Halloween this year; Samhain 2009, remembering

Today I only have the past for you, again.  As its now October (so suddenly too), I remember Halloween is coming.  Samhain (pronounced sow-en).  I think what to do for this year.  Yesterday Stanley brought me a biscuit icing kit with orange and purple chocolate smarties in, toffee icing in a tube, and little black hundreds and thousands.  So I will bake, it seems.  What a good present.  I can smell cinnamon already.

**

So.  Then.  2009.  Back when I was pregnant, hugely, with Fluffhead.  Outside and inside, the best kind of afternoon.

Outside the leaves picked up, dancing, a tune I couldn’t hear; I could see only the steps. The rustle, the scratch.  I watched the branches of the tree from the bedroom window.  They moved, pushing their boughs against one another, catching, tangling.  They were pushed and pulled and kept tethered.  They did not seem to fight it.  Around them rain sparkled, one hint of brightness in the grey afternoon.

Inside, I sat up on the bed, my belly round.  Pushed myself forward, still looking beyond the room, smiling at the trees. Muscles creaked with every stretch forward.  The baby was in a funny position.  It felt like it was pressing on all my organs simultaneously.  I felt comfortable in hardly any position.

But I felt content. 

Yesterday had been Halloween, Samhain.  The New Year of modern witch-type pagans and Wiccans, a time to let go of that which no longer serves.  I had sat in my circle (badly cast as usual, but in the best of intention), and offered my confusions of feeling to the Cailleach, as part of a meditation.  The floor had been hard, but that was fine – it was the standing and sitting for different parts of the ritual, that had been difficult, being so vastly pregnant.  And alone.  Stanley was upstairs with the door to his room closed, alone in his world of computer gaming, and documentary watching, unwinding in his own way.  Over time, I learned more and more that this was not a rejection of me (though I sorely missed the feeling of being under his arm on the sofa – the safe feeling so swamping us we usually both fell asleep quite quickly; the smell of his hair, being absent, bothered me a bit; the casual touching I loved to do as he passed, the love of which I had passed on to him).  And it meant I had a lot of time free for my thoughts, my need for balance.

I had closed my eyes, and told the Cailleach of my fears for the coming year, my failures of the last, confusions, worries, what overwhelmed me.  I imagined a veiled (mostly) old woman in the corner, stirring a cauldron impossibly heavy, stream rising from it.  A smell that could not be identified, not unpleasant, but very pungent though barely on the air.  Occasionally, I held out my hands in a gesture of offering from my prone cross legged position on the floor, the old woman simply paying attention to her pot and stirring slowly.   Sometimes she would turn to me and nod, as I spoke my thoughts.  Eventually, I felt what I had said was done, and I imagined the old woman coming over to me and taking what was left of my offering.  Scraping it away from my hands, and taking it to the cauldron – where it’s indeterminate gloopiness, a dust of worries, a sludge of unresolved issues, plopped seamlessly inside, causing only a small ‘pfft’ before the bubbling resumed.  I imagined the old woman; whose features were one moment quite clear and then another not.   Veiled away and hidden, only her form, also in grey robes, threadbare, old, sturdy, heavy, was visible.  Was Hekate as one of her selves in there too, as the old woman? Is there a shade of the Morrigan?  Who was I really talking to?  Woman in form venerable, form old, form wise and knowing…me, myself, her and mythos…

I imagined the old woman listening intently, and not judging: simply understanding, as she understood all women and their reasons for things, their twisty logics, yet all sensical.  She took what was offered, and it helped her brew.  She accepted it and it helped.  These thoughts of the old year could be transmuted, by another part of myself (the echoes, and sometimes more strong than that, of all the gods and goddesses that are within, the pregnant me felt).

So that Samhain had meant something that last year, something soft and wonderful – the spring cleaning of the mind.  It had meant a new beginning was really here, a new path could solidly be taken.  I was off work, the messiness and claustrophobia of that state of mind was falling away; I would be skint, but semi taken care of, thanks to Stanley; and I had some time, before the baby was born, to collect my scattered self, and hunker down for the winter, like a man under a car, and try and fix the whole thing.  The thing of me, which had made so little sense for so long, and now begged for attention, which I felt I must give.  As the child would be here soon.

From my position of safety, from here in the bed, warm and Sunday afternoon-ed, with the memory of Halloween, and the memory of good deeds done (feeding birds the day before in the small garden a few minutes away, the softness yet spryness of the forms of the birds – their incredible deep greyness and cobalt blue, the miraculousness of their life force suddenly so apparent as I fed them the bread, rosemary bread, that I had made, as a good thing to do, a good good thing)….with these feelings and memories, distant and long past, and recent, I felt armed to try and make a good thing of every day.  To try.  Trying was surely the most important thing.

My back ached badly, but I didn’t mind.  It was only a problem as it may affect the baby – this feeling that some of my organs may burst, that I could hear the pulse of my blood thudding in my right ear all the time, was this normal?  This was the only worry.  Women’s bodies sprang back from childbirth, and rarely died, nowadays.  I needed to remain calm and cool on that score. 

