I celebrate the standstill of time

 

Art: Stewart MacGeorge

"In the great silence of my favorite month,
October (the red of maples, the bronze of oaks,
A clear-yellow leaf here and there on birches),
I celebrated the standstill of time.

The vast country of the dead had its beginning everywhere:
At the turn of a tree-lined alley, across park lawns.
But I did not have to enter, I was not called yet.

Motorboats pulled up on the river bank, paths in pine needles.
It was getting dark early, no lights on the other side.

I was going to attend the ball of ghosts and witches.
A delegation would appear there in masks and wigs,
And dance, unrecognized, in the chorus of the living."

-   Czeslaw Milosz, All Hallow's Eve
    Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan  

 

"I will dance
The dance of dying days
And sleeping life.

I will dance
In cold, dead leaves
A bending, whirling human flame.

I will dance
As the Horned God rides
Across the skies.

I will dance
To the music of His hounds
Running, baying in chorus.

I will dance
With the ghosts of those
Gone before.

I will dance
Between the sleep of life
And the dream of death.

I will dance
On Samhain's dusky eye,
I will dance."  

-  Karen Bergquist, An Autumn Chant

 

 

Perhaps the most famous icon of the holiday is the jack-o-lantern.  Various authorities attribute it to either Scottish or Irish origin.  However, it seems clear that it was used as a lantern by people who traveled the road this night, the scary face to frighten away spirits or faeries who might otherwise lead one astray.  Set on porches and in windows, they cast the same spell of protection over the household.  (The American pumpkin seems to have forever superseded the European gourd as the jack-o-lantern of choice.)  Bobbing for apples may well represent the remnants of a Pagan 'baptism' rite called a 'seining', according to some writers.  The water-filled tub is a latter-day Cauldron of Regeneration, into which the novice's head is immersed.  The fact that the participant in this folk game was usually blindfolded with hands tied behind the back also puts one in mind of a traditional Craft initiation ceremony."

-   Mike Nichols, All Hallow's Eve

"To all the ancient ones from their houses, the Old Ones from above and below. In this time the Gods of the Earth touch our feet, bare upon the ground. Spirits of the Air whisper in our hair and chill our bodies, and from the dark portions watch and wait the Faery Folk that they may join the circle and leave their track upon the ground. It is the time of the waning year. Winter is upon us. The corn is golden in the winnow heaps. Rains will soon wash sleep into the life-bringing Earth. We are not without fear, we are not without sorrow...Before us are all the signs of Death: the ear of corn is no more green and life is not in it. The Earth is cold and no more will grasses spring jubilant. The Sun but glances upon his sister, the earth..... It is so....Even now....But here also are the signs of life, the eternal promise given to our people. In the death of the corn there is the seed--which is both food for the season of Death and the Beacon which will signal green-growing time and life returning.In the cold of the Earth there is but sleep wherein She will awaken refreshed and renewed, her journey into the Dark Lands ended. And where the Sun journeys he gains new vigor and potency; that in the spring, his blessings shall come ever young!"

-  Two Samhain Rituals, Compost Coveners, 1980  

 

We are not alone in the dark

 

some information about Samhain and Halloween:

From the blog  joincake.com:

Samhain is an ancient Celtic festival that takes place every year at the end of October. Most scholars and historians believe that Samhain is the origin of the holiday we know as Halloween. Samhain is also the origin of other fall holidays, including All Saints’ Day and Dia de Los Muertos, which have similar themes.

The festival of Samhain has, for centuries, marked a “liminal” time of year, when the afterlife and daily life on Earth overlap. During this transitional period, spirits and the living can intermingle. Today, many Druids, Wiccans, and Pagans carry on the tradition by celebrating Samhain worldwide.

 

It’s easy to see the similarities between the Celtic festival of Samhain and the modern celebration of Halloween. But there’s much more to Samhain than the few activities that carried over to our modern holiday.

Samhain is a Celtic celebration marking the time of year when the transition to winter begins. It marks the separation between summer and winter, at the halfway point of the autumn season. 

At its heart, Samhain is an agricultural festival. It was originally a time when agricultural communities would prepare for the coldest months of the year. 

With its position at the “border line” of summer and winter (or lightness and darkness), Samhain also took on more spiritual connotations for the ancient Celts. 

