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So, if I read correctly, the time we call Halloween these days was the start of a new year for my Celtic ancestors. Much like the Semites from whom many of us later appropriated a faith tradition, they began the day with night, at sundown. And apparently they began a year with what they saw as its darker half; winter was starting.
This new year's eve was also a thin place in time. It was believed those who'd gone to the next life could visit back. May any ghosts who turn up at your door bring remembrances more sweet--maybe with a tang of sadness felt by most of us who live in time--than haunting.
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May I just start out by saying I was born three weeks late? That's all the excuse I have for just now writing about the summer solstice, which we celebrated roughly a month go.
That's the time when we've pulled up as close to Sol as we're going to this year, and we're ready to head back the other way from how we came. Why the other way? Why not just slingshot back to the far side of the sun? Aside from that's just not how orbits, in space or otherwise, work, that's not how life on earth works. In our elliptical training through the seasons, we can't, and shouldn't, unlearn what we've learned. When we're a pale, vivid and slightly prickly green, we need to be brought along, raised up, watered and given light. There are as many directions we can head in then as there are colors the rising light breaks into on morning dew, in all the fields and not-yet-leaved branches of early spring flowers. Later, when the heat is on, we rise to it. And it's during those times that the true colors we'll show, when we're a little more on our own, are forming. When the light that helped bring us into being is no longer right in our eyes. The fire has been lit from within, and in time shows itself like branches aflame on a crisp autumn afternoon. Blessed be. Here in the District of Columbia, we've been having a chilly May. This in a city known for starting summer in April. It's almost as though something just isn't ready. Like the extended summer of 1983. Well into October, still quite warm. Something about the Jet Stream being stuck -- prompting a coworker at our university library to say, "Somebody go up there and unstick it!" If only getting unstuck and able to "move on" were that simple. If only we could always feel we had done what we needed to in the current situation before it changed. I'm not sure we're supposed to finish entirely before stepping toward the next level. Maybe life is meant to be more dynamic than that. On the other hand, need every year, or every person, proceed at the same rate, in the same way? Surely, life has more room than that. |