But what a ripe and marvellous time to grow something else within myself too – something my baby could also appreciate, as I became ever calmer and less able to be upset by transient things.  To grow a sense of self respect and esteem, a sturdy self that cried not so very much, that screamed in loneliness and confusion and worthlessness far less; this was a goal worthy of the time I had remaining to me, the less of it.

I got up.  It involved heaving, and some pain, and pulling myself up on the radiator, but the day felt friendly, and I felt myself passing unproblematically into it, and went out of the room.

***

Of course, I fail at this marvellous resolve every day.  I failed yesterday, and I fail today.  I cried both days, as I have a sadness at the moment.  But it will pass, as they always do, sooner or later.

And I really did enjoy that Halloween – one of the quietest I ever had or did.  Making something mean something to yourself is so very important. 

Raindrops Nostalgia

It’s windy and wet again.  Which does seem to make me feel nostalgic and full of memories.

But content.  The air is warm, and has not a hint of draft inside here; there is a coolness on my arms coming from downstairs, so I won’t overheat.  I am warm inside the bedclothes, my legs crossed within them.  Laptop humming with me here.  The duvet tangles about me, and I watch the leaves and the rain.  And slip away into the past.

Ever since I was small, I loved the sensation of being indoors when it rained in autumn and winter – the contrast of the harshness of the Cailleach outside, cleansing and moving through the land, understanding the need to sweep away all that was done…and the softness of watching it from inside.  The feeling of being safe, somewhere warm, oh so warm, and soft.  Curled in a bed, or on a sofa, under the arm of someone I loved, or by myself, with a book open on the edge of a chair, its spine broken, and my hands warmed by a mug of steaming hot chocolate or ginger tea. The atmosphere of it.  I can no longer tell what was atmospheric suggestion from TV seen when small, or books read over the course of a lifetime (the same brainwashing that gives so many of us the notion of a Dickensian Christmas[1]). 

All I can remember, very clearly, for it was all snatches, was an afternoon long long ago.  Maybe I was five, or six.  I was in my maternal grandfather’s shed in the back garden.  It was coldish, and dank, and smelled of earth and spiders and wood not stored properly.  But it was a good smell.  There was a hint of boiled sweets in there too, orange ones, green ones.  The shed windows were tiny and grimy about the edges, though plated with real glass.  I remember sitting obediently on the floor, possibly on some sacking, as I remember a sensation of sitting on something that mediated between me and the wooden floor.  I was watching my granddad, who was facing away from me, pottering.  He had false teeth, and would suck the corners of his mouth, his sweet, thoughtfully while busy.  The teeth didn’t fit quite right.  I associated this slurpy quiet thinking noise with him, always.  He had a hearing aid too, an old fashioned one.  He would let me put my hand up to his ear, so the little mechanism would make an ‘eeeeeeee’ noise at me, often.  It made me laugh.  What he was doing in this memory I have no idea.  Planting something in a pot; making me a cot for my Sarah doll?  He used to make me furniture for my dolls, sometimes.  Always sturdy and basic and varnished lightly with a dark brownish stain. 

I only really remember the smell of the shed that day, the sitting down so low, the half light.  Not at all spooky, just that half light of an overcast day in a small space with a small window – and the incessant patter of rain on the corrugated metal roof.  The sound was beautiful, entrancing, hypnotic.  I felt so safe there, with my granddad close by, and me enclosed in a small space, warm and dry and contented.

This image switches to one of being in the car – I don’t know who drove – my mother, my granddad – the only two family members who could. Me laying down on the back seat.  Possibly my head was in someone’s lap. Possibly just the seat (the memory included no one in the back seat with me, or no one important to the memory).  I was looking out the side window on the right of the car, high up, and we were whizzing past trees.  Trees with no leaves on, pointed and frozen.  Watching them fly past at that angle was amazing; an upside down world filled with sky, decorated at the bottom edges with those pointing branches. It was lightish, but again that half light, of autumn or winter.  The glass was streaked with rain, and droplets zigzagged excitedly down the window, one after another, chasing, chasing, happy to be moving.  I remember finding them to be quite alive and very spirited.  The rain puckered the view, trees swollen and eclipsed by a million small drops when there was a flurry.  They slowed and whizzed and moved onward, depending on the speed of the car.  Which smelled of French Fancies cakes, by Mr Kipling, my nan’s favourite. No idea where we had been going or coming from that day, no recollection of conversation or anything. 

Just a frozen moment of contentment in the back of the car, where I was alone, for a second, with the element of water, the element of air – the odd perspective of looking out the window upwards (that change of perspective children do so well: laying on the floor and looking up at the ceiling of a room: imagining THAT is the floor and all the furniture – and yourself – hangs off the ceiling – how empty and bigger the room is, without these things in the way of its space and edges).

These strange half chinked into light memories always wash themselves over me when it is a day with rain, and I have a few minutes to myself.  I am still that child.  The world is just more complicated now.  Not so much time to watch the raindrops in their races.

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[1] Which I’ll post on nearer the time, this year or next.