Samain Thanksgiving Moon
Cattails. Seen them all my life. Used them as decorations. Never knew that if you press gently on the cats tail, the seeds surge out in a July 4th snake way. It’s amazing. If you haven’t experienced it, try it. Take a cattail, a mature one, and disturb the brown outer covering. You don’t have to use much force, about as much as required to get a fingernail into an orange skin, probably less. Kate discovered this after we harvested cattails for fall decor.
When the grandkids came up on Friday, I showed them the “cattail trick.” They loved it. So much so that they got Jon to take them out cattail hunting the next day.
As the sky begins to brighten over Black Mountain, this spinning Earth reminds me that after night comes the day. The gradual ratcheting down of temperature reminds me that spring follows the fallow time. The spiral nature of the days and months as they peel away from yesterday yet follow the path of the Great Wheel as they do, reminds me that mother earth preaches patience. Wait, and the season will change. Wait, and dark will become light. It is the message of the Tao. Follow the watercourse way.
Foci 1 Climate Change
More than any single cause this election laid bare the casual disregard both parties have given to these issues over the last 30 to 40 years. Clinton’s third-way moved the party farther from these bedrock issues. Obama tried, but after his first two years, the GOP became the party of obstruction, the party of no.
We have reached the end of another Celtic year. Summer’s End, Samain, marks both the end of the growing season, really, the harvest season and the beginning of a new year. Rosh Hashanah and the Gregorian New Year celebration on January 1st, like the Celtic New Year, put the marker down for a new trip around Sol either at the start of the fallow season or in its midst. In these three instances the New Year seems to suggest a season of reflection, of inner work, as the harvest ends or is well over, while fall and winter stretch ahead.
So, what does my celebration of the Great Wheel mean? I began thinking about the Great Wheel when I chose to embrace my Celtic ancestry: Welsh and Irish. This was when I began writing novels a millennia ago in the 1990’s. As Kate and I began to garden seriously, joining our lives to the seasonal rhythms of the earth and its weather, the Great Wheel began to live. Time became, as it has remained for me, a spiral, a turning and returning to Beltane and the start of the growing season, to Samain, Summer’s End, and the end of the harvest.
There is life and the spirit of the sun residing in every green thing on this planet. There is life and the spirit of the sun in every insect, mammal, protozoa, fish and flying creature. We are all more alike, much more, than we are different. Think of it. We share this planet, third from the sun, in the goldilocks zone. As living creatures on this one planet among billions of other solar systems, our home is a source of unity, a source of fellow feeling.
I now celebrate several distinct new years. The Jewish new year, just over, comes not long before the Celtic new year which begins on Samain eve, or All Hallow’s Eve, Halloween. The next one is the Western calendrical new year on January 1st and that is followed by the lunar Asian new year, which comes sometime in February. That’s at least four opportunities to assess the old year and make plans for the new one.
This fall season will end on Samain, the third of the three harvest holidays: Lughnasa, Mabon and Samain. The Celts began their new year with the end of the growing season, a last fruit’s festival, one marking the beginning of the fallow time. I like the specifically seasonal emphasis of Samain, tying the new year not to dogma or tradition or an arbitrary date like January 1, but to the cycle of life on earth, a cycle influenced by the sun.
Looked at Orion on the way up here this morning. He warms my heart like a familiar friend, a friend who comes for the season. I have greeted his return each autumn for 48 years. We first became acquainted during the 11-7 shift at Magnetic Cookware in Muncie, Indiana. I worked there as a security guard. When I see him in the southern sky, I smile.
No wonder, in a world lit only by fire, that the stars were the work of gods. We might think we know them better now, now that we can identify their chemistry, understand their age and locate them in a 3-D universe, but that’s only a material, physical way of knowing. Important in its way, yes. Perhaps even key to the future of human existence. Still, very different from that night beacon lighting the way to freedom for escaping slaves. And, very different from Orion as my friend and companion for 48 autumns and winters.
Speaking of seasons, this is not the silly season; it’s the Insane Clown Posse season. When a reactionary like Mike Pence gets kudos for a stable debate performance, the world has gone seriously out of whack. This is a guy who tried to abrogate the first amendment, destroy unions, and denigrates women. The only reason he looked less than totally unappealing is the comparison to his running mate, Donald the Hair Trump. OK, Kaine wasn’t much better, but, hey, these guys were picked as Vice-Presidential candidates for a reason. Whatever it was.
Yesterday was a reading day, getting up to speed on the middot (character trait) of watchfulness. The notion of Mussar is to take character traits like watchfulness, explicate them, then practice them. Literally. Mussar encourages taking a character trait like watchfulness, then working over the period of a month to manifest it in your life or raise your observance of it to a higher level. Watchfulness entails what a Jesuit might call examen. Paying attention to your behavior, becoming conscious of it rather than letting it flow by out of habit unnoticed, that’s the first part.
This conforms to Michaelmas as the springtime of the soul. Sadness is a way we consolidate past experiences and sort them out, learning from them and choosing which aspects of the past to embrace and which to let go. When our tears are over, we are cleansed and renewed, ready for the next phase of life. Autumn gives us an annual opportunity for self-renewal. This Great Wheel, natural cycle phenomena matches up exactly with Rosh Hashanah and its climax, Yom Kippur.
Black Mountain, which is covered in lodgepole pine and actually green as a result, has small gold flecks this morning. Those few aspen groves on its slopes have begun to turn, as have more and more aspens between here and Evergreen, but not those on our property. Too, Orion appeared in the southern sky a week or so ago, the early morning southern sky. On Shadow Mountain Orion and the changing of the aspens are true harbingers of autumn.