10/31/2025
Samhain Reflections: Holding the Flame
The Sun lowers its gaze, and the green world yields to stillness. The harvest is gathered, the fields rest, and the long night begins. We stand at the turning of the year — that thin place where endings and beginnings meet.
The wider world, too, has entered its own darkening season. We can feel the chill of fear and control creeping into places where we once felt freedom. It’s easy to despair when shadows lengthen, when the loudest voices demand obedience instead of wisdom.
But Samhain teaches us not that darkness wins — only that it comes. It comes because the wheel must turn. It comes because the seed needs stillness before it can break open and rise again.
This is the lesson of Samhain: keep the flame. When the nights grow long, tend your hearths — the small lights of kindness, courage, and truth. Protect them. Feed them. Gather near them with those you trust.
The veil is thin, and the ancestors walk beside us. They endured their winters, too — through hunger, through silence, through the long shadow of the Burning Times and every age when power crushed the free. We honor them, and all who have fallen beneath the hand of tyranny. They remind us that no empire, no tyrant, no cold night endures forever. The light waits its time beneath the soil.
Through this Samhain and the months to come, hold fast to hope. Stand watch through the dark. The dawn will come again — as it always has.
"The year a spiral it does make
Turn, turn, the year wheel turn
Unwinding like a golden snake
Turn, turn, the year wheel turn
From light to dark to light again
Turn, turn, the year wheel turn
The spiral dance will never end"
Joshua
(The Spiral Dance song by Susannah Ravenswing (c) 1991)
