Escaping Fear. Going Through It, and Not Around.
The Fall season is upon us, and October, in particular, can be quite beautiful. Perhaps not as much in Los Angeles, where I live. My neighbors and I are not always as fortunate to see all the fall foliage beauty. All the same, the scorching hot summer is behind us, and the trees are shedding their leaves, creating a new array of colors in the landscape (at least in many parts of the country), and letting us know that our seasons always change. October is also associated with fear. Halloween is the holiday where we celebrate scary things, adorning our walls with skeletons and ghosts and the like, even dressing up in monster costumes and having fun with all the things that can be frightening and go bump in the night. There is also the fear of the unknown and handling what’s next in life, and that is why going through a divorce can itself be scary. This is the type of fear that can be real.
The entertainingly macabre holiday of Halloween actually has many roots in ancient Celtic culture. Halloween’s origins lie in the pagan festival of Samhain (pronounced Sow-win). That festival, meaning “summer’s end,” ushered in the Celtic new year and welcomed a time of death and rebirth. It signaled the end of the harvest season and the beginning of the cold and dark winter months that would present many challenges and tribulations for the people living in the ancient world. During the festival of Samhain, to appease the various deities during this time, sacrifices (most often of animals and crops) were burned in large bonfires, not only to appease the gods worshiped at the time but also to ward off other visiting or more mischievous spirits that could come haunting. Though theatrical in ceremony, people knew it was time for the past to die and time to survive the bitter winter ahead.
Be they in ancient times or today, if dark emotions are about us in our personal lives, if a divorce is making one shiver from both the cold and the fear, then the decision is ours to either cower before all the scares or celebrate the death of the old and rebirth of the new.
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