Samhain (saw-wen) — Celtic New Year ritual

Tonight is Samhain (Saw-wen), which spans Oct 30 – Nov 1. This is the time of year when the ordinary and non-ordinary reality are a veil apart. It is important to honor the helpful ancestral spirits, the ones who are here for our benefit, to teach and protect us, to ask those spirits to come around from behind us to watch over us. It is also the time of year when we need their protection most because there are spirits who are more predatory or who can harm us. Even a light smudge and a simple prayer for protection would be extremely timely . . . protection for you and those you love.

Samhain is the Celtic New Year and begins at sunset. It is the transition from Summer to Winter. Traditionally, anciently, the cows were brought down from the high pastures into the paddock, and they themselves were smudged (the animals that is). Nothing was harvested after today because the land belonged to the winter spirits. (i.e., if you harvest a squash after today, simply ask permission of the Winter spirits, that is the idea.) The hearth fire was symbolically lit, as a part of the Samhain ritual, but that could be a candle; once lit it can stay lit or be extinguished, it is the act of kindling the ritual flame that is important. While lighting the fire or candle, acknowledge and honor the house spirits and the home spirits,  the ones who watch over the house and land.

The point is, (if you want to do more ritual) (Adapt these ritual elements to your situation:) Douse the house lights (and hearth-fire). If you are having a Samhain fire outside, light it when the sun sets. (This can be a modest fire.) Bring a stone to place it on a cairn, (breathing into the stone a prayer for the world, a prayer for family and community and a prayer for yourself silent or aloud). tell stories of ancestors while passing around apples to all present. (Remember that ancestors are not just blood-ancestors but all those who lived before us!) As you bite into the apples, while listening to stories (or silence) recognize the miracle of embodiment, being in a body, which the apple represents! To the spirits a body is a wonder and a blessing. The apple is the sweetness of life. Toss the core ritually as an offering to the animals who know all about the transition to Winter. Light a candle from the Samhain fire. You can blow it out but bring it into the house and relight it there. That represents the hearth-fire, the renewed light and warmth for the coming year and the Winter. This is all very propitious and auspicious, doing these very old rituals!!!

PS Even if you only half believe this, I recommend doing it. Trust others’ experience. I promise you, spirits, both ancestral and Nature spirits, are very real.

Waiting for the Barbarians — a solution of a sort (a resurrected poem)

Waiting for the Barbarians

by Willis Barnstone


And now what will we do without the barbarians? — C.P.Cavafy


The emperor has no brains. His ministers, mentors
and minions know the condition of our leader
and administrate his mind with blatant tact,
and no one, not even his cowed opponents, breaks
the hypocritical code. The aura of silence about
the emperor’s mind is mandated by expediency.
No child calls out: The emperor has no brains!


And we seem lost. Maybe the word hypocrisy
is severe to type a man who stumbled to his throne
on an orange, and fear makes him popular.
As regional crown prince he broke a record
for executing hooligans, each time blessing God
for his harsh mercy.The popular fears stay on.
We’re united. Would you be profiled traitor? 


The emperor depends on the holy barbarians
who march in multitudes, who tremble the streets
down to their tar intestines. These ancient furies
tear their hair out and rip bras and blouses
from their bodies. Our leader prays softly at barbaric 
hoots. They cry Idiot They shriek Face of Satan!
Our monarch is pleased their wicked ways are loud.


Our people love a dumb emperor. He’s one of us
a common man with vices who likes a pistol,
a guy talking back to barbarians. He will bomb them
before they smash us. He smiles and looks frightened
yet it’s sweet to be an emperor and host premiers,
athletes and heroes, and not live in a sewer
but in a great white house circled by big cannons.


There is a melancholy in our land. And bad news.
Russians claim barbarians live only in the Caucuses
or have facelifts and own slot machine parlors.
Are there no wild beasts in a desert once Eden?
Our empoeror’s men have gone underground
in panic but send up blueprints to create
a goat-horned dragon roaring over the ocean.


Our mindless caesar lies on the ground and weeps.
it is sad to live under a subnormal emperor.
We are tanking and he bumps along in his golf cart.
The barbarians were a solution. Another winter.
What can we do? We’re obedient as Mongol ponies.
The emperor’s minions haunt an underground city
run secret courts and e-mail God for our next step.


We are waiting for the barbarians.Our emperor
has memorized his speech. He has no brains
yet our daughter comes home from school, saying:
Our emperor seems crudely smart and wicked.
Maybe our barbarians will not blow up the world
or fling us all in prison. The sad one smiles.
There is a terrible melancholy in our land. 
…………….
(from Wikipedia) The original poem, “Waiting for the Barbarians” (of which this poem by Barnstone is a take-off) is a poem by a Greek, Constantine P. Cavafy, written in November 1898 and printed around December 1904, as a private pamphlet. Cavafy’s poem falls under the umbrella of historical poems Cavafy, a Classicist, created in his anthology. Cavafy’s poem describes a city-state in decline, (modeled after Alexandria?) whose population and legislators are waiting for the arrival of the ‘Barbarians’. When night falls, the barbarians have not arrived. Cavafy’s poem ends:’What is to become of us without Barbarians? Those people were a solution of a sort.’


