Samhain is all about taking a pause when the work has been done…. we can allow ourselves the luxury of turning inwards to the timeless, internal realm, where we can be far more than the sum of our daily activities.
(Manchán Magan, Listen to the Land Speak: 138)
Last week I came down with something. Just a bug, a common virus (not the infamous one) but it is the sickest I’ve been in years, and it really floored me. It still is. I’m writing this in 15-minute bursts, as and when I feel able.
It wasn’t what I was expecting for the last week of October and was highly inconvenient. (I signed up to do NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month; a commitment to writing 50,000 words in November and was counting on using the end of October to clear my to-do list — that didn’t happen).
October has always been a good month for me. I don’t intentionally set out for it to be anything exceptional, I’ve just noticed a pattern over the years of it being a month were I take risks, or manage to complete goals I might have been struggling with for months.
When you just look at October as the tenth month in a twelfth month calendar, there’s nothing much notable about it. It’s just the month between the frenetic ‘back to school’ energy of September and the ‘let’s get everything you’ve ever dreamed up completed before Christmas’ expectations of November.
Yet, once I began to learn what October really is — the marker or cross-over point between the end of one year and the beginning of the next and the time of change from the lighter masculine half of the year into the darker feminine— my yearly October patterns began to make more sense.
Samhain, traditionally, marks the midpoint between the Autumn Equinox and the Winter Solstice. There was once a time in Ireland when the year was divided into two seasons: the summer season of Sam and the winter season of Gam. Sam began with the festival of Bealtaine in May, signifying the beginning of the productive, busy, masculine energy of Summer, while Gam began with Samhain in November, marking the change into the slower, inward darkness of the feminine half of the year.
It was a way of looking at the world based on a pastoral way of life, when cattle returned from summer grazing and people spent more time together indoors, feasting, talking, socialising. It also, traditionally, marked the beginning of marriage season as families were more easily able to negotiate during this indoor time. I think this is why so many of the folk customs associated with Hallowe’en in Ireland are divination games to find out who could be married in the next year (the gold ring in the bairín breac, or the blindfold game with a saucer of water, soil and a gold ring), or who a future partner might be (throwing an apple peel over your shoulder to see what initials it would spell out).
Games and customs aside, my October patterns have long been in sync with this seasonal change, and this crossover from the light to the dark, really without me taking much notice of it. Every year, in those final few weeks before Samhain, things I’ve been pushing to get done all summer just seem to get completed, and risks I was previously reluctant to take seem like no-brainers. I now see how clearly this behaviour is aligned with the end of the seasonal period of masculine doing, producing and risking.
Lots of people might dismiss thoughts like this —that my behaviours may be in line with seasonal and solar change— as woo-woo. I don’t see much difference between it and say, how the modern diet, so full of sugar and processed foods, does damage to a body not evolved for it. Or how blue light exposure at night keeps us awake because our sleepy hormone, melatonin, wasn’t made for a world that banishes the dark.
If this is the cycle of the year our ancestors followed and many of the things that influenced the function of their bodies — what they ate, how they worked— were determined by it, then it seems, dare I say it, logical, that we would be impacted by it too.
There is a lot said about Samhain and Hallowe’en but the aspect of Samhain that speaks to me most is of it as an in-between time, the transition time (between Sam and Gam) where things are liminal, otherworldly, where there is a gap, a realm, between an ending and a beginning (the old and new year).
Yet, all my knowledge of what this time of year means, its importance, it’s symbolic meaning, are truly worth little when I don’t put any of it into practice.
I give these in-between times, the gaps needed between endings and beginnings, the slowing and softening required for a smooth transition from masculine to feminine energies, very little respect. I ignore them and carry on.
But this Samhain, I didn’t really get a choice, my illness forced me to slowness. You could say, my body intervened against my ignorance in not respecting endings and transitions.
As Samhain approached, getting closer and closer, and as I worked more furiously to complete things in time for my self-imposed deadline, I got sicker and sicker.
Eventually, I had no choice but to succumb and take to bed (or rather, the isolation nest I made for myself on the spare room sofa bed).
There, surrounded by paracetamol, echinacea, hot lemon and honey, I descended into the liminal world. As an incessant cough that wouldn’t let me sleep, and a tiredness that wouldn’t allow me to be fully awake held me between waking and sleeping. I was forced into a sort of otherworld. A stasis. Neither fully well nor detrimentally ill. Neither fully awake or deeply asleep. Asleep mostly by day and awake more often in the darkness of night.
Nothing profound happened. I experienced it more as a gradual awareness that this wasn’t just about being ill and recovering, it was about honouring endings and beginnings. About “taking a pause when the work has been done” and not continuing unconsciously into the next. In these times, I just can’t get away with it anymore — but it’s a hard learning.
How do you honour your endings?
P.S. If you use Spotify, Rebecca Campbell has a lovely playlist for honouring endings I just discovered this week: