Fall Closing Moon
Fall is in its last days. Samain comes on Friday. The seasons of the year that speak most directly to my soul arrive back to back. Samain, then Winter. Guess that tells you what it’s like to live inside my skin.
The sky today glowered over the landscape, a November sky ahead of its month. It felt like a homecoming to me.
A long while back I chose to identify the period from Samain to Epiphany, as holiseason. It’s a whole season of special holidays, moments and weather. They are distinct, yes, from Diwali to Kwanzaa, Posada to Hanukkah, Christmas to the Winter Solstice, Thanksgiving to New Years, Samain to Epiphany, but their proximity, their charged valence in their particular cultures adds up not in simple sums, but in layered complexity.
Put, for example, Samain’s celebration of the thinning of the veil between this world and the Otherworld in dialogue with the holiday of gratitude and family we call Thanksgiving. To do so reminds me of a small object in the art of the Americas collection at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Nayarit house.
This is a tomb object, excavated from a ninety foot deep shaft grave made by the Nayarit culture of what is now western Mexico. We have little firm information about this object but we can infer from its presence in a tomb that it might convey something about life and death.
It contains groups of people, probably relatives of the deceased, eating and drinking with each other. As groups of kids investigate this ceramic object made between 300 BCE and 400 ACE, they usually conclude that the group above is living and the group below the ancestors. The key thing they also note is that they are eating and drinking together.
Of course this brings up the Mexican celebration known as the day of the dead, also a holiday in holiseason. It could be seen as the living generation celebrating Thanksgiving with each other, yet intimately connected to their ancestors, who carry on their own celebration, one we acknowledge at Samain. Or, one we might acknowledge at Samain if we took seriously the Celtic imagery of the veil between the worlds grown thin, a very similar idea to the one celebrated throughout Latin America, but especially in Mexico as the Day of the Dead.
The most mythic and sacred period of the year approaches. I’m excited about it.
