Hail Samhain! Hail Halloween! Hail Ancestors! Hail Our Beloveds! Hail Our Deceased!
‘Tis the season of our ancestors, those who walked this earth long before us and the ancestors who walked this world with us. Our grandparents, our parents, our children, our friends, our neighbors who have died and moved into the world of the Other are overtly present at this time. The veil between this world and the Otherworld is both diaphanous and can more easily be traversed in both directions now. Put on your mask1, open your door, open your heart, and allow those whom you have loved to visit. Look at their photographs. Pay them homage. Make offerings of their favorite food. Talk about their lives and loves. Re-member them in your being.
‘Tis the season of our mortality, for we cannot have this as the season of the ancestors without also looking at the fragility of our human existence.
Humans have a unique capacity for understanding our impermanence. During our childhoods we will meet with death, whether that of a pet or human member of our families. Perhaps you were very sick as a child and faced your own possible death at that young and tender age. When we are younger, we may experience death of siblings, teachers, friends, our parent’s friends, or our grandparents. Death will touch our lives when we are younger, in some form. Death will leave a lasting impression, a gaping wound, or a chasm which transforms or terrifies us, sometimes for decades.
Death walks alongside us our entire lives.
Our own death is our most faithful of companion in this life journey. More than our parents, lovers, children, or our dearest friends, our own death never leaves our side. Death is but a hair width, the millionth of a second, or one inhale away from us. At all times.
Yet, humans also have the capacity to distance themselves from this inescapable of realities. We fool ourselves that death is way in the future, years from the here and now. Death happens to other people, surely, not me, right? Even when we know we are going to die, there is still a level of distancing that occurs psychologically as a way of protecting our fragile ego. And I really hope death is in the distant future, for all of us, but it may not be. Your death may happen while you are reading this, or afterwards when you make a cup of tea. That’s how close death is. Your death, my death, or the death of a Beloved is pressing against our shoulder and brushing our cheek with her breath.
Human beings have created intricate thought patterns and systems to keep death away and as such we also limit our capacity to live, fully, now. We have two lives, the one we live before we realize we are going to die and the one we live when we fully embrace that fact that we will die. These are two very different lives. Most humans are living the first life, the life where we know we will die but it’s off somewhere in the corner of our psyche along with a few cobwebs and outdated situations for which we are still holding a false sense of shame. Keeping our mortality and our upcoming entrance into the great hall of ancestral fame at arm’s length limits our capacity to really embrace this earthly realm.
The second life is what I invite you to begin courting, intimately and quickly—today. There are two components to this invitation that have to be taken into deep consideration:
1. Your time on this planet is finite.
2. You do not know how long you have left on your clock.
In acknowledging the ancestors during this time period, cultures around the world have encouraged their people to face their mortality. Halloween did not start for the purpose of a national sugar high; it was born out of an old Irish tradition called Samhain (pronounced Sew-een). Samhain pays homage to the ancestors—in other words, other humans who have walked this earth and died. Some of those ancestors we will have personally known, some we may have even loved, and a vast a majority we will have never heard of. During Samhain masks were worn so that one could not tell if it was a living or deceased human who was walking alongside us. Doors were left unlocked. Food was prepared to welcome home those who had died. Turnips, not pumpkins were carved and lit to keep away the ancestors who may not have behaved so well, while alive. We will join the ancestral realm.
In the meantime, it is essential to remember we are in the land of the living. We can stand on the edge of the lake and inhale. We can choose to walk along the cool forest floor. We can choose right now to let go of thoughts, people and jobs that do not serve the deepest longings of our hearts. We get to choose to change, to loosen the grip of the past. We can choose a different life, right now. We can choose to begin. We can choose to stop. We can choose to focus on our dreams. We can choose to write our memoir, start the company, plant more trees, or slow—the—hell—down. Whatever you want to do—do it, now.
We are alive now—for now make every second count. Stop waiting for people to choose you. Stop waiting for people to see you, hear you, or walk alongside you. Start, here and now with one single step—the decision to not wait. Start, your people will find you, or they won’t, but you will have chosen yourself and in doing so, hopefully, you will be an inspirational ancestor.