It is said that the veil is thin at Samhain. The veil between the living and the dead. I ponder this veil. Of what is it woven? For what reason was it hung? And by whom? Is it for the protection of the living or the dead?
And what is the land of the dead?
So often, it is depicted as a joyless dry dusty place where dreams die along with the dreamers, whose life has been lived and whose future is gone; the hourglass that has run out of grains of hope. If this is how you see the land of the dead you watch too many horror films.
Neither do I think it is in the Halls of Valhalla where Odin’s warriors enjoy fighting and feasting until the day of reckoning, when they must fight their last fight at Ragnarok when even the gods are said to be doomed to die.
So what is life after death?
Let me ask instead what is it that has died?
It is just a body. A part of the living Earth that was gifted to a soul for a while before they had to hand it back to Earth with grateful thanks for the life it shared with them. The soul lives on. All souls live on, they do not die, they do not go to sleep – they have no need of it.
So why do we have a veil at all?
I think the veil exists because it is woven of flesh and bone. And upon it we have embroidered our thoughts and fears and uncertainties and stories and ancestral memories, until it is too thick for us to see through and it has become a mere backdrop to our busy life.
Until, that is, we reach Samhain, the year’s end, when the last fruits have been picked and stored, when the last leaves have fallen from the trees, when the land sits quietly around us nurturing the captured summer sunlight; when our rush of summer dreaming is over and we turn our thoughts inward; when we pause for a while in introspection and remembrance.
And as we breath into those moments, the tight weave of the veil loosens and we have a glimpse of something beyond. And if we can bring ourselves to untangle the threads of our embroidery, the backstitch of fears and uncertainties, the satin stitch of guilt and shame, the daisy chain of hearsay and tradition, and the cross stitch of doubt, we find that the veil was of our own making.
At that moment we can happily stand with the dead, for they are not dead at all. They are souls, just like you and I. Except now they can see more clearly unencumbered by the veil that they wove when they walked the Earth.
Our time on Earth is something to be celebrated. So let us use this introspective time of Samhain to think on our life, and that of our ancestors and give thanks for all that we have been gifted and all that we have learned. But let us also untangle the threads of hearsay and tradition so that we can look one another in the eyes and see that their soul is on a journey just like ours. Then, maybe, we can walk together towards the new dawn.
Samhain Blessings