Samhain \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Thanksgiving Moon<\/p>\n
A holiday, a holy day. \u00a0A festival. \u00a0Lights. \u00a0Gifts. \u00a0Banquets. \u00a0Feasts. \u00a0Holiseason, that long season from Samhain through Epiphany, includes so many. \u00a0We know why, those of us in temperate climates where the nights get longer and longer until the day fades into a few hours of weak, cold sun.<\/p>\n
And yet. The Winter Solstice, less than a month away now, celebrates what the other holidays bravely front with lights and smiles. \u00a0The darkness. \u00a0In the dark. \u00a0Afraid of the dark. \u00a0Blackness. \u00a0Dirt. Hecate. The Underworld. \u00a0Cerberus and Charon, Acheron and Lethe. \u00a0The awesome Stygian oath. \u00a0Death, not life. \u00a0Life is bright, daylight, sunshine. \u00a0Death is night, darkness, moonshine.<\/p>\n
My own nature tends toward the dark, a melancholic soul, its shores washed by rivers running through the underworld of the psyche. \u00a0I feel at home as the cold grows and the darkness become dominate. \u00a0This feels to me the way I imagine the beach must feel to those who love the sun. \u00a0A place to relax. To just be.<\/p>\n
What does a holiday really represent? \u00a0It is a memory, an anniversary of an idea, a placeholder with significance itself. \u00a0Christmas, with no known anchor in history, commemorates the Christian understanding of a monotheistic God assuming human form, an incarnation. \u00a0Thanksgiving has a generalized idea behind it, a combination of national solidarity, harvest festival and family gathering.<\/p>\n
A holiday may, too, identify an event that can occur on only that date. \u00a0July 4th is such a date, for instance, as are birthdays. \u00a0The Winter Solstice and all the solar holidays are such holidays. \u00a0But, taken from that perspective, they are astronomical facts, rather than religious moments in themselves.<\/p>\n
Over time though even such particular events accrue meaning. \u00a0Some of the meaning for solar holidays accrues due to their position in the larger astronomical reality of seasonal change. \u00a0So Spring equinox takes on the flavor of renewal, resurrection, rebirth. \u00a0The summer solstice the growing season and the fall equinox, the harvest.<\/p>\n
The Winter Solstice then takes part of its character from the cold, the dark, the bleakness of the fallow season. \u00a0In early farming cultures it also signified, in its end, the return of the sun and the gradual increase of light and warmth that promised another year of agricultural growth. \u00a0It has, perhaps peculiarly among the solar holidays, a distinctive dark aspect and a distinctive light aspect.<\/p>\n
It is its dark aspect that I celebrate. \u00a0It fits my more hermetic, introverted self. \u00a0There is, too, as I said above that melancholic stream acknowledged best in a holiday of the dark. \u00a0Meditation takes me down and inside my self, a time of quiet darkness, an intimate moment. \u00a0Darkness, too, is necessary to so many plants, bulbs and seeds alike, time to germinate, just as ideas sow themselves in the rich fields of the unconscious.<\/p>\n
It’s the best time of the year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Samhain \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Thanksgiving Moon A holiday, a holy day. \u00a0A festival. \u00a0Lights. \u00a0Gifts. \u00a0Banquets. \u00a0Feasts. \u00a0Holiseason, that long season from Samhain through Epiphany, … Continue reading Holidays<\/span>