Danse Macabre, or How I Learned to Love the Skeleton
We don't like to think about the death. In fact much of the West was built to evade it. But it's always right there under the surface
Halloween wasn't always my favourite. The truth is as a child it terrified me. I enjoyed the dress up, embodying identities I assumed in play, but the rest of it was a living nightmare. The Monster Mash made my blood run cold; paper vampires sent me scuttling into my mother's arms.
But the worst of it was skeletons.
This was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen.
After several years of frightened tears and sleepless nights my mother decided to dispell my fears by telling me skeletons weren't scary--in fact each and every one of us had a skeleton inside.
Well.
That didn't exactly go well.
Instead of bravely facing the opening of my favourite seasonal show or staring down the decorations at the grocery store, I now couldn't look another human being in the eye without imagining them as a leering undead monster.
It took me some years to come to terms with the ever-present symbolism of death.
I innoculated myself through a constant stream of horror. I brought home books from the library about hauntings and scared my friends with werewolf folklore. I romanticized vampires and hung out in graveyards after dark and took photographs of decay.
But looking back it was all pantomime.
Plato argued that stories created a false sense of knowledge about the world. Watching characters enact situations that would be otherwise foreign to us stoked a false sense of sympathy. It doesn't actually give us knowledge of these situations, only a false impression of lived experience.
Or inexperience.
Because today's Halloween is a prolonged festival of childhood fears. All cartoon and camp, its bedsheet spirits are unrecognizable as the unquiet dead.
The West has a way of draining the meaning from everything it touches. Tradition is followed blindly, devolving into empty pageantry that begs for the scrutiny of cynics.
The truth is there is no strength to be taken from a charade. If you can lose the meaning, you can banish the power.
On Friday morning I awoke feeling more cheerful than I had in weeks. The Dying Season had arrived, but I felt life stirring within me. After a long dormant season, I felt myself beginning the long uphill climb out of the underworld.
I opened my back door to leave an offering of peanuts for our favourite chipmunk, but as I placed them neatly beside his hideout a flash of brilliant red caught my eye.
There, next to my door, was a dead cardinal.
He was beautiful. A perfect miracle of nature, sleek and soft and scarlet, lifeless in the stone of my walkway.
My heart sank.
When we first saw this house I fell in love with its view. A mid-century A frame boasting nearly floor-to-ceiling windows, it floods with light each afternoon when the sun is high. I imagined sunset cocktail parties, morning coffee in the mountain mists, days upon days without lighting a lamp...
My only thoughts of spring were of flowering trees and wide swaths of green across the forest below.
Until a wood thrush showed up on my front porch. And I realized that beauty always comes with a price.
This land has taught me many things in the short time we've been here, much of which I resisted in the past. I've learned more by watching the seasons change than I have from any human teacher. And as we move into our second year here, I seek a balance between the roles of steward and student.
I am part of a complex ecosystem, and yet my presence here is a challenge.
And it struck me just how divorced we are from the concept of death, even on the holiday once meant to honor it.
On Halloweens past I hurried through the day in order to indulge the night, dress myself up and lose myself to the collective possession of a party somewhere… I would deprive my body and then poison it with chemical confections, leaving myself depleted and sick for days afterwards. The irony now is obvious: on the day reserved for death, I danced a little too close for comfort.
Tomorrow is never certain, even in our world of advanced technology and medical intervention. Death is a part of life. We can hide it in our cabinets, sweep it under rugs, but it's always present.
For most today is a parade of make-believe, all horrors transformed into harmless caricatures. But underneath the candy shell, there's a very real skeleton.
And that delicate balance between creation and destruction what makes life so beautiful.
Today, make sure you live. Go for a walk, sing out loud, dance fearlessly, eat well. Remember that those paper ghosts mean something. And so do you.
Life, Magically contains my personal thoughts and reflections. You're recieving this email because you subscribe to That Astrologer, featuring my academic explorations of the occult and esoterica. You can find me in Instagram @fairlietheta as well as links to my other projects and pursuits.
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Love the photo of you both dressed up!!!