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.

Samhain 2019

I'm getting ready for my annual "Feast of Samhain", and as I do I remember all of those I've loved, all the people who are invited in spirit to the Feast, all the people who have given me my life and its experiences, and all those, whose names are lost yet live inside our blood and our genes, all of those who came before us to bring us here, in this time, in this moment.   

 

 Walking, I am listening.   Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the fruit of the love and labor of  thousands.
 
-Linda Hogan*

As always,  I grouse at the loss of  the sanctity of "Hallowed Eve" replaced with scary ghosts - although, costume balls and trick or treating is something I remember with a lot of affection.  But.... Witches on brooms!  Hah!  The meaning of the broom was an ancient folk tradition of "sweeping away the Bad", sweeping out of the house the bad energies, evil spirits, and illness.  And the ghosts...........well, that's what the Feast, like Dia de los Muertos, made very memorable Tucson's All Souls Procession, is all about:  inviting the Beloved Dead to the party, setting the place of honor at the head of the table for them, drinking their favorite wine and preparing their favorite dishes, and lovingly telling their stories, jokes, and singing their songs. Mexicans often set up their celebrations in graveyards.

Among those I remember are my mother, father, grandparents,  my brother Glenn, and my two oldest friends, Joanna Brouk the composer and Felicia Miller, poet and writer.  I so often think of them wondering how it's possible I have out lived them.   Abby Willowroot, Priestess of the Goddess and creator of the Goddess 2000 Project, and Jeff Rosenbaum, a prime creator of the Starwood Festival and A.C.E.  Nanci Nelson, a friend in a time of need, and Norman Rogers, a faithless yet memorable lover. 

And my good friend Charlie Spillar, who left us just this month.  And so many more...............Thank you, all, for gracing my life.  Come to the Feast all!

"The Sixth Extinction"

And I remember all of those fellow Beings who are leaving and have been lost to us, the Extinct and Vanishing Species, in this terrible time of loss, the Sixth Extinction.  May they not be forgotten.  The litany is long, and grows longer every day.

I always leave Pomegranates for Persephone on my Alter.  Every  year this time I remember a poem I wrote for Persephone that I still love, that is perhaps about the Feast of Samhain as well.  
        

"Persephone"

PERSEPHONE'S  FEAST  DAY

When all the names are gone
when there is nothing left
for memory to feed upon
November hides
an unborn  promise.

All the wastes of love and time
Become, at last, alchemy.
To ferment their healing, here
in these nigrado depths,
becoming  albedo,
the medicine.

    I offer now bread, red fruit, red wine.
    To life.

To the harvest that was,
the  kisses of summer past
fragrant  as  petals on the wind,
 to the poet and the bard, the mother  and husband,
laughter of children, the confidence
of  bountiful fortune.

And to those outcast as well -
the inarticulate, the lost,  the hungry  and fallen.
To every transparent lover
wandering these bardos in their solitude.

To age and youth, light and dark,
Tenderly entwined in their embrace:

Come to the table, all.

Here is a rich conversation
harvested from the last living garden.
A dappled pear, an apple, a ripe pomegranate
A butterfly in its chrysalis, sleeping.

The slow rebirth of color
    deep in the depths of this dream.

The sundial will circle once more,
The wheat has new life in it yet.

    The blessing will be given.

BLESSED SAMHAIN TO ALL!