Samhain ponderings

The above is a cake :) The design is out of "The Ultimate Booke of Children's Party Cakes"

Though I just hear the lines out of MacBeth

"Bubble bubble toil and trouble cauldron burn and cauldron bubble. When shall we three meet again; tis it light, storm or thunder be?"

Last weekend a dear brother asked what the Druid version of Samhain entailed. I had to fess up that "I had not gotten that far". Though technically it is the first ritual of the "year" :) I started on the other side of the wheel and my movement on the Druids path are slow to be formal. I have been working up to it.

My observances have been one festival at a time. A few weeks before the actual date I start to read who and what we will be working with. Generally I have been punting because whatever it is that is traditionally held sacred during this time, does not grow in this dessert. I am getting better at finding functionally correct correlations. Funny most of them are growing in my garden... :) I don't want to get so focused on anyone festival that I lose the point of honoring each of the spokes of the wheel.

I assure you that my natural tendency is to read the first bits, skip to the back and interpolate anything in the middle. This path has not served me well in the past and so now I am slowing down the pace. A lot. I am not a particularly cautious soul magickally speaking. I tend to live by the theory of do enough due diligence to be responsible and then GET TO IT. Magick is a verb!

So when my dear brother asked about the Samhuinn (while I know better I still want to pronounce it SAM HAINE) it took me a few days to jump on the task. I did not wish to skip over Alban Elued and slight Esus in the process. As a Pisces, slighting the Light of the Sea is just an unpardonable offense :)

So for Samhuinn we will be celebrating "Summers end". Every ending is a new beginning and that is well to be remembered in the fall. The altar will be done in gold, russet and brown. The cleansing breath will be violet. We will be calling on Ceridwen and the sacred cauldron. The natural connection will be to an evergreen sprig, to remind us that spring will indeed return and that this is just a place on the ever spinning wheel. Of course there will be carved pumpkins. Otherwise how do you get those delicious roasted pumpkin seeds :)

With any luck the weather will be good and Gribbit Grove will continue it's trip around the sun; one spoke at a time. I suspect that I will be having a chat with one of the three large cedars in the yard. Perhaps we can borrow a bit of evergreen twig :) Funny how it just seems to be growing there all along.

Curiouser and curiouser....