The beautiful leaves that fell with the wind and rain were covered with snow when I woke this morning, before noon the sky is clearing and the snow is melting.
Still. it is Fall, nearly winter here. A time caught between times as the wheel of the year turns. Looking forward and backward at the same time, or so it seems. It even feels different. For many years I have celebrated the New Year not on Jan 1st, but on Nov 1st ,instead. Samhain, literally means "the end of Summer" I have been told. Crossing from one year into the next, from plenty to scarcity, and the uncertainty of being there when spring arrives, may have been some of the sources for the rituals of Samhain.
In the olden days the hearth fire was extinguished on Samhain, which was celebrated from sunset on Oct 31 to sunset on Nov 1st., the beginning of the New Year. To prevent any evil influences from carrying over into the new year. The next morning, Nov 1st, a new fire was kindled in the freshly cleaned, cold hearth using embers from the night before's bonfires to insure a new start, and guard the home from any misfortune or evil influences.
At this time of year there is an abrupt and obvious change of weather, you don't have to go back even a mere hundred years, when "if I make it thru the winter" meant what it said. The world seems to me to feel different, half dread and half anticipation, about the coming of winter. Winter is a time of dormancy, and preparation, not a dead and bleak time. It gives us a to time to pause, plan and turn inward. Please, gentle readers, don't think that I look forward to winter, but them that is another ramble altogether.
It is easy for me to understand how our ancestors belief that veil grows thin, and that ancestors can easily pass thru the veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead, also that the future can be foretold.
samhain was and still is a time when we celebrate out ancestors , think of the past, try to predict the future, , wish, hope, look into the future with hope and or dread.
Feel the electric charge in the air? That is the betwixt and between or if you prefer, liminal, nature of the season.
