November, 2009
Dear Friends:
About a week ago I put my vegetable garden to bed. While there hadn’t been a frost yet, it was looking tired. The corn stalks were turning brown and hard. The tomato plants were dried up. The acorn squash vines had shriveled. The basil was still green…sort of. I felt an overwhelming sadness admitting to myself that death was coming to the season of growth and fertility of the land, the crops, the trees, the life that sustains us.
Still, I found comfort in the peace of the garden after I’d worked it, the gentle readiness for the quiet season to come.
The next morning, when I awoke, I discovered frost on the earth I had just turned. A new and colder season, announced by a soft white gloss, made me think of these words, by an unknown writer:
Autumn is for understanding, for the longer thoughts and the deeper comprehensions.
How well it is that each year should bring such a time –
to relax the mind and give it time and room to span the valleys of belief.”
As fall turns to winter, there are many holy days that honor the turning. Halloween means Sacred Evening; a night of ghosts and goblins traveling to neighbors in search of treats, offering tricks. It joins All Saints Day and All Souls Day in the Christian tradition at the very end of October and the beginning of November as holy days honoring the moment when life meets death, and when death meets life.
Mythology has it that this is the time of year when those who have passed on to the side of life we cannot know come back to visit, to make sure we’re OK, to raise a little “Hell.” Tradition says it’s a good idea to have some of their favorite foods laid out to welcome them; so they know they are still cherished. It’s a turning of the year, and of the life of the spirit; for longer thoughts, deeper comprehensions.
In theory, Thanksgiving is a secular holiday, a day set aside to give thanks for the harvest that will see us through the infertile months of the cold earth. Yet it is our most holy celebration of family as well. We gather with family if we can. We cook with special care the dishes our family has shared on this day for generations uncountable. We share stories that bring our dead back to life, if only for a moment that warms our souls.
And I wonder whether this is yet another harvest that sustains us through the cold, the one that gives us the time and room to span the valleys of belief; the harvest of the spirit we share with all who have touched our lives.
In faith,
- Olivia |
