Samhain – Halloween – Debacle

The image is borrowed from: triplegoddesscoven.com Please check out their post, it gives decent info on Samhain history.

October 31st is a big day for Pagans, it is New Years Eve for us. According to the old calendar that follows the moon cycles and harvest seasons of the year, this day marks the turning over of the year.

For my day I stayed off social media most of the day and allowed myself to listen to the world around me, feel things that need feeling and acknowledge and appreciate my ancestors and loved ones that have passed on.

There is the preparation of the home, smudging – burning sage to cleanse and renew – sometimes I’ll do a ceremonial sweeping of the old out and if possible I will put together a special dinner. Usually autumn vegetables and fowl of some kind or a stew and a dessert. Later, around midnight I will have my prayer, release of things I no longer want to hold onto and state what I want to focus on for myself in the new year ritual among other things. Then head to bed after feeling satisfied and anticipating the new day ahead.

This year however, things went a bit…differently. There was a theme to the day and it was “too much”. I’m going to meditate on this for a few days. From the beginning things seemed to go just a bit wrong. Nothing overly dramatic but enough to have me a bit frazzled and paying attention half way through the day because things just don’t normally go so obviously for me.

I burned sage this morning and the bundle lit up like a torch, which usually I have to use air to keep it going. Not this time, it scared me and took extra long to put out.
Going to do the grocery shopping took extra long because of a crazy amount of traffic. What should have been 10 minutes took me almost 30 to get there.
Then when there I ended up buying an herb I didn’t need and not the one I did.
Got home and put the last of some leftovers on the stove for my lunch and proceeded to burn it.
Started preparing dinner: I made Czech goulash and the paprika dumped too much into the pot, one of the onions was over ripe. I made Slovakian potato dumplings for the first time and didn’t roll the dough thin enough so they were very heavy. I made a sweet potato, corn and blackbean hash and the garlic was too prominent.
Ritual went fine, thankfully.

After giving this situation some thought, it seems to me I should be focusing on my health. Too much. This year has been too much eating, too much over-indulging, too much laziness, too much hiding in my lovely home. So, on this November 1st, my focus for the dark half of the year will be on health. Somewhere a year ago or so I lost my push to get healthier. Time to get back into it.