Category: All Souls’ Day

remembering our ancestors

“Haunted Farmyard” by Debbie Wetzel

Here’s the puzzle I did during the day on Halloween. This is the third stop on my journey around the Wheel of the Year by myself. I don’t have any pictures from past celebrations because in the past I spent this holiday with my ancestors, as it is a time when the veil between the living and the dead thins and they are remembered. I visited cemeteries and did research. They feel closer to me this time of year.

Today, on All Souls’ Day, I am going to share a poem that resonates with me. My daughter found it posted on Facebook and shared it with me. It perfectly expresses my feelings about missing Tim these days.

Your heartbeat was my metronome
My compass
The rhythm I kept
The north I followed

Your arms were my home
My safety
My belonging
The one place I fit

Now I’m alone
I can’t keep time
I can’t find north
And there’s no way home

~ Racheal Bashaw
(No Way Home)

I live too far away from where our ancestors lie buried so I didn’t visit a cemetery. But I did something for Tim and created a memorial page for him on the Find a Grave website. Before he died we had discussed how we wanted to make sure we were buried near where we and our ancestors had lived most of our lives together, and I feel satisfied that I made that happen.

It is the beginning of a new project to add as many of our ancestors’ cemeteries to the database as I can. Since the public can see it without needing and invitation or a password it seems like it will be an excellent way to share the basics. Future descendants might stumble across it and be glad to know where to look for his grave. It won’t replace the pages for the ancestors I’ve posted on this blog; it will be an additional reference. And it’s impossible to know how long my blog will stay online after I’m gone.

And so another year has gone by.

content to bloom

photo by Shane Choinard

Down in a green and crowded box
A modest pansy grew
Its stalk was bent it hung its head
As if to hide from view.
And yet, it was a lovely flower
Its colors bright and fair,
It might have graced a rosy bower
Instead of hiding there.

Yet there it was, content to bloom
Its modest tints arrayed,
And there it spread its sweet perfume
Within the silent shade.
Then let me to the window go
This pretty flower to see
That I may also learn to grow
In sweet humility.

~ Author Unknown

I found this poem back in August, written or copied by hand, on a slip of paper hidden between other papers in one of the family history boxes I was diligently sorting through. I don’t know if one of our ancestors wrote it or if they copied it down from some other source. Naturally, I thought it would make for a great post when pansy season came around.

Well, I was still pondering how different the seasons are down south here, after experiencing apple picking for Lammas Day instead of on the Autumn Equinox. I was in for another big surprise. It turns out pansies are considered cool season annuals in North Carolina, and they bloom from fall through spring! They are usually planted from late October through the month of November!

Then I remembered noticing last fall that the local nursery was selling pansies right alongside mums. Another memory surfaced, too, seeing pansies in flower boxes along the sidewalks back in January 2019, when we were down here visiting. It seemed like they were out so early, but they had probably been there since November.

These discoveries are leading to a paradigm shift in how the wheel of the year looks to me. So I decided to be a careful observer for a year or two, letting my old assumptions go and gradually finding a new way of thinking about (and celebrating!) the seasons.

Pansies for All Souls’ Day? In honor of an ancestor who loved and wrote down this poem? Why not? “Learning to grow in sweet humility…’

ancestral remembrance

The Artist’s Parents by Felix Vallotton

We achieve some measure of adulthood when we recognize our parents as they really were, without sentimentalizing or mythologizing, but also without blaming them unfairly for our imperfections. Maturity entails a readiness, painful and wrenching though it may be, to look squarely into the long dark places, into the fearsome shadows. In this act of ancestral remembrance and acceptance may be found a light by which to see our children safely home.
~ Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan
(Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors)

the darker half of the year

10.31.20 ~ full blue moon
Barn Island Wildlife Management Area
Pawcatuck, Connecticut

I tremble with gratitude
for my children and their children
who take pleasure in one another.

At our dinners together, the dead
enter and pass among us
in living love and in memory.

And so the young are taught.

~ Wendell Berry
(This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems)

It’s been almost a year since we’ve gathered to eat with our children and grandchildren and ancestors. I miss those times. Some day we will all be together again in person but for now we will be grateful for our video calls.

When we know about our ancestors, when we sense them as living and as supporting us, then we feel connected to the genetic life-stream, and we draw strength and nourishment from this.
~ Philip Carr-Gomm
(Druid Mysteries: Ancient Wisdom for the 21st Century)

We have reached the end of the harvest season and the beginning of the darker half of the year. Earth’s energy has shifted and the veil between the spirit world and our world has lifted for a few days. It’s a time to reflect on and honor the lives of our ancestors.

We’re in for a whole lot of hurt. It’s not a good situation. All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.
~ Dr. Anthony Fauci
(CNN, October 30, 2020)