Happy Lammas

Friday Ramble - Lammas (Lugnasadh)

Here we are on the last day of July, and the eve of Lammas,sometimes called Lughnsadh, Lúnasa, Calan Awst, "First Harvest" or "Loaf Mass". The festival celebrates summer, farming and harvesting, particularly the gathering, milling and putting by of grains and cereals.

Humans have gathered and consumed grains and cereals since Neolithic times, and the beginning of domestic grain cultivation is an important moment in our evolution. It marks the transition from an ancient, nomadic lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of farming and settlement. Sickles, sheaves, stooks, mill wheels and grinding stones are common motifs in almost every culture on island earth.

Gods and goddesses? Oh yes, our festival has a throng of harvest gods: Lugh, Tammuz, Osiris, Adonis and Attis to name a few. Then there is Dionysus or Bacchus -  the grapey god is in a class all by himself, deity of vineyards and harvesting, wine making, drunken revelry and ritual madness.  He stands at the gate between summer and autumn, and his magical tavern with its ever turning mill wheel and rapture inducing brews is the stuff of legend. According to folk tales, its doorway can be entered from any street in the great wide world if one is in the right frame of mind and receptive to the alluring tug of the wild, the intoxicating and ecstatic.

In the ninth century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, August 1st was called "the feast of first fruits", and the occasion also marked the end of the hay gathering that had begun at Midsummer (June 21st). Loaves of bread were baked with freshly milled grain and placed on church altars. After they were blessed, the loaves were used in simple charms and rustic enchantments. 

At Lammas, tenant farmers paid an allotment of grain to their landlords as rent, and a tithe (one tenth of a farm's yield) was given to the local church. Farmers delivered their portion to parish tithe barns, and a number of the elegant timber, brick and stone structures survive today. The oldest standing tithe barn in existence is one in Essex erected by the Knights Templar in the early thirteenth century. Analysis of its timbers has yielded a date for them of circa 220. 

Tim Powers' novel The Drawing of the Dark always comes to mind around this time of year. The book is full of harvest and brewing metaphors, and it has a cast of fabulous characters including King Arthur (reborn as an Irish mercenary named Brian Duffy), the wizard Merlin and the Fisher King. Dionysus and his magical tavern put in an appearance. So do the woodland god Pan, Gambrinus (mythical brew master), Finn MacCool, the Morrigan, Guinevere, Morgan le Fay, Odin, Thor and Hercules. There's a shipload of Vikings sworn to defend the ancient brewery at the heart of the story and stave off Ragnarok, and there are other mythical creatures too numerous to mention. I usually reread the novel again around Lammas, and I am about to do so. 

The first day of August marked the beginning of the harvest for the ancients, but it also marked summer's end in some cultures, and so it is for moderns. Days are still blisteringly hot for the most part, but mornings and evenings are often cooler. Some mornings, Beau and I find fallen leaves in the birdbath when we go out, and the air is filled with the splendid whiff of herbs going to seed in the garden. There are still many warm and sunny weeks before us, and it is difficult to believe that summer is waning, but it is doing just that. Our days are growing shorter, and autumn is not far off. 

We've come a long way from our early "hunting and gathering" days, but traces of old seasonal rites remain here and there. When I arrived in Lanark county years ago, I was delighted to learn that Lammas festivities are alive and well in the eastern Ontario highlands. They are called céilidhs or "field parties", and the attendees are unaware of their origins for the most part, but all the festival trappings are there: bonfires, corn, grilled munchies and fresh baked bread, wine and beer, music, storytelling, dancing, parades by lantern light and merrymaking in abundance. Once in a while, there is even a ritual or formal harvest observance. Blessed be.

Happy Midsummer/Litha

Happy Litha/Midsummer! This is the longest day of the year. After today, sunlight hours will wane until Yule (also called Midwinter or the Winter Solstice) in late December.

