Goddess Grove's Samhain
She's been waiting, waiting
She's been waiting so long
She been waiting for her children
To Remember, To Return
I left for here directly from my Witches Lunch, pausing only to talk to Hope for a short while since we both knew we'd be a little like passing ships in the night this weekend. I'm usually very good at being able to predict in advance my calendar for when I'm going to be crazy busy. And so many weekends of this month have been. Trip out of town the second weekend. Renn Fest the third. Sacred Well last weekend. All of Samhain things this weekend. Then the next two weekends are booked, too.
You can look for me not be wanting to have any solid travel plans till probably after the New Year at this rate. A month and half of things stacked on top of each other is definitely starting to take its toll already. But we, as this did start as commentary on talking to Hope, do what we can. Small pieces here and there always. Even with plans. Even with the craziness of new work, which there should be a post on someday soon, too.
I arrived, laden with all my stuff, as the first person like mostly normal. I helped with some clean-up and got to play catch-up with the house mistress and event runner, since it'd been two months since we last saw each other. Which during this is pretty much when everyone else started arriving. We chit-chatted for a little while, probably a little too long, but we always love meeting up. And it's such a small, intimate group that we all love so dearly. And then we started our day.
As we'd all been asked to bring a skull they were all placed on the altar first.
We started the very beginning with passing around a talking stick and each woman had to say first their name and then second why we loved this season or what it meant to use. While listening to two other women speak I finally had a revelation I'd been waiting for to happen that weekend. I'd been waiting on a very serious decision until Samhain, the ultimate turn of the New Year, and suddenly, especially in the wake of my dedication to Lady White, it all clicked into place.
I started my piece saying, "My name is Amanda, but at the end of this I'm going to ask you to forget that..."
I've had a secret name for my practices since I was twelve or thirteen. The likes of which only two or three people actually know or have ever heard. The initials are written on dozens of my things, but it's a secret thing, a sacred thing, and only one of those people who knows is allowed to address me by it, and then only by his nickname of it. This isn't the name I took though. That still shivers inside my veins, a part of me forever.
This was a different thing. A craft name. Stepping into myself. Setting myself apart. And like most things of weighted words that name me, it was affixed by My Girl first, years ago. Which I gave to the Priestess of my Temple of Twelve Path last year, even. But yesterday, the day before a brand new year’s start, I took it for myself. For my religious groups and those who practice with me in them, at least.
And then I talked about how and why I love this season. About all the dark and lightness of it that forever holds me captive to loving it, even when I find it to be the season that draws us the most fluffy people and the worst too often. I talked about how much I love the first half, the veneration of the ancestors and those who have gone before us, the importance of death and the thinning of the veil between the two realms. And then I talked about the second half i also love, the turning of the wheel, the new year beginning, letting go of everything of the last year, moving into the brand new, untouched and pristine.
Next, and one of my favorite parts of any day, we did chanting.
I. Rattle My Bones
Old Woman, wrap your cloak around me
Death Bringer, rattle my bones
Old Woman, wrap your cloak around me
Death Bringer, rattle my bones
Rattle my bones, rattle my bones
Death Bringer, rattle my bones
II. Eight Bead Chant
Girlseed
Bloodflower
Fruitmother
Spinmother
Midwoman
Earthcrone
Stonecrone
Bone
III. She's Been Waiting
She's been waiting, waiting
She's been waiting so long
She been waiting for her children
To Remember, To Return
Blessed be and blessed are the Lovers of the Lady
Blessed be and blessed are Maiden, Mother, Crone
Blessed be and blessed are, the ones who dance together
Blessed be and blessed are, the ones who dance alone....
IV. Mother of Darkness
Mother of darkness, Mother of Light
Earth Beneath us, Soul in Flight
Songs of Love and Love of Life
Guide us to our Heart...
V. Going Down
I'm going down in the cauldron
Don't you worry, and don't you moan
I'm gonna lay my body down, in the cauldron
Crone's a ‘callin, gonna be reborn
VI.
