halloween | The Direction of Intention

Scare Yourself Silly [on saturday morning smack-dab.]

Posted on October 30, 2021 by davidrobinsoncreative

Our house is old and, when I first moved in, I had to learn to discern the many sounds an old house can make. Two sounds in particular woke me each night and sent visions of intruders dancing through my imagination. The first was the clunk of the radiator. The second was BabyCat walking around upstairs. Our heavy-footed cat sounded like a man in boots walking from room to room. I woke Kerri more than once with my startled, “What’s That?”

“It’s the cat,” she’d laugh, and roll over.

Sometimes the radiator still gets me. There’s very little warning. The creeeeak sounds like a foot on a floorboard. And, since it is my job to fetch the midnight snack, in a creaky old house, deep into the dark and cold of an October night, the creeeak-clunk is resonate with the slide-thump of scary stories from my youth. I have a vivid imagination. I can scare myself silly.

Happy Halloween.

read Kerri’s SMACK-DAB blog post

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Light A New Hearth Fire [on Not So Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on October 31, 2018 by davidrobinsoncreative

Even during the summer we call it the Halloween tree. An ancient oak, gnarled and twisted, surely a home to gnomes and sprites, a rest stop for wandering spirits. An inciter of wild imagination. It watches our passage through the seasons, our walks though the woods.

Halloween has a history, an origin story. It has evolved and changed from a sacred to our now secular celebration. It once marked the end of the year, the line between the end of harvest time and the onset of dark winter, the day when the boundary between the living and the dead became soft and permeable. A liminal day when the future could be seen and told. Ghosts returned. People donned costumes to fool the spirits and speak for the future. Mischief was made. The hearth was stamped out and then reignited from the communal flame. With the sunrise came the new year and the boundary between worlds and the future was restored.

Costumes and carved pumpkins. Neighbors coming out of their houses for trick-or-treating. Corn mazes and haunted houses. We are not so different, not really. In this way, whether we acknowledge it or not, through our coming together to carve scary faces, through our meeting on the street to watch our children walk the neighborhood and perpetuate this yearly ritual, through our parties and dressing up, we light a new hearth fire to keep us warm and full of hope through the cold months of dark winter.