didn't, a great gift.  May the
 Starwood Bonfire burn bright for you,  every year, continuing your legacy, Jeff!

 

"Mr. Grey", the noble and ever mysterious "Guard Kitty".  He was killed in the spring,  and I always miss him.    May you run free, old friend, catching many mice in that great Hunting Ground where noble and brave cats go.

______________________________________________________________

and, of course,  I thought of this song by Jackson Browne.  We are all Dancers...........

Dia de los Muertos! A Presence in the Southwest!

It's that time again!  Día de los Muertos  approaches with celebrations beginning on November 1, (Día de Muertos Chiquitos--The Day of the Little Dead) ( also All Saints Day) and continuing on November 2, (All Souls Day). It is a joyous occasion when the memory of ancestors and the continuity of life is celebrated, and a beloved holiday in Mexico and South America.  It's celebrated in Tucson with a famous parade and festivities that go on late into the night......although, I am not sure it will be so this year with Covid still rampant in Arizona.

I love the vibrant color (and humor)  of Mexican culture and art, and in the Celebration of Dia de los Muertos it becomes most flamboyant.  It is a celebration, praise, for those who are no longer with us, and they are loved and remembered in the best way possible:  with a party to which they are invited, in fact, to which they are the Guests of Honor.  To me, the richeness of the art and the flowers and the offerings of food are all about the richness of life, and the richness of having been given life, and shared life, with those who came before us.  

Tucson's "All Souls Procession"

Like the Celtic traditions of Samhain, which were also associated with the end of the year and the last harvest festival, it was believed that at this time of the year the souls of the departed can return to visit the living (the "veils are thin"). It is not a time of mourning since, as the Latin saying goes, "the path back to the living world must not be made slippery by tears".


Celebrations for the dead originated in indigenous Mexico before the Spanish conquest. Following the Spanish conquest of Mexico during the 16th century there was a blending of indigenous customs with the new Catholic religion. All Saints' Day and All Hallows Eve (Halloween) roughly coincided with the preexisting Día de Los Muertos resulting in the present day event. Although the skeleton is a strong symbol for both contemporary Halloween and los Días de Los Muertos, the meaning is very different. For Días de Los Muertos the skeleton is not a scary or macabre symbol at all, but rather represents the dead playfully mimicking the living.

Very often, a large community altar may include many small personal shrines, such as the one below that includes Frieda Kahlo.

Or here are some personal shrines made by artists:

Preparation begins weeks in advance when statues, candies, breads and other items to please the departed are sold in markets. A sweet bread, pan de muerto, with decorations representing bones is very popular, as are sugar skulls made from casts. All sorts of art objects and toys are created. This gives the economy a boost in much the same way as our Christmas season does. Alters ofrecetas (offerings) are set up in the home with offerings of sweets and fruits, corn and vegetables, as well as the favorite foods and beverages of the deceased. It's not unusual to see a good cigar and whiskey bottle beside a photograph of a loved one. These offerings may later be given away or consumed by the living after their "essence", and the loving remembrance, has been enjoyed by the dead. Marigolds are the traditional decorative flower.

The particulars of the celebration vary widely. On November 1, Día de Muertos Chiquitos, the departed children are remembered. The evening is sometimes called la Noche de Duelo, The Night of Mourning, marked by a candlelight procession to the cemetery. On November 2, Día de los Muertos, the spirits of the dead return. Entire families visit the graves of their ancestors, bringing favorite foods and alcoholic beverages as offerings to the deceased as well as a picnic lunch for themselves. Traditionally there is a feast in the early morning hours of November 2nd although many now celebrate with an evening meal.

There are sugar skulls and toys for the children, emphasizing early on that death is a part of the life cycle, and the importance of remembering those who have passed on to another kind of life.