Shouldn't…but Do

It is Halloween to some, Samhain to others.  On the old Celtic calendar, this is New Year’s Eve.  Tomorrow, November 1, begins a new year, the next season – winter.

November 1 seems an appropriate start to winter.  We now face our darkest moments of the year.  By December 21, solstice, things will get a little brighter.

Samhain is a fire festival.  Fire, consumptive and life giving.  Burns between time, worlds, madness and sanity.  It takes as it gives, because that is the deal.

At the end of the year, at the end of the universe, when tide meets tide, there is no sound.  When the wind has whipped last leaves from the trees, when the ship that slipped its moorings has been dashed and pushed from shore to shore – there is an oddly familiar, but unknown place, where it all settles out.

Ends are never ends, they are only in between.  It can be a very strange place.

In that place, rules do not apply, the language is strange, unknown.  The howling of the wind creates stillness, the effect of human drama, nary a ripple.

Is this the place beyond chaos? Or is it yet another deception of the immram, the great sea journey, another island of eventual horror?  Fatigue along the route extinguishes curiosity after a time – abandon oars, things happen as they will – the ship knows its way, even if the captain knows not.

Life is seen from this place with a half smile, and millennia-old eyes.   When you reach it, you may say “it was hard,” “it is good to be somewhere else,” “I wouldn’t go back.”

Clear of chaos, or in the depth of it, there is stillness—gentle indifference—to loss or victory, neither matters.  They who wish it claim Nature is benevolent, those who are sure of these things state Nature is cruel.

In the end – because that is where we are all going – we each find this place.  With every small and big finish.  The secret is death, as life, turns toward us the face we turn toward it.  And that is what marks both the end of chaos, and the beginning of the next life – our own reflection.  Nothing more, nothing less.

Nothing more, nothing less.  Greetings of the season.