October might be my favorite month. One of my daughters was born in October, and she is a magical creature out of a Grimm fairy tale. I love fall, and the spirit of Halloween. It is whimsical and dark both, a contradiction that children seem to accept more easily than adults. This season evokes magic and adventure, the possibility and unexpectedness of fright, reminding me of how I felt as a child reading The Wrinkle in Time.
The days are shortening rapidly, the air is cooling, leaves litter the ground and crunch underfoot. Gusts of wind seem sharper, more penetrating than a month ago, a warning of weather to come. It suddenly smells different, of dying leaves and damp earth, the last of the cut grass. It is a season of change. The small internal shift of a few degrees is magnified on the outside, the ripple effect staggering. I feel a slight pause in this weather, like the suspension between an inhale and an exhale. In that waiting space, in that dying phase, lies fear and opportunity.
October is a stage set for the darkness inside us all to have a cameo. Instead of remaining in the comfort of our warm kitchens, gazing outside at the dark and wondering what lies beyond, we can open the door and let that fragrant decomposing air stir our senses. We can walk under the night sky and listen to the coyotes howl. It is exciting and terrifying both, like seeing scary movies with friends when we were children, craving life with every fibre of our being. We want it to consume us, need it to fire up our nerve endings. We are drawn to the heart of our darkness, not so domesticated that we don’t hear the call of the wild. Our blood sings to it.
The howl resides in all of us. Mothers putting out scary decorations in October for their children must feel some intoxication for Halloween. I don’t believe it is all cultural brainwashing and American consumerism from the Party Store. I was one of those women, and I felt my blood quicken when I hung ghosts from trees in our yard, put up gravestones on the lawn, lit the garishly carved pumpkins. I wasn’t just entertaining my kids, I felt the pull of the dark. October is the month when society permits its expression.
Halloween is a holiday of witches and ghosts and the dead, of harvest and pagans dancing around a fire. We embrace fear and allow it to sharpen our senses, to go over the threshold and into the night where mystery and magic reigns. We drug ourselves senseless the rest of the year in order to numb this sensation. And yet our very essence, the miracle of our being, cries to connect to the wild, to the heartbeat of mother nature, like coyotes howling at dusk.
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