Cherish this golden day in the heart of the year! Be outside at sunrise and watch the sun come up - capture the moment with your camera or cell phone. Sip a mug of sunchoke tea in your garden as the sun rises and drink in the rising light.

Make a sun wheel or sun mandala out of flowers. Arrange sunflowers in a vase and place it in a prominent place your home. Put a pot of something sunny and golden on your threshold. Mums? Marigolds?

Float a wreath of wildflowers on a pond or river and watch the current carry your offering away. Build a fire on your favorite beach after darkness falls and and toast sweet "stuff" in the dancing flames.

May all good things come to you on this longest day of the year!

Litha (Midsummer) Thoughts

Here we are, just a day or so away from Midsummer or the Summer Solstice. Tomorrow night is the eve of Litha, and the following day (Sunday, June 21st) is the longest day of the calendar year, the Sun poised at its zenith or highest point and seeming to stand still for a fleeting interval before starting down the long slippery slope toward autumn, and beyond that to winter. Actually it is we who are in motion and not the magnificent star at the center of our universe. Helios stays right where he is.

This morning's image was taken near the front gate of our Two Hundred Acre Wood in the Lanark highlands some time ago, and it is one of my favorites, capturing the essence of midsummer beautifully with towering trees and hazy sky in the background, golden daisies and orange hawkweed, purple bugloss and silvery meadow grasses dancing front and center.

It seems as though summer has just arrived, but things are all downhill from here. After Sunday, daylight hours will wane until Yule (December 21) when they begin to stretch out again. The ebbing of daylight hours is bittersweet, but the longer nights during the last half of the calendar year are something to celebrate for those of us who are moonhearts, stargazeys and ardent backyard astronomers. The Old Wild Mother strews celestial wonders by generous handfuls as the year wanes, spinning luminous star spangled tapestries in the velvety darkness that grows deeper and longer with every passing twenty-four hour interval. It is all downhill from here until December, but what a fabulous trip!

The eight festive spokes on the old Wheel of the Year are all associated with fire, but the summer solstice more than any other. Centuries ago, all Europe was alight on Midsummer eve, and ritual bonfires climbed high into the night from every village green. Midsummer festivities included morris dancing, games of chance and storytelling, feasting, pageantry, and candlelight processions after dark. Prosperity and abundance could be ensured by jumping over Midsummer fires, and its embers were charms against injury and bad weather at harvest time. Embers were placed at the edges of orchards and fields to ensure good harvests, and they were carried home to family hearths for protection. Doorways were decorated with swags and wreaths of birch, fennel, white lilies and St. John's Wort which is in bloom now.

My Litha fire jumping days are over, but I am usually outside with a mug of Jerusalem Artichoke (Earth Apple) tea to watch the sun rise. There's a candle on the old oak table and a lighted wand of Shiseido incense in a pottery bowl nearby. An hour or two of afternoon pottering in the village, quiet feasting as the sun goes down, a little stargazing and moon watching later. We cherish the simplicity of our small festive doings, the quiet pleasure of being surrounded by kindred spirits at such times. As always, we will think of my departed soulmate. This is our seventh midsummer observance without Irv, and his passing still cuts like a knife.

Happy Litha (or Midsummer), however you celebrate it (or don't celebrate it). May the sun light up your day from sunrise to sunset, and your night be filled with stars from here to there.  May all good things come to you

Happy Beltane (May Day)

Beltane (May Day) Thoughts

This is the eve of Beltane (or May Day) in the northern hemisphere. The word is Scots Gaelic in origin and marks the beginning of summer. Below the equator, this is the eve of Samhain (also Scots Gaelic) meaning "summer's end". As we northerners drift toward warmth and light, our southern kin are drifting toward the dark half of the year.

Nights are are still cool, and it will be another week or two until full colonies of bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) are up and blooming, but early specimens lift their gold and white heads in protected nooks here and there in the woods. In other years, there were wild yellow orchids blooming, but it will be a while before they put in an appearance, soon to be followed by trout lilies and columbines.

