Introducing: The Samhain Creativity + Ritual Challenge
A 3-day portal to guide you through the year's thinnest veil
IMPORTANT NOTE:
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Can you feel it — the whispers of other worlds? Can you hear a ghostly song humming like wind chimes through the attics and cellars of your memory? Can you feel a faint presence tugging on your sleeve, a child’s wispy touch or a bone-witch’s firm pull?
The leaves are browning, dying on their branches. The air is cooler, cut through with a northern chill. And we’ve arrived at one of the year’s most potent thresholds: Samhain, the witches’ New Year.
Other worlds are all around us all the time. But in the days surrounding Samhain, which occurs between October 31st and November 1st in the Northern Hemisphere, the veil between the worlds is particularly porous.
This is traditionally the time when barriers between the spirit world and our world falter and unspool, letting wisps of the Otherworld dance through into what we call “reality.”
In ancient times, the Celts believed that not participating in preparatory rituals surrounding Samhain would evoke the ire of the gods. While I don’t necessarily subscribe to the idea of punitory gods, I do very much subscribe to the idea that we need ritual to reconnect us to the landscape and to our inherent inner rhythms.
We need rites and ceremonies to reconnect us with our ancestors and to the land itself, which of course is also an ancestor — perhaps our oldest of all, unless you count the primordial life force that breathed us into being.
So this Samhain, I’m inviting you to join me for a 3-day creative ritual, which will include emails sent on October 29, October 31, and November 1.
On the first day we will be preparing creative offerings for the spirits of Samhain.
On the second, we will be exploring the ancient tradition of dressing as monsters and demons in an effort to ward off errant faeries and spirits, embodying and freeing our own inner monstrousness in the process.
On the third, in the spirit of Day of the Dead, we will be paying tribute to all that has passed away, invoking it and honoring it through altars and thereby bringing it to life again.
This is a sacred portal, a time rich with energy and meaning, but we can only access that energy if we intentionally set aside time to invite it into our lives. So this Samhain, I’m inviting you to join me for a sacred ritual. Let’s dance with the monsters and ghosts and faeries and witches and Otherworlds that live in our own spirits.
I will be emailing this challenge to all subscribers who have signed up to receive Eco-Arts Sanctuary posts (and if you’re receiving this, that’s you!), but paid subscribers will be able to access special journal prompts at the end of each post. I would love to see you there.
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