the work of samhain

Today is Samhain, or Halloween, as it’s called by everyone else but us witches. The veil is thin, and it is time to deal with the dead. That means honoring them, working on healing any old relational wounds we still have with them, and asking them for help. As my beloved said to me this week, “Being a witch is a lot of work”. I’m particularly feeling that today. For the past few weeks I’ve been creating sugar skulls and for the past few days I’ve been creating tall votive candles with pictures of ancestors of spirit on them, all those who are our/my allies on the other side.

There are a lot of them, and the binder keeps expanding in which I keep copies of all the photos and pictures I have collected. Google images is an incredible resource! As I’ve made both skulls and candles, I’ve felt the spirits come closer, and not an hour goes by when a new name or face doesn’t emerge from the memory bank. We witches say, “What is remembered lives”, and this week, I am remembering back into life a whole passel of dead.

As I’ve been writing this, there have been two big disruptions. I had to solidify the date we plan a living wake for my friend Jeremy, and I had to pack up the sugar skull for my housemate to take to our mutual friend in the hospital who had a mastectomy today. I sent over a skull covered with pink ribbons to symbolize those on the other side who have died of breast cancer. I feel them working to keep Marika on this side of the veil.

Tonight I will dance in the Headlands, the hills looking down at the bay from the other side of the Golden Gate. I will dance with a small group of witches, holding jack-o-lanterns, in a ritual that my friend Macha has been part of creating for many many years. Names of the dead will be sung, and the beauty of this living earth will be felt.

Saturday night I will be part of putting on what we call “Dinner With the Dead”. The sugar skulls and candles will grace the tables, and people will bring food to share, food that either their dead and/or ancestors loved. We will toast to the memory of our dead, and feel them amongst us, whispering advice and encouraging us to toast the memory of this one and that one.

The following weekend I will be part of creating a living wake, celebrating the life of Jeremy, letting him know before he crosses over, what he has meant to his community. We also will introduce him to our dead on the other side, bringing pictures and asking for their help in welcoming him when he crosses over.

It’s Samhain, a time most of us Witches work hard. The alliance between the dead and the living is important. Remembering our dead helps keep the life force strong. Each year, as the Craft as grown, I’ve felt the spiritual part of this holiday gain strength in the overculture. More and more people who don’t call themselves witches are building altars and tuning into the power of remembering. It’s a lot of work, this being a witch. But what better work to be doing?

the veil gets thinner

As a child and teenager, death was part of a collective dream. It wasn’t up close and personal, but played on the screen of the black and white television and came in over the radio. I remember my second grade teacher tearfully telling us the president was dead and then watching Oswald being shot live/dead on the screen in my family’s living room. Many more of these kinds of deaths would follow, and nightly the news brought us images of the carnage of a distant war. Church bombings, casualties of war and assassinations of heroes were the backdrop of a childhood devoid of family funerals. Up until my twenties, I don’t think there was one funeral I attended.

My twenties seemed consumed by them. In my twenties, death came like an icepick. It hit hard and fast and it hurt. Bad. When I went off to college one of my new friends was raped and murdered. Before I was twenty three I would lose my father, my cousin who was also my best friend, and my grandmother. Death came quick by suicide, car crash, and stroke. These deaths came all within the span of three months, leaving me raw and reeling. I found solace in living on the coast of Oregon, and learned to know the rhythms of moon and tide. It was death that started my life as a witch.

In my thirties, death came slowly and insidiously. At thirty, I was finishing up graduate school in San Francisco and the mysterious illness that was killing gay men and I.V. drug users had finally gotten a name. Aids. Moving thru the city, it was impossible not to note an increasing number of bone thin men with lesions. Death began on the edges of my social circles, winding itself closer until I finally found myself as one of those surrounding a death bed of someone I loved. It was a time that people in their thirties watched many others of the same age go. Many of us of that age learned how to do the slow loving work of midwiving death, at the same time as learning to be with those who were giving birth. As it turns out, it truly is the same gate that we come in and go out of. By the time I turned forty, I had experienced the luminescence in the room that occurs when a baby is born and when a loved one dies.

Death pulled back in my forties. There were major life transitions and there were losses, but not from death.

The leaves are swirling in that particular way they do as Samhain approaches and the dead flow into the city. I’ve been preparing my molds for the sugar skulls, and I have all the makings for the frosting which will decorate them. I am fifty-two and I’m realizing that death will be a major player in this decade. Marla, Jan, and my aunt and uncle have all passed on since turning fifty. My mother and two other friends have cancer. More will probably have it by the end of this decade, and I’m pretty damn sure somebody I love will die from it. Besides the personal losses, it’s been since turning fifty that it feels like death is gathering up steam in the collective dream. The planes crashing into the towers and into the pentagon, the ever increasing deaths due to war, the earthquakes, tsunamis, Katrina, and the monks being killed in Burma, the deaths just keep mounting up.

I haven’t blogged in quite awhile. Some of it has been due to processing that I may soon lose someone I love, and some of it has been because of preparing to do Open Studios. In truth, it is because of both. I had a beloved Mexican papercut of a skeleton surrounded by animals that I wanted to give more life and that I wanted to make part of the show. I painted a juicy scene of a rainforest on which I was going to lay the papercut. After spending days painting, I went to take the papercut out and found it was glued to the paper behind it. No matter what I did, the life affirming scene would not and could not show thru. Several hours later, I found myself in my deck garden with two friends, hearing bad news about our mutual friend with cancer.

So, that’s how it’s going to be. I don’t think the piece will be in the show. It will however, be on my wall, reminding me that behind every death and every loss, there is a fragrant and wild jungle of possibility. Even if you can’t see it, it will be there. And in the making of this piece, the skeleton did change, and there is color and vibrancy where there was not before.

Let’s hope that’s true for how I feel when turning sixty.

This is going to be one heck of a Samhain.