Living Tradition

Our family loves everything about the Halloween season. Learning that our dear friends do not celebrate the holiday made me take a closer look at why and how we tend to honor this time of year.

In the ancient Western world, the Celtic calendar was divided into the light half of the year, May 1st to October 31st, and the dark half of the year, November 1st to April 31st. Mind you, these dates are not exact as most of the old "holidays" were based on seasonal transitions and moon cycles rather than specific, rigid dates on a paper timekeeper. Further, the traditional activities absolutely followed real life seasonal tasks - harvest, preserving of the harvest, breeding and birthing of livestock, planting, and planning. Halloween falls at the beginning of a long season where most food plants go into dormancy in the Northern hemisphere. What you've managed to ripen and preserve is all your family can hope to get for several months.

Such was the reality of life before cheap energy and multinational corporations allowed us to expect tomatoes and bananas in January. This was the primary reason our family began consciously celebrating Halloween as a sacred season rather than just a candy bonanza. When we shifted our grocery shopping from big chain stores to local providers and our own garden, we became intimately aware of the Celtic halves of the year.

This is certainly not to imply that we find Halloween to be the first night of six months of deprivation and misery. Paradoxically, it is my undisputed favorite time of year, the time when I most feel a burgeoning hope. I love the rainbow of canned beets, beans, jellies, and sauces. My eyes feel so good traveling over the green, orange, brown, red, and tan of Winter squash - colors and shapes that words cannot adequately describe. Potatoes, onions, garlic, apples, beets, and rutabagas provide the base of all our winter meals. They mimic the glorious variation of our Autumn landscape before Winter snows disguise all the edges and gullies in a soft white blanket. The cold air seems to sharpen each smell until you can almost navigate from one single scent to the next. Variations in temperature are like the stroke of different hands against my cheek. To me, these are promises of long Winter nights spent reading and sewing and talking and laughing.

The tradition of dressing up in costumes for Halloween grew from the belief that during this shifting season, the veil between what is living and what has died is very thin. We are just starting to realize that the garden does not need tending, that everything that can be harvested has been, and nothing new will grow. It is the vulnerable time between the abundance of life and the composting of death. Those things that have died are still finding their way to the next stage. Halloween, or the older name Samhain, celebrants disguised themselves so that those dead spirits couldn't find them.

Some texts say they disguised themselves so that "evil" spirits couldn't find them. I guess I have a particular idea of evil - that it is anything that is supremely out-of-place. Sins are actions that, under other circumstances, have different connotations. Adultery = Sex with a culturally inappropriate partner in a culture that views marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Actually, there are a whole lot of other "sins" that are the act of intercourse with inappropriate partners but the act of intercourse in itself is considered sacred, that which ensures the continuation of life. One of the hardest things about being human is trying to pin down, in black and white, what is evil. There always seem to be exceptions to the rule. During this time of year, all spirits are transitioning. Essences only become good or evil through our human expression of them.

This review has prompted me to shift our Halloween costume tradition a bit. What if rather than hiding from the spirits we don't want to find us, we dress to invite the spirit we do want to welcome into our life? One year, Zoe dressed as Autumn and Rae dressed as The Little Teapot, short and stout. In the ancient Samhain context, we were saying, "Go away evil spirits, there is nothing to see here but some fallen leaves and an old kitchen kettle." How would you dress, advertise really, so the spirit of a beautiful painting would find you, to fill your imagination with such inspiration that you spent the entire Winter season pouring forth its expression? What do you most want to draw to yourself?

I'm going to have to work with this one a bit. I want terribly to live on our own land, to work with it and pass something full and mature and sustainable to my children and their children. If I just wanted land, I suppose I could dress as a real estate developer or property manager. But what I want is to be a steward. I want the land to grow and flourish and find a stable, self-regenerating expression under my care. I suppose this makes me servant of both land and my descendants. But I am no martyr. I love to be joyful, to taste, feel, and move in ways that are sensually pleasurable. And truth be told, I've a good streak of lazy - I could spend hours laying on a grassy hillside, letting the sun warm my body and the plants all around me until I can barely tell what is me and what is hillside.

I don't want just any land. We've owned and leased property before that I'm certain needed me to help heal itself. I was glad to do that but I am not looking for a wounded spirit that needs a healer so that it may move on to other purposes. I want land that will nurture and shelter generations of Logue Mathiases, giving and demanding that each person step up to the challenge of their own unique gift. I can imagine what that piece of land would look like. Now I just have to imagine what it wants me to look like!

I invite all of you to create a costume, a visual expression, that is a classified advertisement for what you want to draw into your life. My girls are getting this one as a homeschool assignment and we will get back to you later this week with our ideas.