Bloodroot flowers are breathtaking, and the shy white blooms with their golden centers are dear to my heart. They are something of a seasonal marker for me. Encountering this one glowing in its flickering, stone-warmed alcove, I felt like getting down on my knees and kissing the good dark earth where the flower made its home—it was that perfect. Ignoring my painful and protesting knees, down I went in the dead leaves and stayed there for quite a while, nose to nose with the dear little wonder and happy as a clam. Getting to my feet again was quite an undertaking.

The interval was one of the wild epiphanies I love so much, especially in springtime when the north woods are just coming to life. Call it a moment of kensho, one of those fleeting intervals of grace, quiet knowing and connection that I like to call "aha" moments. Forget the fancy stuff - this is the ground of my being. As long as I can spend time with trees and rocks and wildflowers, I can handle the big life "stuff", most of the time anyway. Add lakes, loons, cormorants, herons, sunsets and full moons to the equation, please. Also Canada geese, swans and cranes.

Happy Beltane (or May Day), everyone. May there be light and blooming and fragrance in your own precious life, in your particular corner of the great wide world. Wherever you make your home on the hallowed earth, may all good things come to you at this turning of the wheel in the Great Round.

Happy Easter

Friday Ramble for Ostara

Today marks the Vernal Equinox or Ostara, one of two times in the calendar year (the other being the Autumn Equinox or Mabon) when the Earth and her unruly children hover in perfect balance for a brief interval. Humans had nothing to do with this day - it's a pivotal astronomic point ordained by the natural order of things in the astonishingly beautiful cosmos where we live out our days, spinning like tops in the Great Round of space and time.

Today,  day and night are perfectly balanced in length. After a long hard winter that persists in hanging about and making our lives an endless snow removal exercise, that is something to crow about. No matter what the weather is like today (and it is nothing to write home about), brighter, warmer times are on their way.

If I lived further south, this might be a time of greening and enchantment, a day when Eostre, the old Teutonic goddess of greening and fertility, wanders wild places with her arms full of spring blooms. Flowers would spring up in her footsteps as she passed, and she would be attended by hares, her special animal. The air would be filled with birdsong, the heady fragrance of rich dark earth and wild springtime herbs.

Alas, the only snowdrops blooming here at the moment are in a glass jar in my study. It will be several weeks until Lady Spring makes an appearance, but rumors of her imminent presence and the arrival of the greening season persist. We are hopeful. It has been a long winter this time around, and Eostre can't show up too soon for me. The birds in the garden feel the same and are proclaiming their craving for warmth and light. Every feathered visitor seems to be declaring its lofty status as a messenger from the sacred, a harbinger of abundance, fertility and new life.

Early this morning, Beau and I went outside into the garden for a few minutes, and a cold going it was. As we shivered in the star spangled darkness and looked up, it seemed to us that March's full moon (now only a thin waxing crescent a day or two past new) always bears more than a passing resemblance to a great cosmic egg. Its egginess is a perfect expression of this turning of the wheel with its verdant motifs of warmth, light and new life coming into being.

There is, most assuredly, blooming in our thoughts, but the weather is too cold for outdoor celebrations, and it will be very dark tonight since the moon is a thin waxing crescent. We will spend a few minutes outside looking at the stars, and perhaps we will light a celebratory candle on the deck, but our observance will be indoors for the most part. All are welcome at the table, and there are enough chairs and mugs to go around. See you there.

Happy Imbolc/Candlemas

Why a sheep here this morning? The name Imbolc is taken from an Old Irish expression meaning "in the belly", a respectful nod to the ewe sheep who are pregnant in early February. This day is sometimes called "Oimelc", meaning "ewe's milk".

The livelihood and status of ancient tribes depended on the fertility of their livestock, and the ancients considered raiding other tribes for prime specimens quite acceptable. Ballads were sung to celebrate the more daring thefts, and wars were sometimes waged to regain the ownership of prized animals which had been pilfered.

