Samhain

It's the time of year when people start explaining how to pronounce Samhain.

I woke up thinking about it a couple of days ago and hearing a whisper in my ear of how the word sounds in the Southern American vernacular. And not anything super regional but just the overall softness of our speech.

Sah-Wehn. Soft-Soft. Nothing hard, no sharp edges, nothing to batter or break against, just a soft landing.

This time of year when many of us are celebrating the end of the agricultural year and the coming of a new one, yes, even if we also celebrate at the calendar year's end, we are also hard up against the awareness that our ancestral altars are made and calling to us, the remembrances of our beloved--and deeply missed--dead are coming more quickly than is typical.

It's a time of year when grief, too, is closer to the surface than it normally is. So many reminders of family and friends who are no longer embodied here with us.

And the word, Samhain...Sah-Wehn...is so soft. It's a festival that is, in the way I like to create it, meant to hold us with the soft arms of that grandmother we might be missing. In my mind these arms are pale and soft, with the flappy bits at the bottom that come with age and atrophied muscle, they wrap me in the scent of talcum powder and Suave shampoo and line dried clothing. Warm and safe and held in the heartbeat of love that has no expectations.

Sah. Wehn. Two soft expulsions of breath. Sighs, almost. Like a soft breeze ruffling brown marsh grass. Like the wind that is causing the autumn leaves to drift down over the curving mountain two-lanes. Like the sounds of pleasure when a lover’s longed for touch is finally, finally felt.

A place of ease. A place where you can grieve in safety, knowing the space is held for you as you let go.

We've all read about how the trees give us this lesson, the one of releasing, like they do their leaves. But its more than that. It is the timing that allows it. Winter, the long sleep, the time when we are most internal is close. And what we connect to, I think, in this time of Thin Veils and the vibrant beauty of the dying year is this: The very Mother, the Earth, holding the space for us to feel the inner barrenness--the winter--to come.

(Also, I don’t care how you pronounce it. If you are exploring a new way of celebrating the rhythms of the planet, the cycles of the seasons, I will celebrate you. )