Samain Healing Moon
Samain. The end of summer. The end of fall. The end of the growing season. The time of quiet and darkness and cold. Ushered in here on Shadow Mountain with 6 or 7 inches of wet snow. Welcome. Winter has come.
The veil thins. The always resonant link between the living and the dead thrums, pulses. A moment to consider those who have died, to remember them, celebrate their lives or appease their spirits. Most present to me right now are 11 lives ended in Pittsburgh, people I didn’t know, but with whom I share a spiritual connection. They left the living under circumstances so horrific as to be unimaginable, except, of course, circumstances also all too common here. All the horror this Halloween needs.
Samain is also the beginning of holiseason (though to be fair with my Jewish inflected life holiseason really begins on the first day of Tishrei with Rosh Hashanah.). This long dormant time causes humans affected by it to want gatherings, lights, gifts, bravery in the face of potential starvation. It is, as a result, peppered with holydays, days of family and friends and feasts, days that encourage both standing over against our fear of bleakness and ample opportunities to pause, reflect, and embrace it.
The wings of the angel of death hover, whirring. They brush the air past our souls. We feel it, a faint quiver. He is never far away, never at rest, never near the end of his duty. Murders, catastrophes like Tree of Life, Pulse, Columbine, 9/11 are not awful because people die. We all die. They are awful because these are lives ended too soon, with malice, through hatred and venality.
I prefer the wonderful Day of the Dead with its playful, joyous overtones. Like the Nayarit House in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts we all dine with our dead. On the day of the dead we remember that. At each shabbat service near the end kaddish is said for all those mourning a recent loss and for all those celebrating a yahrzeit, the anniversary of a death. In this sense each Jewish service is a rolling Dia de Muertos.
On this day, Samain, summer’s end, the season of vitality, growth, the season which replenishes those things we need to sustain life comes to a close for another cycle. As it does, we remember those whose vitality and presence shaped our own lives, just as later, after our deaths, others will remember us. I suppose this could sound grim, but I don’t experience it that way. I’m more of the Mexican, Latin American spirit in this regard.
However you experience it this is a day when memory underscores the unique value of each day, each moment. Ichi-go, Ichi-e. This time, right now, is once in a lifetime. Savor it, don’t gloss over it, don’t let worry blot out your attention. Happy Halloween.
The weather gods have chosen an apt offering for the last day of fall, 8 inches of snow. In true Colorado fashion it will probably be here tonight and tomorrow, gone by Thursday if not late Wednesday. Looking forward to it. A difference between Colorado and Minnesota exists in forecasting snow. Here in Colorado people pant for the snow, welcome it, do celebratory dances. In Minnesota, not so much. It means work and slick roads in the Gopher State; here snow means beauty, tourist dollars, and will be gone conveniently.
Astrology. Judaism has its weird side. Kabbalah, in particular. Turns out the kabbalist’s support astrology and if you follow the story of creation from a kabbalistic perspective, you can see why they might. At the shattering, the sharding of the divine light, ohr, pieces of divinity divided into minute pieces, atoms you might call them, and since then have created and recreated everything in the universe. That means that all things are connected, as part of the original attempt to create an undivided holy creation. In a sense it means that all things yearn for each other, to be rejoined, made whole again.
The concept of the north/south nodes has some connection to the past lives notion, which seems far fetched to me, but I got opened up a bit here, so I was listening. The idea is this: the south node is your default approach to life, the one, if you’re a past lives enthusiast, informed by the accretion of knowledge from other lives you’ve lived. It’s comfortable, effective, easy. But. Not growthful.
I remember MLK: “You can’t legislate feelings, but you can legislate behavior.” It was an admission that changing people’s hearts is work outside the realm of government, but within the public sphere, government’s appropriate responsibility, we can decide what behaviors we will tolerate and which we will not.
In its original manifestation the Feast of Fools served to highlight the norms governing public life by mocking them within a predetermined period of time. Leadership of the chaos went to one obviously unsuited, his actions expected to be unpredictable, coarse, even blasphemous. When the party ended, all went back to normal. The king was in charge, louts were not. And, the difference between the two had been made visible. Rule by louts harms everyone.
When I say we are not a nation that does these things, I do not mean they will never happen. Hardly. I mean we recognize them for what they are, behavior not tolerated. We need to push these people back into their Klan Klosets, push them back into places from which they can grumble, but not rumble.
Kate and I got coffee, sat down at our beetle-kill pine dining table, cracked open the mailers from the state of Colorado, and voted. Not a complicated ballot in terms of candidates, though the retention questions for judges left us both scratching our heads. Guess which way we voted? Blue wave, blue wave, blue wave. At least two water particles added.
Then there were two that make creating both federal and state legislative districts non-partisan. Like campaign funding gerrymandering is currently a cancer in our democracy, both in their own way as serious as the orange tumor in our body politic. Voting yes.
Colorado continues to be a strange political environment to this native Midwesterner. The libertarian streak in all American politics colors issues with a let me alone and don’t make me pay swoosh, here it’s a swoosh often as big as the entire running shoe. That can drive electoral decisions. There’s also the even more dramatic than in most states divide between the liberal Front Range and the remainder of Colorado. Rural and mountain Coloradans often complain that their views are ignored. True, too, to some extent. The rural vote is often reflexively against candidates and ballot measures that seem to reflect Front Range values.
Well pump dead a couple of hundred feet under the surface. It will cost about the same as I’m projecting Kate’s hospital co-payments. Oh, joy. Right now I’m feeling beat down, labile.
Then the pump. It labors on our behalf, in the dark, responding when the pressure tank calls for water to keep the house supplied toilets, showers, faucets, hoses, dish and clothes washers. The pump is most of the expense, this one coming in at $1,500. Other matters are metal sleeves for the new pump, new wiring, since the 1991 code requires all wells to have a ground and ours went down in 1982, and, of course, the men and the truck.
Sometimes. Piling on. You’ve heard of it, right? Jumping on the quarterback or wide receiver or tail back with more big bodies after they’re already down, stopped. Well, SeoAh telling me last night that there was a water problem. Piling on. For a reason I do not understand we have no water. In the whole house. Of course, this happened at 8 pm, after I’d already taken my thc and had a long, fruitful, but exhausting day. Just. Couldn’t. Deal.
At 7 am I’m going to call Herb Swindler of H2 Plumbing. Herb, oddly enough, lived in Ramsey, Minnesota, less than 10 miles from our house in Andover. It may not be a problem he can fix, if it’s the pump, but I want to rule out some simple explanation inside the house first.
Finally figured out my life over the last three weeks or so. I’ve been telling people I haven’t been anxious. And, I haven’t been. Thank you, years of Jungian analysis, existentialism, Taoism, the Great Wheel, and each of you out there. But. I have been stressed. Unable to focus. Tired. Responding to new threats. Did I mention tired? In spite of adequate sleep and decent nutrition.
Somehow this makes me feel better, validates learning I hoped had sunk in deep. Reminded me a bit of “living in the move” which Kate and I tried to do while preparing for and executing our move out here to the Rockies, for the most part successfully.