Today's festival celebrates fertility, springtime, and the lambing season about to begin in so many corners of the northern hemisphere. No lambs will be born in the eastern Ontario highlands for several weeks, but here is a contented face from another lambing season. This morning, we are halfway between winter and spring, and that is something to celebrate.

Happy Imbolc, happy Candlemas! May there be light in your life.

Friday Ramble - Thoughts Before Imbolc

Here we are on the closing pages of January, nearing the eve of Candlemas or Imbolc. The festival falls on Monday, February 2nd, beginning at sundown on the evening before (Sunday, February 1st). Strange to relate, this observance in the depths of winter celebrates light and warmth, the stirring of new life in the earth and the advent of springtime.

In many French speaking countries, February 2nd is also called La Chandeleur, a Christian feast honoring the presentation of the infant Jesus Christ in the temple and the purification of his mother, forty days after she had given birth. The festival's name comes from the Latin festa candelarum, meaning "the festival of candles", and there are links to the ancient Roman purification feasts known as the Lupercalia. The modern observance is marked by blessing candles and eating festive crepes which represent the sun and the return of the light to the northern hemisphere.  

For those of us of Celtic lineage, the day is called Imbolc or Candlemas, sometimes the Féile Bride (Festival of St. Brigid) or "Bride's Day". It is consecrated to Brigid, honored as an Irish saint in modern times, but hallowed as a Tuatha Dé Danann goddess many centuries before. Brigid is a deity of fire and creativity, wisdom, eloquence and craftsmanship, patroness of the forge and the smithy, poetry, fertility and the healing arts, especially midwifery. Light is her special province. Hers are the candle, the hearth and the blacksmith's forge.

Made of light ourselves, we are Brigid's unruly children, forged from the dust of stars which lighted the heavens billions of years ago, went super nova at the end of their time and dissolved back into the cosmos. Within the motes of our being are encoded the wisdoms of the ancient earth and all its cultures, the star knowledge of unknown constellations and "The Big Bang" which created not just our own precious world, but the whole cosmic sea in which it floats..

We are recycled matter, our dancing particles having assembled into diverse life forms over and over again, lived and expired as those life forms, then vanished into the stream of existence to emerge as something else.  The universe never wastes a thing, and we could learn a lot from her.  In our time, “we” have been many things, worn many shapes and answered to many names. In this lifetime I exist as a tatterdemalion, specific and perhaps unique collection of wandering particles called Catherine or Cate, but in previous incarnations, I was someone or something altogether different.

Buddhist teacher and deep ecologist Joanna Macy has written that since every particle in our being goes back to the first flaring of space and time, we are as old as the universe itself, about fifteen billion years. We are the universe, and it is us.

I have my own small festival observances, and I cherish them. Food is prepared using ingredients associated with sunlight, sweetness and abundance: eggs, butter, saffron and honey, a little green to invoke springtime. Since such things often feature in my culinary efforts anyway, perhaps there is a ritual element in my kitchen doings all year long, and I like to think so. There will be a festive lunch with a dear friend, and small gifts will be exchanged. I will light a candle at nightfall and nest it in a snowdrift in the garden. We are up to our eyebrows in white stuff this year, so clambering up on a snowdrift with a candle and matches will be good fun.

Happy Imbolc to you and your clan. Happy St. Brigid's Day. May warmth and the manifold blessings of Light be yours.

Merry Yule

Friday Ramble - Thoughts Before Yule

After a time of decay comes the turning point. The powerful light that has been banished returns.There is movement, but it is not brought about by force; thus the movement is natural, arising spontaneously. For this reason, the transformation of the old becomes easy. The idea of RETURN is based on the course of nature. The movement is cyclic, and the course completes itself. Therefore it is not necessary to hasten anything artificially. Everything comes of itself at the appointed time. This is the meaning of heaven and earth.

