All Souls Eve and Superstition

October is a changeling month. Life slows down, temps drop to a chill in the air, leaves color up and fall to the ground, the monarch butterflies arrive to the California coast to form their winter cocoons in ancestral grounds marked by generations of migrations. And of course here we have the glorious whales and their new babies swimming south to the nurseries and warm ocean spas of the southern Pacific Ocean. This year the humpbacks have given a lively show in the Monterey Bay caught on camera and the Blue Whales in the south feeding on krill in the Channel Islands have really entertained the world with their lives. It is a joy to witness these changes.


The atmosphere though, no matter where I am, is always charged with more of a deathwatch than life giving. The edges are rougher, human transactions sometimes have less patience and there is an urge to kill along with the harvest. It is a blood time and I believe it has been on earth at this time of year since humankind has noticed. The preparation for the long bitterness of winter is fervent and the fears accompanying the knowledge of the darkness that is encroaching is tinged with the joy of the abundant harvest...the knowledge that we will make it through the winter season as far as it goes and spring will be there.


This is the time of superstition. It is conceived out of the winter fears and premonitions buried deep in the intuitive memory banks of tribes and families and passed along generations through the centuries and into millenniums. The Bible is full of references to the darkness and how it will not know the light.


For myself, the night light of the moon has always been powerful and I still stop and notice its luminance and size. It has caused my imagination and heart to stir to untold depths of romance and fears of destruction. It has conveyed curses hurled from unknown parts of the world directly at me on long moonlit nights alone or with people. And the animal abuse of superstitious births is incredible and unending no matter how enlightened we become over time. Spiders and cats and owls and bats earn strange notoriety during this cold time of change and slowness. Even in my rational mind, I avoid the nighttime and my step quickens as the daylight evaporates into the depths of terrifying shadows. It can't be helped, Halloween is coming!