Pumpkin Blues

I have been a pumpkin-carver wanna-be for a while. I have always envied those people who could carve intricate designs in a pumpkin, with curves and curlicues and shapes that seemed to defy the reality of a paring knife. My pumpkins were usually limitted to three triangles (two eyes and a nose) with a gaping toothless smile. That was pretty much all I could manage with paring knives. More often than not, I would cut the teeth off my pumpkin face as the paring knife would slip just as I got close! If I was lucky, my pumpkin would have one tooth! This year, I was introduced to a higher level of pumpkin carving via the oh-so-cheap "pumpkin carving kit"... complete with two small saw like instruments, pumpkin guts scooper, felt pen and tracing templates. Amazing!!! That is all I can say!! I have spent the last 44 years of my life using crude and clutzy instruments to carve pumpkins... massacre pumpkins is more like it. And now... the fine intricacies of pumpkin carving have openned up to me. Which only goes to show... sometimes it isn't the skill that makes a difference, sometimes you do need the right tools for the job. Yet, all this pumpkin carving is for naught apparently. It is past 7:30 pm and although we have Halloween decals on the windows, Halloween wind streamers and pumpkins... we have no trick-or-treaters! Quite a disappointment... but perhaps Hallloween is evolving...

Originally the pagan festival of Samhain, this date and feast was usurped by the Church as All Hallows Eve, the night before All Saints day. Recently, the Church has lamented on the fact that this orignally Christian feast has become a secular event. Now, it seems to becoming solely a marketing event. Lots of decorations out there, pumpkins sold out at Superstore, some people dressed up, but really, no heart to it anymore. Fears of H1N1, fears of sexual predators, fears of razors in candy all suffice to keep people close to home this year. Has Halloween found its demise?? Is it a non-event... something whose time has come and gone...

Perhaps we have lost touch with the deeper routes of the feast... standing in the face of the fear of death and mocking it, making fun of it, laughing at it... and moving on with our lives. In Mexico, the Day of the Dead, celebrated on Nov 1, is still a major holiday festival with parades and decorations galore. The heart of the holiday is to remember those who have died. Perhaps we have lost that heart in our Halloween. It has become something else, something shallow that means nothing. Humans like rituals, we connect with the deeper meaning of things. If Halloween has lost its deeper meaning, it is to be expected that it will become a shallow husk, a hollow of its former glory. Perhaps the Mexicans have it right... celebrate the heart of it... laughing at the seeming triumph of death, but always knowing, believing that there is something more...

The pagans of former centuries believed that on the festival of Samhain, the boundary between this world and the underworld became thin. They believed in the afterlife, believed in something beyond this life. Perhaps, we do well to recognize the power of that boundary, the boundary between life and death... or between life and new-life...

Flow of Life

Today I gave blood for the 25th time in my life. Given that we can donate every 56 days, it is clear that either (a) I'm very young, or (b) I haven't been as conscientious about donating as I could be! The answer in this case is (b)!! "Too busy, forgot the appointment... they have enough people..." Some of the excuses I can come up with, quite weak ones obviously, and yet ones that hold me in their grip more often than not.

Scientists tell us that the air we are breathing today has been breathed in China, that it has gone in and out of the lungs of countless people. That can seem a little weird and removed. Donating blood on the other hand has an immediacy to it. My blood, the blood that has been keeping me alive, will be flowing through the veins and arteries of other people shortly, giving them life. My life being shared with the lives of others.

Sometimes I walk down the street and think, "maybe they received my blood". And there is a sense of connection. We are connected, at a deep and fundamental level. My blood has mingled with theirs, so that there is no longer "my blood" and "their blood"... it is "our blood".

Beyond breathing the same air, and sharing the same blood... all of us are connected. We are One. We come from the same stardust, come from the same clay of the earth. We are more alike than we are different. We like to think we are special and different, but when it comes right down to it... we are motes of the whole. Motes of the divine... dancing a dance in which we believe we are separate... and yet connected by the divine symphony to which we dance.