I Ching Hexagram 24 - Fu / Return (The Turning Point)

Here we are again, nearing winter's 'still point of the turning year'. The ancient festival of Yule falls on Sunday, and its observance begins at sunset tomorrow evening. The occasion celebrates the return of the light, and it is one of four pivotal astronomical coordinates in the calendar year, along with the vernal equinox (Ostara), the summer solstice (Litha), and the autumn equinox (Mabon). The I Ching hexagram in the first paragraph of this post describes the observance beautifully. 

South of the equator, the four seasons are reversed, and Yule takes place on or around June 21st. If you live in the southern hemisphere, you are nearing midsummer and about to celebrate the summer solstice, Litha. Wherever you make your home in the great wide world, Happy Solstice to you!

Yule (also called Midwinter, or the Winter Solstice) is one of the two times in the year when the sun seems to stand still for a brief interval. The word "solstice" has been around in one shape or another for many centuries, and it comes to us from the Latin noun sōlstitium, itself a blend of the noun sōl [sun] and the related verb sistere [to stand still]. So, the word solstice simply means "sun standing still". At the beginning of our wordy trek are the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots  *seH₂wol-, and *sH₂un-, both meaning simply "sun". Of course, it is we earthlings and our dear little planet who are in motion, not the magnificent star that lights our way.

December days are cloudy for the most part. Sunny days are rare, and they seem to be the coldest days of all. The earth in the woods is frozen rock hard, and this year there is snow under the old trees. There is a sense of movement in the landscape, a feeling that change is on its way. The word chthonic always comes to mind at this time of the year. Somewhere in the earth below our wandering feet, small entities sleep and wait to rise when the northern world is warm again.

Sunlight is a scarce quantity here in winter, and we look forward to having a few more minutes of sunlight every day after this weekend - until next June when sunlight hours will begin to wane again. The first few months of next year will be frigid going, but hallelujah, there will be sunlight and blue sky now and again.

As I kindle a fire at nightfall, I think of the ancestors. Huddled together for warmth in their caves and bothies, they would have fed the flames burning on their open hearths and lighted tallow lamps to drive the dark away. They would have watched winter skies hopefully for signs of the sun's return, and they would have rejoiced when earth's northern hemisphere began to tilt back toward the sun.

Lighting a candle or building a fire on one's hearth is a powerful gesture. In putting flame to wick or kindling, we claim our kinship with those who have gone before us. We join our hallowed foremothers in a joyful circle that goes back to the beginning times. We are not alone. The spirits of our ancestors dance in our bones.

Beau and I will have a quiet Yule lunch with a dear friend on December 21st. We will walk in the woods and leave small gifts for wild kin, make sure that the birds visiting the feeders in our garden have suet and seed and bits of festive fruit. There will be candlelight and mugs of tea, clementines, cider and gingerbread cookies.

We will look out as night falls and give thanks for the fruitful darkness, for the return of light to the world. My departed love will be here in spirit - he always enjoyed celebrating the solstices and equinoxes, our Yule festivities most of all.

Happy Yule (or Litha) to you and your tribe. May light grace your life.

Thursday Poem - At the Winter Solstice

Owl hoots three times in the far woods,
fair warning for all small creatures
scurrying to their burrows.

Are we not still and always
those crouching figures
who flee the heavenly alchemy?
Three times in the crackling air,
Owl hoots for us.

*

Wind plays the drums of snow...
staccato taps,
crescendo off the roofs,
flourish of shuddering branches.
Ice snaps its castanets,
its daggers.

Atonal music of the darkest days
needs the most fearless,
subtle listeners.

*

Those strumming flamenco
fingers of sunlight
are a long time away from now.

Now we go comforted
in dreams and ceremonies,
flaming our star-speck candles,
raising our voices against that other music,
drowning out the forever
at night’s heart.

*

Look up! The wheel is turning.
The spectacular crowd of stars,
the tangle of dimensions
jostle for our attention.
Salute the birth of everything holy.