The festival of Samhain originated in ancient Europe as a “fire festival.” On the night of Samhain, the Celtic people would build a bonfire to appease the gods. They hoped that by showing thanks to the gods, the gods would in turn help regenerate their crops. 

The ancient Celts thought of the year as two halves: light and dark. As the dark half of the year began in November, they believed that the world of gods and spirits became visible to mankind. And this could lead to trouble for the living.

With the line between the living world and the Otherworld blurred, the Celtic people believed the needed to take protective measures to avoid harm. 

 

 

 and some thoughts from 

Halloween as Practice

By Tracy Cochran

 

At a certain point, the summer of our innocence passes. The bright hope that spiritual practice might be a way for us to bypass suffering vanishes. The bliss we might have felt at the beginning gives way to the realization that the more we practice, the more we feel not just joy but also the 10,000 sorrows. The practice begins to feel a bit like Halloween.

Halloween is typically linked to the Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-an or sow-in), celebrating the end of the lighter half of the year and the beginning of the darker half. The ancient Celts believed this to be a thin time, a time when the border between this world and unknown worlds became porous, allowing the passage between worlds and levels to be much easier than it ordinarily is.

According to legend, one rite of Samhain in ancient Scotland was the dowsing of household fires. People would allow themselves to experience the darkness, lighting a new fire from a common bonfire. As we begin to understand that everyone suffers, everyone without exception, we begin to experience that common fire. We begin to be able to look at ourselves and others with kind attention. Our hearts begin to open to others and to ourselves, in all our guises and manifestations, even the most frightening.

Moment by moment, we begin to realize that waking up involves waking up to the truth of who we are, and that means the whole truth. A new kind of warmth and vibrancy and ease comes into our lives at moments (and let me stress again that this is a work of moments). We feel just as much as before. But there is also light and warmth, and the understanding that we are not alone in the dark.

The Autumn Rain covers us with blessings

 Psalm 84,  6-8

Blessed the man who finds refuge in you,

in their hearts are pilgrim roads.

7As they pass through the bitter valley,*

they find spring water to drink.

The Autumn rain covers it with blessings.

8They will go from strength to strength*

and see the God of gods on Zion.

Japanese Maple

Clive James

Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.

So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:

Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?

Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.

My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that. That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:

Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colours will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.

_{From Clive James' Sentenced To Life}

The Crows know too

 

art by Angela Rizza

Musing on the coming dark...   by Scott Ferry

 

i have said it before

but those squirrels are up to something

every october they know that we are weak

and they chatter and mock us

and store our hopes

and our light

in secret holes

the crows know too

they have tried for millennia

to teach us how to exchange our bodies

for charcoal and moonspit when the doors

are still visible before the dark closes

in around our throats

but we have never listened but string

our false suns around our homes

like a mistranslated spell

and sing songs of a man

who brought the light to us

and was murdered for it

or songs of light which endured

eight days on one day’s oil

as if this could bring a submerged star

back to this northern sky

the crows are in the water under and through

as they dance between doorways

bringing the light through in swaths of

wingbeat and caterwaul

the squirrels dig their way there

as we look up impuissant

and plead with a blank

dark heaven

The Veil is getting thin

 

Here's the image of the veil and gate between the living and the dead in the film "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix"

And here's a meme from Google:

Don't know the author of this one,  but it grabs me:

 

"As I went out walking this fall afternoon,
I heard a whisper whispering.
I heard a whisper whispering,
Upon this fine fall day...

As I went out walking this fall afternoon,
I heard a laugh a' laughing.
I heard a laugh a' laughing,
Upon this fine fall day...

I heard this whisper and I wondered,
I heard this laugh and then I knew.
The time is getting near my friends,
The time that I hold dear my friends,
The veil is getting thin my friends,
And strange things will pass through."

-   The Veil is Getting Thinner

This sense of the nearness of the Other Side, and also of my friends who have crossed over, is very much with me each October, at the last days of the month.

"Between the heavens and the earth
The way now opens to bring forth
The Hosts of those who went on before;
Hail!  We see them now come through the Open Door.

Now the veils of worlds are thin; 
To move out you must move in.
Let the Balefires now be made, 
Mine the spark within them laid.

Move beyond the fiery screen, 
Between the seen and the unseen;
Shed your anger and your fear, 
Live anew in a new year!"

