The Cob and Log Hampster Wheel

My current theory is this:

Look, it’s the time of the year when the membrane between this world and the afterworld is at its thinnest. This is the time when grief can be at its greatest, when our past is very much with us, and when the ache of death is present in all of our activities. It makes sense that things would get all freaky. I have to remind myself of this. I have been crying a lot lately about people who have died years ago, or people who are not in my life anymore, and I have felt very mournful for past incarnations of myself. Revisiting a lot of old themes and talking lots of walks in the old corridors of my mind.

It makes so much sense. I think that things are just this way, before we move into the quiet hibernation of winter. The wheel just keeps turning.

I think that creating and participating rituals are part of this, and I feel shy for not remembering before this weekend that we are in Samhain/All Saints Eve/post-Harvest time. Last week, I worked the Pumpkin Festival at the farm, and it was amazingly beautiful, an achingly brilliant fall day. I walked around the farm to check on the storm damage of trees (we lost a few, unfortunately), and was overwhelmed with the bare branches against the crisp sky and the fallow fields. The farm was silent, where only a few months ago, it had been buzzing with the heavy humid air and swarming insects. I felt like I could imagine myself going crazy, or stepping into another slice of time. I was, for a moment, nonexistent on this terra firma. And then I sweetly came back, and stumbled back to the festival area, where a high school jazz ensemble was playing Green Day covers, and families were participating in pumpkin-tossing contests and chestnut throws. Kids pedaled the bicycle-power blender to make whipped cream like their lives depended on it. We are alive in all our closeness to death.

Anyway, what really sealed the deal for me was bringing our houseplants in to overwinter. Rearranging the shelves to fit everything, repotting the experimental begonias and making room for them on sunny windowsills. The advertisement for the Requim Mass. The deflated pumpkins rotting on everyone’s porch.  These things are all so important, and everything that I do that honors this season seems to shed a little more light on why everything seems so crazy, so unstable, so freakish.

The afterworld is really breathing in on us close, and I think that this time of year is really asking us to face our relationship to failure, to future, to our own creativity, and to our own human strength.

I don’t know, those are my off-the-hip thoughts about it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 9th, 2005 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.