Dolores Stewart (Riccio)

At Yule, we celebrate the triumphant return of old Helios, the ascendance of light in the fertile darkness of winter. This morning's poem was written by the late Dolores Stewart (Riccio) and published in her exquisite Doors to the Universe. It is posted here with her kind permission. She was my friend.

Advent Sun Wheel Wreath (Week 4)

Advent Sun Wheel Wreath (Week 3)

Advent Sun Wheel Wreath (Week 2)

Friday Ramble - Calling the Sun Home

Herons, geese and loons have departed for balmier lodgings somewhere further south. Rivers and lakes in the eastern Ontario highlands are still and silent without their summer residents. Nights and early mornings are cold. Beau and I dress warmly when we go out because there is always an icy wind. Boreus, god of the north wind, is in residence, and he is making his blustery presence felt. 

On early morning rambles, fallen leaves crunch pleasingly under our feet, and we examine the frozen puddles along the trail for woodland snippets suspended in the ice. Near home, the north wind rattles the eaves of the little blue house in the village and sets the whiskery trees nearby in raspy motion.

When night falls, I pull draperies closed and shut out the gloom beyond the windows, taking refuge, comfort and great pleasure in small seasonal rites. I light scented candles, brew pots of tea, knead bread dough and stir mugs of hot chocolate, experiment with recipes for curries and paellas, sketch and read. I plot gardens for next year (more roses and herbs, perhaps a Medicine Wheel garden), craft grand and fabulous schemes which will probably never see the light of day. I do a little dancing from time to time, but my efforts are closer to lurching than anything else.

We are nearing the end of November, and in a few weeks, days will begin to lengthen again. It will be some time until we notice a real difference in our daylight hours, but at least we will be on our way, and for that reason, Yule just may be my favorite day in the whole turning year. When the winter solstice arrives, there will be celebrations and silliness to drive away the darkness and welcome old Helios back to the world. He is still here of course - it's the earth's seasonal wobble that makes him seem more distant than he actually is at this time of the year. We and our planet are the ones in motion, not the magnificent star at the center of our universe.

Beginning Sunday night (November 23rd) and continuing until Yule, I will light a candle at dusk every Sunday night in a practice called the Advent Sun Wheel, four weeks and four candles, a fifth festive candle to be lit on the eve of the Winter Solstice. Now in its twentieth year, the observance was crafted by the late Helen Farias, founder of the Beltane Papers. Helen passed beyond the fields we know in 1994, and her creation has been carried on by friends, first by Waverly Fitzgerald and since 2004 by Beth Owls Daughter. Waverly passed beyond the fields we know in December 2019, but she will be with us in spirit as we light our candles. She always is.

In touching match to candlewick, I join a circle of wise women and kindred spirits in far flung places, bright spirits like Beth, Joanna Powell Colbert and many others. I am not so wise myself, but that is quite all right. Together we will honor the earth and her fruitful darkness, and we will welcome the sun home with warm thoughts and healing energies. This has been a difficult year. May there be light ahead for all of us.

One needs only a wreath and five candles to participate in this observance. At sunset this coming Sunday, light the first candle in your wreath and spend a little time in quiet reflection, then blow out the candle when you are done. On the following Sunday at sunset, light the first candle and a second candle too... and so on and so on until the Winter Solstice when the fifth and last candle of the ritual is lit.

Magpie creature that I am and ever a passionate collector of seasonal lore, I am very interested in your own "before Yule" practices.

Merry Samhain/Hallowmas

Merry Samhain/Hallowmas

Happy November!

Friday Ramble - Samhain (Halloween) Thoughts

Here we are again at my favorite festive observance in the whole turning year. This is the eve of Samhain, or in popular parlance, Halloween.