This poem by Willis Barnstone, by the same title, is Barnstone’s version of Cavafy’s poem. Willis’s poem was written over a hundred years later, about 15 years ago. (I can’t find a date for it.)


When we read Barnstone’s poem, we automatically cast Trump as the emperor, but for me the brainless emperor riding around in a golf cart is an archetype constellated by every president who has presided over our travesty of a democracy that I can think of. When we read this poem we might also cast the January 6 insurrectionists of the Capital as the barbarians, but there is a darker implication.The barbarians are the loud, violent ones who act out brainlessly, but for me the most disturbing line is in the second to last stanza: 


The emperor’s minions haunt an underground city
run secret courts and e-mail God for our next step. 


. . . Not their next step . . . “our” next step.


Let’s stop waiting for the barbarians to displace our brokenness with a “solution of a sort”. I still believe we can do better than that. 

If I were to die: A love poem: followed by a reflection

If I were to die tonight or tomorrow
I would need you to know
That I don’t think we are done seeing each other
So it would not be good-bye.

Remember when I told you
How your moon-eyes bring tears to mine?
That was many moons ago!
I am sorry for all the times

Your moon-eyes were hidden by my cloud . . .
Or maybe that was another life
When I was a cloud and you were the moon.
(sigh) My soul is tired of hearing me say, Sorry

So let me skip the thousand excuses
And let this one stand for the rest
Of the reasons I felt so heavy
Climbing the back of the hill yesterday.

Not sorry for getting old before you.
But sorry that I Iost my sense of joy
Along the way! Sorry that I
Lost my way to your smiling eyes!

Yesterday we started our walk together on the road
And at the turn-around I decided to walk home
Through the woods
Over the back of the hill.

The sound of leaves
Crisping under foot was my familiar along with
The smell of last year’s fallen, penetrating
To the deepest chambers of the nautilus of my brain.

Each noisy step a giveaway
That I am coming,
Large and clumsy,
But harmless.

And then it was I saw the feather,
A beautiful wing feather that hawk
Dropped onto that thread of a path
That I should never have taken,

It being bow season in Vermont
And me in brown and black.
Holding that magnificent feather
I could picture it falling, spinning

Pirouetting from a high place in the sky.
But as I walked down into more familiar woods
Within that magical protection
I imagined an arrow entering my heart.

And the hunter, following his arrow,
Finding me with the shaft buried deep in my chest.
And I am saying, Get my wife.
Just go get my wife!

Such a strange poem to write
About love and death
And hawk and your crescent eyes!
But I know why I wrote it.

I wrote it as a hunter
Stalking his own life,
With a hawk feather for my resurrection
Chanting, Here I come!

Here I come!

…………………

Longer poems are like power lines:

Does writing about a poem add anything to a post like this? Sometimes I think the poem is enough all by itself, but, in my experience such is not always the case. Sometimes a poem is like an attractive (for whatever reason) box, that the reader unwraps, appreciates, puts on a (mental) shelf and never returns to, or they share it a few times and forget it. We assimilate some deep or beautiful message or insight or image and that reduces the poem to a shell or wrapping. I would argue that poets do, often, write poems like that, using language (metaphor, rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, story, and all the other elements of poetry) to wrap something up that is meant to be unwrapped by the reader. I make poems like this, but as a poet (as writer and reader) I need more. If the poet starts out knowing what the poem is about I would argue that that makes the poem into an object. And a poem should not be an object, it should be a living thing, with it’s own life-force, it’s own energy.

The kind of poetry I like to read and write is where the poet / (I, as the case may be) is not omniscient and not controlling everything. I don’t want to know ahead of time what my own poem is trying to say. I do want to know enough about the core or the spirit of a poem I am writing to begin to feel qualified to try to write it. The feeling going into writing a poem — that is, if this poem is to be written — should be, This poem needs me to write it. Not someone else — me! At least I have to be in awe of what I am trying to do!

In this poem there are stanzas that are like transformers, step-down transformers, to decrease the voltage, which increases the current, and step-up transformers that increase the voltage which decrease the current.

An example of a stanza that decreases the voltage so the poem can flow better, is a repeat-line like “the back of the hill” and an example of a step-up transformer that increases the voltage, decreasing the flow is a line like “It being bow season in Vermont” because there is voltage being added to the poem with this slightly ominous revelation but the reader has to pause to consider why that is coming up.

All I am saying is, that with longer poems, there is an electric current, a life-force and the poem is like a power line.

What about comparing a longer poem to a stream or river that is flowing down-hill, following a gradient, and like a stream it has momentum? I actually prefer the power line simile for this poem. Imagine it as a power line and try reading it noticing when the voltage is stepped up and when it is stepped down.

Preparing for when someone asks

Are you well?

A good friend just asked me this in an email.

