Samhain as an act of remembering…
Samhain (Summer’s end) is upon us. We can deny it no longer. The dark half of the year is finding ways to really settle in our bones and ways of being. People are putting up Halloween decorations. The leaves are flying and whirling in the orange gold of autumn. The nights are drawing in and the earth getting colder (though maybe much less cold than in previous years, as the whole world heats up).
Samhain provides another one of those remembering times of the year, a time for resetting and recalibration of rhythms, of being more fully with an earth coming to rest. Blinds and curtains are drawn earlier. Words like cosy and warm have a different appeal. Stews and soups call much more definitively than salads and lite-bites. Increasingly, there is a draw to remembering what our ancestors did at times like this, and a pull towards our dead and otherworlds.
Imbolc: the return of the light
There is an old remembering that time was once kept not by clocks or calendars, but by light and land. By the slow breathing of the Earth. In the Celtic wheel of the year, the dark half and the light half face one another like twin lovers, meeting at the solstices. Between them lie the equinoxes, moments of balance, and between those again the liminal thresholds of cross-quarter days — the fire festivals — when something turns, quietly but irrevocably.