-   Lore of the Door  

It's always evening in an occupied country

 

The October wind grows colder and stronger.   I love this poem by Dylan Thomas:

"Especially when the October wind
With frosty fingers punishes my hair,
Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire
And cast a shadow crab upon the land,
By the sea's side, hearing the noise of birds,
Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks,
My busy heart who shudders as she talks
Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words."

-  Dylan Thomas, Especially When the October Wind  

 

As Halloween approaches, I re-read and ponder this poem by Charles Simic:

"On the first page of my dreambook
It's always evening
In an occupied country.
Hour before the curfew.
A small provincial city.
The houses all dark.
The store-fronts gutted.

I am on a street corner
Where I shouldn't be.
Alone and coatless
I have gone out to look
For a black dog who answers to my whistle.
I have a kind of halloween mask
Which I am afraid to put on."

-   Charles Simic, Empire of Dreams  

 

 

 

Blue poured into summer blue

 

The last hurrah of my garden:

October 20  New England Aster

October 22    Tuberoses and Dahlias

October 22   Aromatic Aster

Actually, we still don't have a killing frost in the forecast for the next week.  But it's coming.

"There comes a time when it cannot be put off any longer.  The radio warns of a killing frost coming
in the night, and you must say good-by to the garden.  You dread it, as you dread saying good-by
to any good friend; but the garden waits with its last gifts, and you must go with a bushel basket
or big buckets to receive them."

-   Rachel Peden

 

 Another October poem I love:

End of Summer

"An agitation of the air,

A perturbation of the light

Admonished me the unloved year

Would turn on its hinge that night.

 

I stood in the disenchanted field

Amid the stubble and the stones

Amaded, while a small worm lisped to me

The song of my marrow-bones.

 

Blue poured into summer blue,

A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,

The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew

That part of my life was forever over.

 

Already the iron door of the North

Clangs open: birds,leaves,snows

Order their populations forth,

And a cruel wind blows."

-   Stanley Kunitz, End of Summer

and this one:

"the air is different today

the wind sings with a new tone

sighing of changes

coming

the harvest gathered

a flower, a nut

some mead, and bread

a candle and a prayer

returning the fruits

in thanksgiving

to the grove

and receiving

it's blessing

again"

-   Rhawk, Alban Elfed

and this one:

 

"Today I walked on the lion-coloured hills

with only cypresses for company,

until the sunset caught me, turned the brush

to copper

set the clouds

to one great roof of flame

above the earth,

so that I walk through fire, beneath fire,

and all in beauty.

Being alone

I could not be alone, but felt

(closer than flesh) the presence of those

who once had burned in such transfigurations.

My happiness ran through the centuries

in one continual brightness.  Looking down,

I saw the earth beneath me like a rose

petaled with mountains,

fragrant with deep peace."

-  Elizabeth Coatsworth, On the Hills, 1924

 

 

from  West Chester Views  on Facebook.  unknown photographer

 

 

 

I Cannot Do This Alone

 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer        art by Kelly Latimore

Here is a prayer by Dietrich Bonhoeffer that I brought back from my retreat:

I Cannot Do This Alone

O God, early in the morning I cry to you.

Help me to pray

And to concentrate my thoughts on you:

I cannot do this alone.

In me there is darkness,

But with you there is light;

I am lonely, but you do not leave me;

I am feeble in heart, but with you there is help;

I am restless, but with you there is peace.

In me there is bitterness, but with you there is patience;

I do not understand your ways,

But you know the way for me...

Restore me to liberty,

And enable me to live now

That I may answer before you and before me.

Lord, whatever this day may bring,

Your name be praised.

photo by Malia Edwards

The light falls so variously here, at the end of October

art:  Alfred Sisley

And this poem - so appropriate and so thought-provoking for me:

"Like someone who opens a door of glass
or sees his own reflection in it
when he returns from the woods
the light falls so variously here at the end of October
that nothing is whole or can be made into a whole
because the cracks are too uncertain and constantly moving.

Then you experience the miracle
of entering into yourself like a diamond
in glass, enjoying its own fragility
when the storm carries everything else away
including the memory of a freckled girlfriend
out over the bluing lake hidden behind the bare hills."

-   Henrik Nordbrandt,  The Glass Door
    Translated by Thomas Satterlee 

 more thoughts on the season:

art:  Wilson Henry Irvine

art: Theodore Robinson

Habit-forming

Not the habits we used to wear... but habits of behavior and attitude.

