Halloween

My pumpkin can eat your pumpkin's face off.

Halloween is my favorite holiday, though I'll admit I don't get too jazzed up over holidays much anymore. Why Halloween? Well, it's a fun holiday, and fell during my favorite time of year, autumn. Also, I always kinda liked the pagan aspects, given my sympathies with that belief system, partly stemming from my environmentalist attitudes, and maybe also from a strange attempt to identify with my Irish roots). I especially like that it's a purely pagan holiday, and totally unChristianized, which makes it unique. Yeah, All Saints Day comes the next day, but Halloween is still just Halloween. But let's face it; my love of Halloween probably has most to do with childhood conditioning wherein I got a huge bag full of free candy just for dressing up in a costume, which was fun anyways, and walking around the spookified neighborhood after dark.

You might think that Christmas would take first place, if the conditioning thing holds true, because toys and other cool stuff are better than candy, but Christmas was ruined for me by working for years in retail. Mainly, being forced to listen to a month and a half of that horrible Christmas music, the same fifteen or twenty old songs on endless repeat, most of them on the down side of good. Also, the general consumerism, to say nothing of the syrupy sentimentality, of Christmas turns me off, and, no longer a Christian, the Jesus stuff is largely lost on me. Plus, again, the month and a half or more of hype, which leaves me with the feeling of just wishing it was over, because it's never so amazing as to deserve that kind of run-up.   /tangent

One cool aspect of Halloween is the notion that the veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead disappears or at least becomes permeable. This resonates with the notion of "thin places," which were areas the Irish of old considered special in that there, more than in other places, the connection to the spirits, or to God, was stronger. I don't have any Halloween poems on hand, nor am I feeling particularly inspired to write one, but here's a link to my favorite spooky poem, Poe's The Raven (or watch The Simpson's version); and then there is this from my archives, on the related topic of thin places:

Thin Places

Some say they built the standing stones just so,
to mark the places they had come to know
as holy land, as where the veil was torn
between the world of dead and of the born,
and where a quiet minded man could feel,
just barely touch, a bit of more-than-real.
The spirits there could now and then be heard,
by those with ears to hear, a holy word,
and time would pause, eternity be known
in falling raindrops, waterfalls, and stone

Those days are yet these days, today is then--
for still those stones can speak to humble men
and still they stand as markers on a land
where spirit walks with matter hand in hand.

Time in the Tropics

Well it's getting towards Halloween here in the subtropics of Florida. Driving around you see a few people who have decorated their houses with Halloween paraphanalia; the pumpkins, hay bales, chinsy ghosts and witches hung from the palm trees. It's too weird. What meaning can a fall holiday that marked the final harvests mean in a place that has no real autumn, no real harvests (Florida is for cows and citrus, and little else, and what other crops are planted, they're still being planted now), and a bunch of suburbanites that don't have any real connection to the seasons anyway? We get the same food in winter that we get in summer, only the prices change some. I figure most of the people decorating for the holiday are transplants from up north.

Which got me to thinking. Holidays like this are how we mark the year and its seasonal changes. Here in the subtropics, there isn't much of that kind of change: it cools down in the "winter," maybe even getting some frosts for a few weeks in December and January, but it's sandals-and-shorts weather most of the time, and the seasons are more about rainy season and dry season than anything else. So the old holidays, while observed out of tradition, mean even less down here than they did in the northern cities, where people are still divorced from the land but at least still have the seasons.

I was wondering how people in the tropics proper mark the year-- do the tribes in the Amazon or the South Pacific have holidays in any way reminiscent of those of northern Europe? I wonder if they don't mark the year at all, and whether their sense of time is moreso one of constancy than change. I can't even get my head around it. And could this be why paradise is so often associated with the tropics, a place of seemingly no change? The prefect weather the same every day, the sun always high in the sky, never seeming to "die" or leave for the south.

If this is the case, that they don't see the world as going through a life and a death or dormancy, than it must greatly affect their cosmology. A people who know winter will end up with a cosmology of salvation, a sun god who dies and returns. Such a cosmology would probably be largely unintelligible to a tropical people, who don't see the world in this life and death struggle that needs saving.

I say this because you can look at the religions of the Middle East, clearly shaped by the empty desert and it's single, austere, harsh god, and compare it to the lush and fertile India, with its endless count of gods, its cyclical, constantly returning cosmos of no end, Brahman's dream. And then to China, a temperate land of seasons, summer and winter, with a strongly dual concept of yin and yang. Where people live can really affect their understanding of the world. Not that it's the only thing, and let's not get carried away here, but it's an interesting thing to think about. I don't know much about tropical peoples and their basic beliefs, I wonder if this is true.

Is this why I'm so uncomfortable here in Florida? I mean besides the awful heat and oppressively strong sun, of course. I keep expecting, subconsciously, a shift that never comes, a cool down, a time of rest and silence that is winter, and it never arrives. I'm a man of the North, so that makes sense. But I wonder what it'd be like to be a man of the South, or more precisely and less Northern-Hemispherecentric, a man of the Equator.

Caught in the Undertow

It sort of feels like I'm caught in an undertow. I've been living very well all summer and fall, working out in the beautiful mountains and forests, in clean air, among people who sympathize with an unorthodox style of life. Now I'm in a major city, unemployed, alone, feeling trapped and bored and completely out of place as I choke on the air and the noise. It is like the great wave finally found its shore, but is rushing back out to sea. And what is an ocean but a giant depression, a hole in the earth filled with water and strange monsters?

Things are made worse by the holidays. The massive shadow of expectation and nostalgia darkens the world, demanding, because of the date on the calander, that we have cheer and joy. The corporate Christmas machine has been blaring since Thanksgiving, no, Halloween, telling us to prove our love with cheap consumer goods. And the airwaves fill with songs that make us long for times and memories that, truth be told, we never really had. Nostalgia's a killer. And I hate having my unhappiness thrown in my face.

Summer fades into winter, happiness into a gentle, quiet despair. I take courage in the fact that one's capacity of joy is the same as one's capacity for sorrow; hard times are the knives that carve the hollow, into which we pour our happiness. I have been gulping at the cup for months, and it is nearly empty. To everything there is a season.

Ebb and flow. This is my third such winter following a summer of mountainous bliss. I get by, bit by bit, clinging to patience. I let the knives do their carving, hoping some new dream will reveal itself from the wood of my soul, some new design into which I can throw myself. Then, when spring comes, I will walk back into the mountains, praying for a way to stay for good.