Halloween Magic: How to Embrace Your Fears & Feel the Fullness of Life
Shining light into the darkness and celebrating what’s there…
Halloween is the holiday for confronting — summoning even — all the icky, rancid, rotting, dying, gruesome, ugly, uncomfortable stuff that we generally don’t want to confront.
This is what this holiday is for: For your spirit.
What hides in the shadows of your psyche?
What lies oozing somewhere unseen?
What haunts you? What tortures you?
Can you invite it out, dress it up, and actually have fun with it?
Halloween is a fun holiday!
Look! There’s a meat cleaver splitting my chest open! My beating heart is bleeding all over, I gush from an open wound and my eyeballs are green! I’m a zombie, a dead woman walking, dead on the inside and cracking jokes over pumpkin-spiced wine at your house party at the same time. Did you hear the one about the dead baby? An entire family was destroyed! Ha, ha, ha.
Killers and psychos, witches and vampires, monsters and ghosts: Halloween invites us to put on the costumes of these representatives of Chaos: all the dark forces we spend the rest of the year praying aren’t real, praying we might abolish, if only we might be good enough, clean enough, brave enough, orderly enough; if only we might smile brightly enough; be convincing enough!
But we can never pray enough to eliminate Chaos from Life.
Chaos, Entropy & Evil: Ignoring Them Is Not Possible; Trying to Is Not Advised
Chaos is an inseparable and essential feature of life, and, because this is true, we will always have something to fear.
Entropy is as unavoidable as gravity.
“The line that divides Good and Evil passes through every human heart,” as Solzhenitsyn said, and this line moves: Evil squirms in all of us.
Halloween reminds us not to deny these facts — because that is when they hurt us the worst.
Halloween instructs us to put on our red face and horns, pick up our glittered pitchforks, and take a picture together smiling.
We’re All Scary, and We’re All Afraid.
Whether you dress up as a goblin, or a dragon, or a sexy little cat-eared minx, Halloween spotlights that we’re all just people playing dress-up.
October 31st is the day for remembering the unifying truth that underneath it all we can all be horrible, hideous and horrendous — sometimes.
We’re all suffering and we’re all struggling.
We’re all the potential victims of unpredictable horrors.
We’re all potential vessels for acts of horror, (if we’re not very careful.)
We’re all bleeding and laughing and crying at the same time.
We’re all addicted to candy… and that’s the least of our problems!
Halloween is the day for bringing these uncomfortable truths to the front of our minds, and really taking a good look.
The Magic of Facing Your Darkness with a Smile
However you dress it up, can you, for one day at least, regard all that haunts you — the shame; the regrets; the aching, longing sorrow; the unjust loss— can you regard it all as you would a child in a bedsheet with two eye holes cut into it?
On Halloween, we don’t merely face the scary, spooky, ugly parts of life, we celebrate them! We embrace them with the spirit of amusement. We get together and get drunk on punch and we say, “Oh Life, you are so weird, and so fun.”
Like this, the demented clowns get closer to sanity.
Like this, the slutty nuns get closer to God.
Like this, the monsters remember our shared humanity.
Now someone please jump out of the bushes with a battle axe so I can really feel what it means to be alive.
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