Mother, I feel you under my feet
Mother, I feel your heart beat
Heya heya heya, Heya heya ho
Mother, i hear you in the River's sound
Eternal waters going on and on
Heya heya heya, Heya heya ho
Mother, I see when the Eagles fly
Flight of the Spirit, gonna take our time
Heya heya heya, Heya heya ho
After this we settled into our seats for the learning portion of the afternoon. We passed around a picture of our goddess of the day (Mamam Brigitte) and talked about what the picture made us think of, or what it brought to mind.
The picture made me think of a Grandmother, a Crone, both welcoming and warning (it made me think of the ending of one of the megalith's at Sacred Well, Call me _______, but if you aren't ready don't call me at all). Her face was so full of knowledge, both of this realm and the land of the dead. The other side, as I called it then. Reaching out from a doorway, a gateway, but one where she still stood on the other side of it from us.
We talked for a long time about her, and the things with her. Mamam Brigitte is a goddess from Louisiana (yes, right here, in the good ol' US of A). A goddess of mingled religions and need, from a time of slavery, when everything was mixing. She comes to us from Haitian religion, of English-Celtic Brigid, and of Fiery Oya, with a flamboyant flare of all this voodoo and nurturing about death that you find so rarely anywhere not in that area. She is Mistress of the Cemeteries, Keeper of the Bones, Mother of the Dead.
She is the one who is there to steady you when you wake on the other side. The Mother who orients you to this new world, the same way you were once as a baby of the living. To learn the world without skin and life. It was very important to focus on the different between her being an Earth Goddess, because she is a Goddess of Cemeteries, which are here, in this ground, and not an Under World goddess like Persephone, who is with you far beyond here.
And we spent a large amount of time talking about the dissociation of death in our culture. The rituals of death, of dying, of bodies, of graves, and even of grieving. We're so disassociated from it that we begin to push people aside in our decades before they will actually die. We expect mourning to take place over weekends and that people will come back to work on Mondays. We make graveyards sterile places (which they aren't at all in New Orleans. A graveyard procession is beautiful and awe-inspiring and doesn't require a funeral) and we prettify dead bodies as though it would wound someone to see the slackened form as it really was now.
I wonder how different a world would be where grief and death had its place. If bodies were left in caskets for days, and mirrors covered, if grief was given its own time to happen in, where you could feel it changing. I don't know how I would feel, but I think if my sister's body had been somewhere other than a sterile hospital room, maybe I could have come to terms with her death and having died before it was three months later, waking up sobbing for the first time, and not knowing if i could have gone to anyone.
I think we do need better ways of dealing with aging and death and dying.
More grace and more knowledge than this 'modern' age displays each year.
We followed this up the a meditation holding out Skulls. We walked through each of the months and season of our last year individually. Picking out the things that hurt or were hard or the effort done. Taking them and giving them over. To the grave. To the bones. To Mamam Brigitte to take with her into her cemeteries and let rest, so that we were free to go onward with our lives, with our path, bright and bold and beautiful into the new year.
For as short as that paragraph is, it was a long meditation, with my finger caressed the eye holds and head plates of my skull, walking through the hardest parts of my year each with minutes to think about and to give away, to the air, to the grave. It was so incredibly powerful for me. Especially with everything that's been with me, on my shoulders, and in me from all of this last year. Last October, and this spring, this summer, and even in the recent weeks.
I almost wrote 'it's going to be with me for a long time' but my fingers stopped, because it won't. I gave it all away and I'm done with all of that. A powerful, beautiful gift from our Priestess and Mamam Brigitte.
After our meditation, the lady running it pulled a set of black board off the altar, handed them to all of us and a stack of journals and we did a timed collage of our wishes/will for next year. Even going as fast I could I couldn't finish it. (I wouldn't, in fact, finish it until later that night at home talking to Earl. But I only used pieces cut out and picked during my timed period in class, because I didn't want to pull anything else in it.)
Taken at the end of the night, at home.
I wasn't done when we finished, and I was a little persnickety about it in my head. To myself. To the timeframe, but I stopped along with everyone else. Because our time was running a little late and we still needed. Everyone put on their masks or ones donated to them. And then I began to have issues. I tried a lot not to. Except I was already sniffly that day which meant my nose was irritated, with meant my skin was and then the mask was rubbing across all of that space and my cheeks.
