Melisinka

October of the oranges and orange pumpkin heads. When the leaves turn orange and fall from the trees and the wild winds start to howl and blow and thunder rumbles in the big black sky, casting spooky shadows on ancient graves….

Or not. Oh how i  wish. The closest i get to this kind of dreamy halloween is listening to Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness when the sun goes down and enjoying the creak of my bedroom door when the wind blows through my window. And i guess there’s a certain horror lately to be found in the screeching of my two black cats as they fight it out for supremacy now that Mr Nijinsky has come out of hiding. Indeed, it feels like they’ve multiplied – i can’t move without tripping over one of them or catching a flash of black cat from the corner of my eye everywhere i go.  I actually had a nightmare recently where my loungeroom was filled with black cats and kittens so there was no space left to even sit..spoooooooooky………

But i digress. Thing is, i’m in a weird headspace after being so sick recently with this flu and fever. Fever is so trippy!  Hot and cold, visionary and cloudy, trancing into strange lands and back again before breakfast. I still don’t feel really here, and i don’t really want to be here. i wish i was in the forest. i wish i was on a beautiful beach swimming in the ocean.  i wish i was in Mexico celebrating the Day of the Dead in all its crazy skeleton-sweetie glory, full of bright colours and graveyards lit up for my ancestors. If my ancestors had been Mexican i guess that would make it a little more viable- but i’m allowed my dreams, dammit.

As it is, Halloween in Australia kind of sucks. Because of our continental isolation, we have this ongoing identity crisis which results in  a somewhat schizophrenic uncertainty as to what festival to actually go with.  The weather’s getting hot and most witches and pagans have come to embrace our southern hemisphere calendar and claim Beltane as the correct festival to be celebrating right now. Fair enough. Go for it. Jump that Beltane fire and make sweet love all night long, throw off your velvet robes and dance skyclad to the djembe whose beat will stir your loins. But for those of us with celtic/anglo ancestry, the blood in our veins yearns for samhain. For rain. For the impending darkness of winter.

Oh!!! As i wrote that last line, it started to rain outside! I kid you not! How divine!

Let me slip between the smoke tendrils and converse with the dead. I want the veil between the worlds to be at its thinnest, so that i may penetrate the mysteries a little more deeply. I will light a black candle in honour of my Nanna, my Dad and my friend Scott. I will leave an offering of food and wine for the roaming spirits in my front garden.  I will dream of long-forgotten graveyards, broken headstones under willow trees, and peaceful memories of happier times almost lost to memory.

I will not say “Happy Halloween”, but i may carve a jagged grin into a pumpkin and light it from the inside.