Here are a few notes from these last days of retreat at Cape May:

What is rewarded is repeated...

Humility... what do I have that I have not been given?

Humility - there are seeds of the Gospel everywhere, but it's only the humble who see the goodness coming through.

Humility:  noticing the wonder that is everywhere.

Humility  makes me more able to accept other peoples' corrections... lowers my defensiveness

Humility is the opposite of self-importance

Gentleness conquers the hearts of those who are angry and bitter

 Monarch flying South by the house on Stockton Street... one of hundreds I've been privileged to greet during those eight days in Cape May.

and now...

art by Albert Blakelock

The full orange blood moon shines over the valley.

It is easy to forget what I came for

 That's a line from Adrienne Rich's poem "Diving into the Wreck."  That poem stays with me during this retreat, partly because the theme of yesterday's conference was "the virtue and mystery of acceptance" and one of those - acceptance of diminishment. Another was acceptance of brokenness.

art by William Strang

Here's the poem:

Diving into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

From Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1973 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright 1973 by Adrienne Rich.

 

 Also, these, as I age:

* becoming more invisible, less noticed

* feeling the next generation taking over

* going from mostly active to mostly passive

* diminishment of possibility

Art: Wilson Henry Irvine

Pieces of heaven

 

art by Josef Israels

This is how I always feel at Cape May. I am grateful for an extra week here this year.

More great quotes and pictures from  A Garden of Bright Images:

art by Edward Willis Redfield

art by Wendy Andrew

and a poem by Robert Frost, which expresses this October day:

"O hushed October morning mild, 
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall; 
Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all. 
The crows above the forest call; 
Tomorrow they may form and go. 
O hushed October morning mild, 
Begin the hours of this day slow. 
Make the day seem to us less brief. 
Hearts not averse to being beguiled, 
Beguile us in the way you know. 
Release one leaf at break of day; 
At noon release another leaf; 
One from our trees, one far away."

-   Robert Frost, October

 

Retreat

 This year I am making my eight day silent retreat at Cape May.  What a gift. There are sixteen of us here together in prayer.

Here are some great photos of Cape May by others:

photo by Mark Forbes

photo by Tom Gelella

our house - Villa Saint Vincent -  photo by Vincent Vespico

photo by Wendy Redelico

They breathe in me as angels

 

Labyrinth     Chartres Cathedral

Here's a lengthy and powerful poem by Adrienne Rich:

Integrity

the quality of being complete; unbroken condition; entirety

~ Webster

A wild patience has taken me this far

 

as if I had to bring to shore

a boat with a spasmodic outboard motor

old sweaters, nets, spray-mottled books

tossed in the prow

some kind of sun burning my shoulder-blades.

Splashing the oarlocks. Burning through.

Your fore-arms can get scalded, licked with pain

in a sun blotted like unspoken anger

behind a casual mist.

 

The length of daylight

this far north, in this

forty-ninth year of my life

is critical.

 

The light is critical: of me, of this

long-dreamed, involuntary landing

on the arm of an inland sea.

The glitter of the shoal

depleting into shadow

I recognize: the stand of pines

violet-black really, green in the old postcard

but really I have nothing but myself

to go by; nothing

stands in the realm of pure necessity

except what my hands can hold.

 

Nothing but myself?....My selves.

After so long, this answer.

As if I had always known

I steer the boat in, simply.

The motor dying on the pebbles

cicadas taking up the hum

dropped in the silence.

 

Anger and tenderness: my selves.

And now I can believe they breathe in me

as angels, not polarities.

Anger and tenderness: the spider's genius

to spin and weave in the same action

from her own body, anywhere --

even from a broken web.

 

The cabin in the stand of pines

is still for sale. I know this. Know the print

of the last foot, the hand that slammed and locked the door,

then stopped to wreathe the rain-smashed clematis

back on the trellis

for no one's sake except its own.

I know the chart nailed to the wallboards

the icy kettle squatting on the burner.

The hands that hammered in those nails

emptied that kettle one last time

are these two hands

and they have caught the baby leaping

from between trembling legs

and they have worked the vacuum aspirator

and stroked the sweated temples

and steered the boat there through this hot

misblotted sunlight, critical light

imperceptibly scalding

the skin these hands will also salve.

 

 

art by Jane Newland