On morning walks, there's a chill in the air that cannot be ignored. Daylight arrives later with every passing day, and dusk makes an earlier appearance, village street lamps turning themselves on one by one, hours before they used to. The shorter days and longer nights are all too apparent to a crone's fierce and gimlet eye, at least to this crone's eye. How did we get here so swiftly?

The last days of October have a beauty all their own. In the great wide world, crops and fruit have been gathered in and stored, farm animals tucked into barns, stables and coops readied for the long white season. Rail fences wear frost crystals, and nearby field grasses crunch pleasingly underfoot. Wild beasties are frantically topping up their winter larders and preparing warm burrows for winter.

Most trees have already withdrawn into themselves for the long white season, and their leaves have fallen, but the great oaks on my favorite hill are reluctant to part with their finery, and they are hanging on to every leaf. A north wind scours the wooded slopes and sweeps fallen fragments into rustling drifts and heaps. The air is spicy and carries the promise of deep cold days to come.

The festival (cross quarter day) marks “summer's end', the beginning of the dark half of the year. According to the old Celtic two-fold division of the year, summer was the interval between Beltane and Samhain, and winter the interval from Samhain to Beltane. It was also the gate between one year and another. For the ancestors, the old year ended at sunset on October 31, and a new year danced into being.

Some of us are enchanted by seasonal turnings in the Great Round and the old ways. Some of us love spooky "stuff", the fey, the mysterious and the unknown. Some like Halloween "clobber" and dressing up. Others are fascinated by the myriad ways in which the human species has measured the passage of time over the centuries.

The festival doings of the ancients celebrated pivotal cosmic points in their year, and Samhain was sacred to them. It was a fey interval in which the natural order dissolved back into primordial chaos for a brief unruly fling before regenerating, burnished and newly ordered for another journey through the seasons. They believed the veil between the living and the dead was thin on Samhain night, and that one's beloved dead could return for a visit. All the old festivals celebrate the cyclical nature of existence, but October 31st does so more than any other. 

In the last few years, many loved ones have left this realm and gone on ahead.  While they were here, they loved this world fiercely, and they treasured its innate abundance and wildness, its grandeur, grace and reciprocity. Lit from within, they blazed with life and passion wherever they went, and they lighted up every room they entered—it was always a little darker when they left. Somewhere beyond the here and now, my dear departed ones are still alight, and I try to remember that. My Samhain altar gets more crowded with every passing year, but there is always room for them all, and places will be set for everyone at the old oak table tonight.

Three cheers for trick-or-treating, tiny guisers and goblins on the threshold. What's not to love about witches, ghosts and goblins, grinning jack-o-lanterns, the colors orange and black? As I dole out treats to wee neighborhood friends tonight, I will reflect on the old year and tuck it thankfully away under a blanket of fallen maple leaves. I will think good thoughts about the cycle that is coming into being, and I will remember that endings and beginnings are natural and ordained parts of earthly existence, not something to be feared.

Bright blessings to you and your clan. May your jack-o-lanterns glow brightly tonight, and throngs of tiny costumed guests attend your threshold. May your home be a place of warmth and light, and your hearth a haven from things that go bump in the night. May there be laughter and merriment at your door, music and fellowship in abundance. May all good things come to you and your clan.

Thursday Poem - All Hallows Eve

Night of the void between the worlds,

night when the veil between the worlds is stirring,

lifting, when the old year shrivels and fades,

and the new year has not yet begun,

when light takes the form of darkness,

when the last light sinks into darkness like

spilled water, disappears in the leaves,

in the hot secret runs of earth underneath.

when grandmothers rise like mist,

the silent grandmothers with soft tongues of fog

in the ear, claiming nothing for themselves, nor

complaining that they were abandoned,

when children go out clothed in darkness,

the children with sweet orange lips slip among

whispers, go out with wavering candles among

crosses and mossy eyes in stone,

when children go out in the mist,

the children tasting of candy, of carelessly spilled

dreams, the children like faraway stars

flaming into the soft folds of darkness.

Dolores Stewart from Doors to the Universe