We, as the participants, were told to sit in the sitting room and we did. The lights off, and the house dark as night had already fallen, and then all of us in the dark room talking. Until the main lady came, quietly among us, and took my hand, leading me up from the chair. All the ramping cranky about my unfinished collage and my bothersome mask, and she leaned over, her fingers like bones and whispered, "When the times comes, you'll never be ready."
And
everything
stopped then.
And I could see so many things at once. My sister's dissolving. Phoenix's death. Korea. Billy. All of this summer's panic. Hope's voice, saying all too clearly, Too Late, from this spring. And my shoulder's fell. So much of life and death fits into those word. As above, so below. No matter what, you'll never be perfectly ready. It's okay to live with that, too. It's what you do after that, that matters.
I took my place at the circle center piece laid out for us meditating on those words and the thoughts that came from them. But my skin wasn't entirely so helpful. Anytime I took a breath in my nose or mouth my mask would irritate my skin. But a lovely friend, once she was seated, who had been seated by me in the sitting room, had a brilliant idea and she got up, went to her bag and returned to me with a really long black veil. Which worked epically better.
I need to invest in getting myself one of those for this purpose.
The ritual was really nice. We cast our own personal circle around ourselves first, turning outward when we were done. Then we cast a communal circle in call and response. Followed by the elemental invocation. (I'd almost completely forgotten I'd volunteered myself for this months ago. I jokingly asked if I was water, based on the last two Sacred Well random, only to remember amid the face made at far earlier in the day, that it was Air. Because this is the group that I accidentally got covered in yellow air candle wax in , who knew about my year dedication). It went awesome for all of that.
The work itself was actually hugely powerful. From Mamam Brigitte each of us was given a paper (to write down the thing, or things, we most wanted to give up of the past year) and a small coffin to lock it inside once we were done. We held the small coffin in our hands and then once everyone was done, we were allowed to say one or two sentence about what we most wanted to give up. I had so much to say and I can't for the life of me remember what the first sentence I said was.
Maybe something about Billy/Korea, but I remember so clearly my second sentence. Because it fell out of my mouth completely unplanned
"I give up on believing I am helpless....
.....on believe helplessness really even exists."
Then it was chunked into the huge cauldron, just like everyone else's, at the end there being a so mote it be to everyone statement. Next we lit tea lights and meditated on our skulls, thinking as big as we wanted about what the next year should be full for us. Followed be getting to say one or two sentences about what we wanted to draw into the next year. After each statement there was a massive storm of talking as everyone chimed in with amazing encouragement, soft or loud, sweet or bawdy, drawing in that it could only be like that, that it could be seen, that it would be.
I asked for peace in my relationship, and a full time job I'd like. We closed up our circle after that, being informed we could dispose of our coffins however we best deemed fit at home. (My plan at present is to be rid of it tonight, as the first use of my adorable triple moon cauldron Earl got for me at Renn Faire, which, yes, one day there will be pictures of).
We moved on to the kitchen where we always have our feast afterwards. I love people gathering around tables in kitchens giggling. And the food is always amazing. So many of my sisters make amazing from scratch dishes that 'just came to mind for today' or 'wanted to see if you/she would be able to eat this.' I was definitely in love, though I did forget to bring home either a homemade candy apple or sugar skull. But even more awesome stuff distracted me.
We were already running late at this point, which we usually are, but the house we are is almost always empty of the Priestess husband and children, all boys. In two years, I've occasionally caught sight of one of the four of these people for a few seconds but never more. Since we'd run late four of our sisters had to leave really quickly after closing, and it left only the mistress of the house and two of us. Who said we really didn't mind if they wanted to come in.
So for the first time in two years, I got to meet the lovely man who makes it possible for all of our women-only circles. He was rather sweet and it felt very full circle to be able to tell him thank you, and to talk to them, and watch children inhale cake in one bite, and after they went to bed, to be laughing so hard I was crying and it was making my head hurt. A rare but beautiful end to a night.
Laughing and getting a two-thirds shot of the outfit!