Samhain Challenge Day 1: A Creative Spirit Offering

The veil thins, the portal forms, she calls you through

Welcome to this year’s 3-day Samhain Creativity + Ritual Challenge! To receive this challenge in your inbox, you’ll need to go ahead and and toggle on the Eco-Arts Sanctuary subsection of Ink Roads:

Samhain portals — all images via the Ink Roads Pinterest.

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We are on the brink of Samhain. The portal to the Otherworld yawns. Will you turn away, or stand tall, open your eyes, and see what or who walks in?

Samhain, like all portals, is a time of endings and beginnings. It is the end of the Celtic year and the start of a new cycle of death and rebirth.

In some traditions, it marks the day when the sun sinks fully into the Underworld, creating space for the Lord of the Dead to rise with his armies of spirits and ghosts and faeries. Soon, they may walk among us.

And yet this is not a reason to be fearful. Instead it is a time to focus on protection, integration, shapeshifting, and paying tribute to the strength of the Otherworld, the spirits around us, and the vast infinity of all we do not know and understand.

For witches, or those magically inclined, Samhain is a day of celebration, when the great well of power that always shimmers around and through us is at its most ripe for the taking.

I personally believe that magic, or energy, or whatever you want to call the subtle forces that weave through reality and bend our world into shapes that should be impossible and yet somehow are manifest, is a neutral force. It responds to the intention with which we interact with it. So yes, Samhain can offer up dark energy and dangerous power, but only if we approach it with this energy in mind.

We can also approach it through the lens of gratitude and reverence. This can also be said to our relationship to the natural world on the whole, and to our relationship with ourselves. Nature can be violent and benevolent; so can our minds; so can all spirits of the Otherworld.

When we approach powerful energies with worshipful openness and caution and love, we almost always receive the same in return.

In that spirit, here is your challenge for today.

Today’s Challenge: A Creative Spirit Offering

One of the key rituals performed during ancient Celtic Samhain celebrations was making offerings to the faeries and spirits that breached the boundary between our world and the Otherworld at this time. So today, your challenge is to create an offering dedicated to errant faeries, spirits, or challenging or unpredictable energies that may be present in your life.

Before you start, envision yourself surrounded in white light, and say a prayer allowing energies that want your highest good to enter your field.

From there, reflect on the spirits or energies that scare you or challenge in your life. Is there a person causing you pain? Create a poetic tribute to them, venerating their positive aspects and asking for healing and peace in your relationship with them.

Is there a part of your mind that has been haunting you? Can you write a song to it, accepting it and thanking it for all it secretly gives you, despite all the suffering it can create?

Is there a particular ghost following you around? Write a letter to them, thanking them for the lessons they’ve taught you.

Share your offerings and tributes in a Note and tag me :)

Thanks for following along. I’ll see you on Hallowe’en…

P.S. The quote in the caption of this post — “the portal forms, she calls you through” — is from Big Thief’s Jenni, a song about aliens and UFOs (another favorite subject of mine) but that also feels applicable to this moment, and this time of year, so I will include it here.

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