I feel like I’m writing on the edge of the Veil. By the time anyone reads this, the Wheel will have turned with a banshee scream and, hopefully, the heaviness of the season will have lifted. Yet here I am, prepping candy bowls and carving jack-o-lanterns, swaying to an ancestral hymn on the precipice of the Old Year. It’s almost time to jump, to cross the threshold into the stillness that waits beyond Samhaine.

Samhaine… this year has been difficult, hasn’t it? Nearly every person I know has had a tale of sorrow to tell this year. While there are many of us who have had losses of loved ones this year, those who haven’t have still paid the ferryman as they’ve let go of dreams and friendships or have simply come more face to face with their own mortality. It’s as though Autumn’s gilded cloak was lined with lead… great beauty but oh, so heavy.

It’s during years like these that the need-fire lives up to its name. The Samhaine fire becomes a beacon to those we need to share space with one last time, drawing them closer to hear our words of love and our farewells. Some of my coveners will say goodbye to people, to relationships, to jobs, to hopes, to a measure of health. We’ve all felt the hand of death on us in some way or another. For me, it’s myself on the pyre this year. Perspectives that no longer serve me, habits that no longer control me, fears that no longer chill my heart… so many things to leave on this side of the Veil. It’s hard work to part with anything. Attachment is the equivalent of spiritual kudzu. Samhaine just happens to be the time for one last burst of hard work before our much needed rest.

And so we mark the final harvest of another year, another lesson, another life.

I’ve long said, “Give me an eight-spoked Wheel and I’ll tell show you the wisdom of the world.”. A large part of my path involves the pursuit of natural philosophy as it relates to the process of living. My Scottish ancestors observed Samhaine with a bonfire and sacrifice near the sacred oak tree at the Clan keep until the Crown hung my forefathers for sorcery and destroyed the castle and burned that oak to the ground. There’s probably more than a bit of Druidical leaning in my blood and the gift of observing Nature’s wisdom and applying it is something I pull into all aspects of my life and my writing.

One thing I’ve noticed in my musings on the Wheel… as we move from the blood harvest of Samhaine and into the downspiral of gathering darkness, our modern society does exactly opposite of what the Wheel is doing between Samhaine and Yule. Instead of slowing down and resting, society speeds up.

It goes something like this.

Halloween items are out at Back To School time. Thanksgiving items are in stores by Labor Day. Yule decorations are out by mid-October and by the second week in November, you feel sorry for the retail folk who you know have to listen to holiday music for at least six more weeks. Holiday shopping is upon you. The roads are bloody crowded. Most people are working longer hours to pay for more gifts, bigger gifts, or just gifts they feel they are obligated to give. The holiday calendar looks like a train-wreck on paper. Time to bake cookies? Not likely. Decorate the house? That’s why we left the decorations up from LAST year. Read the sales papers; find out who has what’s hot this year. People camp out in lines to get the best deal.

News headlines begin to fill with stories about fights in stores over some toy. You go from party to party, house to house, store to store. It’s cold; it’s wet. You’re hungry because you don’t have time to eat or cook a proper meal so you pick up fast food which is not anything remotely resembling good nutrition. You tense up at the thought of family gatherings – somehow, Samhaine never quite banishes those ghosts.

You are inundated by holiday music everywhere you go – half of it is benign enough, but the other half is religious material for a faith that’s not even yours. You push through Yule, through Christmas, through the days of holiday shopping afterwards where you find out what the stores REALLY could have sold you everything for in the first place because they mark it down 50%. You fight the crowds at the return counters. And then comes the ease (Ease? Since when?) of taking down the tree and putting everything away until next year. When secular New Year rolls around, you need that party and that cocktail. Badly.

What is restful about all of that?

In the meantime, the earth mirrors our rat-race behavior in precise opposite. Nature asks the oak trees to drop their leaves, thinking we’ll get the hint and drop a few of the activities that had us running all summer. Our sunlit days shorten but do we shorten our schedules or do we rush to do one more thing, enabled by fluorescent store lighting and the social expectations of the season? The ground hardens and animals show themselves less. Even the nights are still and crystalline. The wind blows, but with no leaves to move in the breeze, we only recognize its passing in the sharp surge of cold air. Naked silhouettes of trees stand in sharp relief to the indigo sky, branches glowing so even the mundane wonder at their beauty.

The Winter Queen draws designs in ice on windowpanes and windshields while we sleep because She wants to marvel at their scintillations in the morning sun. Gone are the dahlias of summer, though our minds recall their place against the fence long after we have cut back the last of the foliage. Orion takes to the sky and strides across heaven’s vault, ever hunting, ever watchful of Gaia who, in stillness, sleeps.

Our lives, too, echo this cycle. Samhaine is the crossing point and death is the name for the event that births us into the beyond. Just as Nature’s splendor withers and fades into a season of rest, so too do I believe our spirits cross over into a time of pause and reflection. We look back at what we learned before setting our goals for the next lifetime and before we choose where and when and to whom we will be born, thus planting ourselves in the proper place and time for our next lifetime of spiritual growth.

This is where I find myself tonight. Like Janus, I look backward to the Old Year and its heavy lessons, and I look forward to the season of stillness and rest at the advent of the New Year. Now is not the time for New Year’s resolutions. What resolutions can we make when we haven’t fully paused to reflect on our total harvest of the last year? No, those resolutions are better set during the Capricorn sun, growing daily in light and filled with the ambition of a new solar year.

This is the season of rest. It is a time of giving what we already have, not working to acquire more. Now is the time to gather close and settle back, to sip something warm and count our blessings in every wisp of steam spiraling up from mug of cider or cocoa. These are the days of thankfulness and gratitude, neither of which requires anything from us but a merry heart and a joyous song and the acknowledgement that we have all we need.

Take up a hobby, read a book, cook up a pot of soup you’ll eat on for days, bake bread, snuggle up with someone, watch the movies you loved as a child and do so with no apologies to anyone for shedding a tear when Clarence gets his wings for helping George Bailey learn how wonderful his life truly is. And most importantly, take some time to share that abundance and that joy. Draw another person who needs that sanctuary into your home and your life and slow them down long enough to ply them with soup, bread, cocoa, movies, friendship and love.

As one of my favorite songs by Simon and Garfunkel goes, “Slow Down, You Move Too Fast”. Don’t we, though? So, as we leap from the cliff’s edge of the Old Year to glide down on stronger wings into the New Year, take some time to soar on the updrafts and rest. Skip down the cobblestones of your life, have a holiday cookie and ooh and aah at the stars and the twinkling lights. Take care to move with the earth and not the mall crowds, and remember the season and who you are.

It’s time to chill (literally!) and you are a Child of Gaia. You’re looking for fun and feelin’ groovy.

Happy New Year, everyone! May the Wheel turn in peace and abundance for you and yours.

Published 11/9/08, Witchvox Feature Article