samhain — Clare Mulvany writing

The hedgerows made a chequerboard of the land below me. Leaving Dublin, morning turned to dawn, then dark, flying westwards, back into the night. Time up high can do strange things, like curling you back into a dream.

I am travelling westwards to tend to a grief. A dear friend’s father passed away, and as she prepares for his life celebration, she asked that I accompany her. I can think of no greater honour: to accompany.

His death was anticipated, it was his time to pass, and they have both taken his leave with grace and an exquisite elegance of care. But still, how we learn to travel that threshold together, is everything. As much as I am doing this for her, it is my apprenticeship too; to get more skilled in navigating the so often painful, so often beautiful folding terrain of a life as we attempt to cross the landscapes of death, love, loss, homecomings.

To be an apprentice, I write in my journal, then jot down the qualities that it invites.

The mastery of a craft. Tacit holding and honing, through practice. Aligning with a lineage of elders and teachers. Adopting the novice mind. Knowing we won’t get it right first time, but with practice, and care, we can get more refined.

I look out the plane’s window, and invite those qualities to accompany me too, as moonlight tips the wings, reminding me that there are other sources of light available, even in the dark. It makes me think about how I can be more of that light, and remember that it too is an apprenticeship.

To be an apprentice to the light as well as the dark, I add to my journal.

The flight, the height, the moon, the travelling backwards into the dark, the apprenticeship with grief and loss, the tending; it all feels weirdly potent and symbolic, given the timing, for soon I will be on Northern Turtle Island, the ancestral lands of Mississaugas of the Credit, Anishnabeg, Chippewa, Haudenosaunee, and Wendat peoples, and is now home to diverse First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples, whose land I will be on for the Celtic New Year, as we cross another threshold, of Samhain. It feels all so appropriate, for this is a time of initiation, all about how we approach the living and the dying, and the rituals in-between.

The moon slivers below me, the descent is soon to begin.

Up here, close to the stars, I have been thinking too that it is time to invent a new verb, a little like summering or wintering, but with more transition built into it. Samhaining, or in Irish, to be ‘ag Samhain’. While wintering teaches us how to rest in the fallow dark and unknown, and summering how to celebrate our fullness, Samhaining, as a gesture of approach, has much to teach us about how to enter dark times.

I need not list all the ways in which we, human and creaturely kin alike, are experiencing the ruptures, fractures, factions and dis-ease the planet is moving through. They are global, and they are systemic, and I don’t think there is a single life form on this earth right now not impacted. For some it is the failures of politics and economics, for some it is a reckoning with the exposed cracks in our education, food, or health systems, or for others more a climate or ecological polycrisis. But they are so interwoven now, it’s impossible to untangle the threads. And so it is here I turn to the great elders, both in Ireland and beyond, to help me understand the drivers and leavers below it, and attempt to apprentice to their insights.

I turn to the likes of eco-philosopher, Joanna Macy, who shared her wisdoms on how we move to this collective Samhain, or in her words, ‘the Great Unravelling’. I turn to writer, psychotherapist and ‘grief tender’, Francis Weller, who speakers of how we are entering ‘The Long Dark’, and I think too of now of the late Manchán Magan, who was showing us how spirit, land and language are interwoven, and have everything to do with the health of our collective soul. For in the severance, we have been loosing touch with the sacred ground between us. How we reconnect, at ground level is also about re-connecting at soul level.

A little important note here. I am careful how I use the words ‘we’ and ‘us’, for not all ‘us’ and ‘we’ is equal. As a cis white female from a privileged background- privilege here being access to education, healthcare and opportunity, I speak from that particular vantage. I can work on revealing my blindspots and biases, but that too is a practice of care and craft. I need training, I need apprenticeship. And I say all this coming from a colonised land, where my language, culture, trees, seas, rivers and life forces have suppressed. When I see the chequerboard of hedgerows, I seek out the oaks. I am longing for the call of the curlew. In my ancestral bones, I can feel the pain like a grief that cuts me in two. Restoration must be lived forward, and backwards, which I am also realising is much to do with re-storying- finding and amplifying the stories which will help carry us through these dark times, which, in turn, brings me back to Samhain. For it is in my own lineage that I am finding the restoration, bone level, soul level. In the descent, the story is in fact rising. I’m slowly putting Irish words back into my mouth and mind, and I am trying to dream in myth, and listen to the land speak’. Plus I have access to this ancient calendar, which I discovered through my friends and mentors, Mari Kennedy and Dolores Whelan, with its wisdoms and its wise ways, a systematic map, which all begins with an initiation into the re-storying of the dark, and the anticipation of the treasure and tools we might find there.

As I have learned from over ten years now of working with the Celtic calendar, I know if I can lean into Samhain, I will encounter the healing properties of the rituals of the threshold; I’ll meet the dark crone of the Cailleach, and, as I continue the slow descent into the underworld, in Jungian terms, I’ll enter the alchemical period of the nigredo, where, if I can stay true to my apprenticeship with the dark, and travel through the unknown, I will be on the route of descent, a place of encounter in so many of the restorative myths. For here, was not just the known world, but the otherworld, the spirit world, the dark interior, or in Irish, altar. As Manchán has explained it, this is the ‘netherworld, or the other dimensions beyond, and we recognised there was only a thin veil between them’. And so it is here, at Samhain, on a precipice of the known, where the otherworld is said to push through, like a palm against the opposing face of foggy glass, declaring a presence. I am here, there is more to this dark than you can see. Tar isteach. Come inside.

Will fear grip us? Or will curiosity? The apprentice, of course, true to their craft, is a curious creature. They enter, and soon find themselves in a world of resplendent things. It is like, as the poet Rothke has said, ‘In a dark time, the eye begins to see’. I am hoping the ‘we’ can begin to see too.

The plane is soon to arrive. I will enter new territory, land I do not know, arriving for the first time here, into the arms of a grieving friend. We can Samhain together. I suspect there will be tears. But there will also be treasures and tools, glistening in the corners of the long night, both accompanied, the living and the dying, held together in a finely woven gossamer weave.

The moon slivers below me, the pilot’s voice cuts through, the descent is soon to begin.

Samhain: Initiations in the Dark

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Clare Mulvany