Me: Yes. But I’m dealing with the usual (for me) back issues, probably brought on by life-style — life of writing and too much sitting — which is hard to change (life-style I mean). What I am dealing with is that, with neuropathy (which I’ve had for 10+ years), my feet and legs would rather not be active, which means I have to will myself to be more active. But if I don’t become more active in my seventh decade it could be my last, because my heart and other systems will be impacted. It’s easy to say I can change but change is hard when the body gets older. I can easily remember when it gave me a rush to climb a mountain or dive into a stream or even climb a cliff. I’m being honest. (One of my favorite things was jumping from boulder to boulder in a Vermont river bed.)

Not having been old before (at least in this life) I was not prepared for how it would feel “normal” to slow down. The trick for me is to recreate myself and step into a new less sedentary normal, but for that to happen I will have to find a physical activity that is as engaging for my aging body as writing is for my mind and imagination – the equivalent of boulder-jumping.

I invite us to answer honestly (as honestly as we are comfortable being) when a friend asks “How are you?” or “Are you well?” Answer honestly, for yourself, and then edit if you want to, but be prepared for your answer to surprise you.

One thing I have learned about myself, as a writer and thinker, is, we can’t draw ourselves out of our comfort zones. We need caring prompts.

One of the most common responses of someone being interviewed these days is “That’s a great question.” But you know what? Most of the time “That’s a great question” means: “Thanks for asking that question because I have a great answer to that question that will make me sound really smart.” If you are really asking a great question, someone will have to pause and think, and wrestle with language because it’s hard to be articulate outside of our comfort zone.

Also, often, whether a question is a great question or just a good question or just a pedestrian question depends on who is asking. How much do you respect the person asking the question?

How much do you respect yourself in answering?

These are just some things to think about to prepare for when someone asks, “How are you?” Or “Are you well?”

Tipping point

I drove through the whole city
Can you imagine?
All the way through that horrible city
Just to get to my horrible job.
My car was a small rusty thing,
The bumper held up by a wire,
The windshield splattered with old bug-juice, 
Smeared across my line of vision,
The pitiful wipers useless.
But what was windshield and what was lack of sleep?
My coffee was only just beginning
To kickstart my dream-besotted brain.
Was I not peering through the wide end of a spyglass
Into a world
That I needed to keep as far away as possible?
That was when he stopped me
Like a wasp 
Even though I cannot explain
All these years later
How it was that I was able to keep living in a world
Where a wasp can stop you
Just to receive its sting,
I’m rolling down the window
And he’s just inches away
All scrubbed clean and shaved and uniformed
As if for an inspection
And he’s asking, “Do you know why I stopped you?”
“Ja” I say, in surprisingly perfect Hochdeutsch.
“Du bist ein Stuckchen Sheisse.”
“What did you say to me?”, he snapped.
“Nothing”, I said.
I think that was some kind of tipping point for me.
I was 33.

Conversation with God about Ukraine

Me (to God):  
Good morning God.
Can you do anything about the war in Ukraine?
Just joking, kind of. . .
Thanks for healing that awful cut on my finger!

God:
You’re not joking. 
So I will tell you
Ukraine is not my problem.
It is Your problem. (that’s a capital You)
I created You humans
But why You need to have wars is beyond me.
There are lots of things that happen in the world
That I can help with
If I am in the loop
But not wars.
Wars may be the end of You.
And as for the cut on your finger,
I had very little to do with healing that.
When you prayed to me to help with that last week
The cut was getting worse
It was infected
And it had to take its course.
But I was with you when you couldn’t sleep
And you asked me to help.
But I was deeper down the whole time
Giving you dreams, spinning the back story of your life.
To be honest
Your infected cut was not that important to me.

Me:
But it was super important to me!
It hurt like hell and I was worried
That the infection would spread . . .
Like Ukraine.
War is like an infection right?

God: 
Yes, I see that. 

Me:
So Ukraine is like a cut on the world.

God:
Yes. The cut on the finger is your cut.
The cut in Ukraine is the world’s cut.
You exaggerate my influence.
You project a lot onto me
That doesn’t stick.
I’m glad the cut on your finger is healed
And the pain has subsided
But to be honest, as your God
I am more interested in your many lives.
One life is just one life.

Me:
Now you are talking about karma, right?

God:
Yes, karma. 

Me:
How many more lives do I have to go?

God:
That depends on you.

Me:
Hey, how about answering this, God:
Is it my karma to try to heal the open wound
In the human race that is war?

God:
Yes.

Me:
How am I doing?

God: 
OK.
You could be doing better.

Me:
What else should I do?

God: 
You should heal the pain
That hobbles your self
And once you are no longer distracted
By the pain of being Gary
Then you can begin healing
The pain of the human race.

Me: 
That’s good advice.
But I’m 72.
Do I have time to do that in the life I have left?

God:
Time is irrelevant.
I mean relative.

Me:
If you are God
Why do you struggle finding the right word?

God:
Excuse me.
I have another prayer coming in.