Hallows Everyday - 4

Remembering To Remember

This is the time of year when the veil between the worlds is thinest. Our Ancestors and other spirits are easier to communicate with. This is the time when we should remember those gone past the veil more so than any other. Ancestor veneration is not so common, we remember them occasionally, yet most of the time we forget them. We need to think about that, why are we afraid to remember? Why would we forget? We all will be Ancestors one day. None of us wishes to be forgotten.

If you begin a regular practice of remembering your Ancestors now, keeping to it through this Hallows season, it will likely stay with you through the rest of the year. It will become a daily or weekly practice. Simply lighting a candle, speaking their names, and spending a moment with them can be enough. Of course, more elaborate devotions are beautiful too.

If you've had difficulty communicating or connecting with them before, at this time they will hear you easily and you will hear them as you have not heard them before. This is the time, make it so.

To the Ancestors in the Scrapbook
by Ashleen O’Gaea

On the simple grey pages of history,
your pictures are framed in unconscious confidence
that someone will remember your names,
and your faces will shadow in another generation’s light.
You are young in your pictures and earnest: 
you accepted your duties, lit your candles.
Dearly departed, you are present in us in the usual course of Nature:
you begat us, you were our primal seas. 
Cryogenitors, you are frozen,
your breath and years caught in single crystals affixed to this page.
You are still real.
But I have so short a memory of you
that the fraction must comprise the whole.
You are real; you are real among
faeries and gods;
you are the muses and ghosts beyond our pale and ken. 
You are the few moments of your life
that someone photographed.
You are in them, truly:
these are the moments that eternally reveal you, 
reveal what your lives meant.
Our blood courses on.
Flesh becomes photograph, effect becomes legend, 
and you are still real.
I too will be real some day,
on the simple grey pages of history. 


from the anthology
Calling to Our Ancestors
Edited by Sarenth Odinsson, available as download or paperback at
http://www.asphodelpress.com/book.html?title=calling-to-our-ancestors

Blessings dark and deep!