Greetings and blessings you all on the eve of Samhain. For those of you are just learning or are curious Samhian is the Celtic New Year as well as one of the most important days of the pagan calender known as the Wheel of the Year.
I wanted to take some time to reflect on all of the changes and happenings of this year. While I recognize that there are still two months of our calender year left, for myself personally, I see the Wheel of the Year as a spiritual calender.
Samhain and even Halloween has a resounding theme to it and has for centuries: Death.
The number one thing that most people are afraid to talk about other then religion and politics. Death is the the greatest unknown of our time. Sure there is a wealth that we don't know about space and even the vast majority of our oceans are unexplored. But we can develop technologies to investigate space and the depths of the sea. You can't exactly research death. You can research the cause, and there seems to be a rather unanimous consensus that there is no coming back from it. It's death.
One thing that I have been learning more and more is that death is a part of every day life. I don't mean in the sense of people die everyday, there's a unanimous consensus about that too. Just that death is a form of extreme change.
There have been so many things that have taken place in such a short amount of time, that I can hardly believe it some times. And the fact that things are still changing, and shifting, and evolving by itself can sometimes be overwhelming.
I also don't see an option of things to either slow down, or the option to stop. This ball started off slowly, and I have waited long enough to get it going to risk stopping it now. Not to say that I am always ready for change, or that I always handle the change well.
To be perfectly honest, I'm not the biggest fan of unexpected change. Suddenly letting go, or saying goodbye has never been an easy task.
I am an extremely stubborn person, I do not take hints very well. Up until the last two years, I have had to had my ass handed to me on a silver platter to consider change. Not exactly a productive way to go about things. It could very well be the reason that one particular god has taken an interest in me, or seen my need for his help, and why this time of year has such a personal and spiritual significance for me. Which I will get to in a moment.
When my life came crashing down around me last April, I didn't have another choice, I HAD to change. EVERYTHING had to change.
Change came slowly because I was in a state of utter mourning. Everything that I had planned, and relied on was gone, and I was what was left. I was literally starting with nothing and had to figure out what the hell I was going to do, and how I was going to do it.
I didn't celebrate Samhain last year because I was still in the middle of living it all. I had been making progress sure, but nothing that made me feeling like celebrating.
Fast forward to a week before Thanksgiving and I was all riled up about something so I figured the best way to calm down would be to meditate, ground myself and then move on. I got a lot more then I bargained for during that meditation.
Now I was shocked as hell (no pun intended) that Hades came to me in a meditation almost a year ago now, and took me on a journey to see a past life. Up until that point I saw different gods and goddesses as different aspects from different cultures of the two halves of the Source, the Universe, the Ultimate Power. And now, here was the last figure of the male half of deity that I ever expected to encounter was standing in front of me wanting to take a road trip.
In that life I experienced tremendous heartbreak like most people did during that time period, and was even given a glimpse of how I turned that unspeakable grief into something. When he brought me back he said one thing that I have been unable to forget.
"I don't like repeating myself, don't make me have to do that."
Not exactly the words you would expect from a god, but in my experience deity has a way of communicating to you on your level, regardless of what form it takes. Hades has popped up here and there throughout this year as a way of helping me to recognize when it's time for something in my life to die. Some times it's yet another thread to something I have been working on letting go, others are whole pieces of my life that it is time to say goodbye to.
This year is a whole other story. And I want to be clear, that for me Samhain is not about celebrating the death of the horrible experiences that I've had.
It's about celebrating who I have become because of those changes, and the progress I have made. It's about being thankful that things that once held me back and tied me down no longer exist.
The time in between Samhain and Yule for me is really about lying low, resting and just letting things flow. It's the dark time before the Sun is reborn. It is a time for solitary reflection on what I can take away from those lessons that I have learned. It's about taking responsibility for what I may have ignored, and about making a plan for moving forward.
When I think on it, and I may have mentioned this previously, but if someone had told me how...difficult, this path can be at times, I might have had second thoughts. I know that I don't have a way back to a life without it, and I don't regret taking those first steps and accepting what I know in my heart and soul to be true.
So, I will probably not be writing again until around Yule when school is on break, which is the second week in December.
Love and light to you and yours,
Thea
©2013-2015 Thealynn
