An All Hallow's Eve Reflection

Writes Deborah Oak Cooper . . .

The dead from many ages swirl around us. They come to delight in our living bodies, to hear the music of our heartbeats, to remind us how precious that sound is; how they miss it; how fleeting life is. Rejoice, they say. Every moment is a treasure and a responsibility. Everything we do in life, every step we take, we can impact what comes after us. Tonight, as we dance, decide if you want to do the work that could ensure that someday your name will be called and that you will come to dance with the living. What steps can you take to help ensure that this dance of life and death will continue? That sometime in the future the children of our children will call our names and dance with us the double spiral of life and death on this wondrous green planet earth.

The dead swirl among us, reminding us how wondrous this world is, how sacred the earth is. Life is sacred. The dead know that in their bones.

Feel the blood, the precious blood, coursing through your bodies. Rejoice in it. It is sacred.

Know that you dance tonight with the dead, to remember how sacred the life-force is and to renew your pledge (or make it for the first time) to protect it, to protect the living body of our Mother Earth, and to take delight in her, to not only fight for clean water, clean air, and preservation of the wild places, but to relish and to delight in them, to breathe them in, and to delight in our life, to delight in our senses.

The dead exist to remind us that life is sweet – oh, so sweet. Savor it. It is also oh so short.

This is what the dead come to remind us.

Feel them around us everywhere tonight. So many dead; so many ancestors from so many different lands and cultures. They come to dance with us and to dance together, to make magic, to make change. Magic that will help us renew this sweet green earth and the beauty of the wild. Magic that will open hearts and senses with each dancing step.

So come now. It is time to dance with the dead and with the living, to work our magic so that this dance will continue, so that life will thrive on this green planet. And as you dance, feel the power build above you and below you, increasing power and magic in both worlds. Feel the power as we dance the double spiral which is our own genetic code, the symbol of this glorious cycle of life and death.

– Deborah Oak Cooper
Excerpted from "Samhain Journey Meditation"
in The Pagan Book of Living and Dying
by Starhawk, et al (Eds.)
pp. 89-90

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• The Pagan Roots of All Saints Day
• Halloween Thoughts
• All You Holy Men and Women
• Our Sacred Journey Continues: An All Saints and Souls Day Reflection
• A Hallowtide Reflection
• "Call Upon Those You Love"
• Buffy Sainte-Marie and That "Human-Being Magic"
• Magician Among the Spirits
• An All Souls Day Reflection
• There is a Ghost . . .
• The Signalman – A Ghost Story by Charles Dickens
• Prayer of the Week – August 3, 2015
• Prayer of the Week – July 28, 2013
• Prayer of the Week – November 14, 2012
• A Kind of Dancing Divinity
• Remembering and Honoring Dorothy Olinger
• Divine Connection
• The Source is Within You
• The Most Sacred and Simple Mystery of All

Image: Artist unknown.