Samhain Challenge Day 3: The Dead and the Living

Samhain Challenge Day 3: Reflections on death, and a challenge: write like it's your last day alive.

Thanks for reading Ink Roads! This is part of the Samhain Creativity + Ritual Challenge. (If you’ve been following this closely, please forgive the inconsistency in headers; I’m experimenting!)

If you’d like to receive Wheel of the Year challenges in your inbox (these are special creative challenges sent across eight sacred portals each year), you’ll need to subscribe to Ink Roads, then click the button below the subscribe button and toggle your Eco-Arts Sanctuary tab on.

Images via the Ink Roads Pinterest

*

Today is Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. It is also All Souls’ Day in Celtic traditions. All across the world, this day — November 2 — is seen as the particular day of the year when the dead are most present among the living.

My grandmother died in March of this year, and ever since then it has been quite clear to me that she is not gone. At a mescaline ceremony in April, I received what appeared to be a very obvious sign from her. I also went to see a psychic acupuncturist recently who said she felt a loving spirit was following me around, which sounds like her.

I also just checked my Substack user activity rankings, and it says that my grandma has been actively viewing this publication in the last month. I’m sure there are perfectly logical explanations for this — someone has access to her email, an aunt or uncle, or I restacked an old comment of hers a few weeks ago and maybe that did it.

But no matter what, it’s hard to deny that the people that we lose are still with us.

They’re in our cells and DNA. In our manners of speech. In the ways we see the world. They tint our memories and shape our perceptions.

I still feel my grandma with me. She was always one of the biggest advocates for my writing. She always believed in my work and believed I was meant for great things and really wanted the best for me. She was one of the only people who had the nerve to tell me that I was way too good for my old job, which was just true.

She was a ferocious ray of light. She was a high-powered lawyer who went back to law school with three young kids. She always wore red lipstick and bold jewelry. She was one of the strongest and most energetic and loving people I have ever met.

As she was dying of cancer, my family told me they were reading some of my blogs out loud to her from when I was staying at a Buddhist monastery in Thailand. I only regret that she didn’t live to see me publish my first books, but I know she always knew I would.

She was an incredibly vibrant person who cared very deeply about everyone she knew, and she seems exactly like the sort of person who would come back and visit and check in on all her loved ones. In life, after all, she would be the one checking in for updates every single day when someone was sick. Just a year before she died, she took care of me after my knee injury, wheeling me around her Florida development in an electric wheelchair she’d ordered for me as she walked briskly beneath the palm trees in her orthopedic shoes.

The psychic acupuncturist told me I needed to meditate, imagine my skull is full of light, and tell her — or whatever spirit is with me — that it’s OK to return to heaven, which I did. After all, a shaman I spoke to recently said, it is always better for the living if the dead return to heaven.

But I also have a feeling that if my grandma has anything to do with it, she may not leave the spiritual plane until at least her children and grandchildren are gone from this Earth.

Again, I don’t even know for sure if I believe in spirits, but I do believe the past stays with us. Perhaps it’s just a projection of our minds — but couldn’t that be said of everything in this life?

*

I have not experienced a loss in this lifetime of someone very close to me until recently, which I know makes me very lucky. But I also have always been afraid of losing people I love, and I consciously and strongly feel the loss and death of the earth each day.

Death, as much as I want to embrace it, terrifies me, especially when it comes to people I love.

I am also terrified of dying myself for two main reasons: for the grief it would cause to people I love, and because I’m scared of dying without creating whatever I’m meant to create on this Earth.

During my knee injury ordeal last year, when no one could figure out why my torn meniscus surgery had left me unable to walk for months, I was told that there was a possibility I might have a specific genetic disorder that meant I might live only an average of two more decades or so.

I immediately began making plans. Mostly, I knew I had to start writing, and fast.

It appears that I don’t have this disorder after all, but I still don’t know for certain. Of course, we know nothing for certain. We could be hit by a car tomorrow, or a strike of lightning, or the whole world could be obliterated by a comet. We simply don’t know.

Part of the reason I wrote and shared my essay Nature Worship For the Modern World recently was because it is that exact kind of writing that I feel I really need to do before I die. If I could leave one thing on the planet, it would be writing that reshapes people’s relationship to spirituality and the earth.

I still feel I don’t know enough to fully speak and write on ecology, spirituality, and climate justice, but what if there just isn’t enough time to wait? The clock is running out; every day temperatures rise. The earth lashes out with her natural disasters, her droughts, her wildfires. We are out of time. The only time is now.

*

At the same time that I am afraid of death, I am also deeply curious about it and about what happens after our souls depart our physical bodies. I am also fascinated by ghosts, decay, and ruin, a fascination that extends to all of the places where our world and the next brush against one another.

I also believe firmly in the Gnostic idea that contemplating death is beneficial, that it reminds us that we are more alive, and that we have limited time on Earth, and that everything is ephemeral and perpetually changing. We are never stuck where we are. We are not here for very long.

I am afraid to die because of what it would mean for the people on Earth, but I am not really that scared — I think — of jumping into that final void. I am just so curious to see what happens.

After studying near death experiences, I’ve begun to suspect that death may be a warm absorption back into the loving arms of cosmic union. Perhaps our souls are quickly reincarnated back out into this illusion of separateness for whatever reason, but at least, I think in death, we get to rest in the Great Mother’s arms for at least a little while.

I am in no rush to reach that place, though. Why end life early by choice? It’s so short, after all — might as well stick around for the ride, play the game, see what happens. The good news is that change is guaranteed. Everything could turn around in a moment, and soon enough, before you know it you’ll be swallowed up into the great beyond. It really is such a short trip. A little flicker of a dream. A fragment, a hallucination.

Life is a tapestry of moments woven from everything that has come before us. In Imelda Almqvist’s beautiful essay “The Alfablot,” she writes about how ancestors are not just our immediate blood relatives. “In some ways even the elements are our ancestors. They have sustained human existence since its very first expression or manifestation,” she writes. “…The Land also holds the memory of extinct animals and ancestors from times before human beings. There were tree spirits and plant mothers long before there were human mothers. The list is endless.”

These ancestors also deserve worship. “Take some time to express gratitude for all that went into the making of you!!” she writes. “Give something back.”

The stars are our ancestors, as is the earth, the wind, the air, the fire, the sun, the moon, and the rain, and the burst of initial energy that sparked our world into being, and the protozoa that crawled and oozed, and the fish that sprouted legs. All of these things are our ancestors. They are part of us, reborn in us, in dialogue with us. The dead don’t leave, they just change form.

We are living, walking transmutations of everything that has come before us, and we will be woven into everything that comes after us. Everyone we meet is touched by us, irreparably changed by our very presence. Butterfly effects flutter out from all we interact with, creating hurricanes and new dimensions wherever we go.

What are you weaving, during your short time here?

Today’s Challenge: Write Like It’s Your Last Day on Earth

Here’s your challenge today. It’s a simple one.

What would you write, if you had to die tomorrow?

Don’t think too much.

Write it.

Share it.

Tag me :)

I’ll leave you with this song:

Thank you so much for reading Ink Roads! You can become a paid subscriber and support my work for just $1.11 per week by clicking the link below: