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.