I’ll Be Home for Samhain, You Can Plan on Me

Last year, the online Reclaiming Spiral Dance for Samhain was delightful.

It was amazing to watch witches from around the world come together to create magick over the internet. Often saying things at a blank screen. Or recording things weeks earlier.

People with the skills of digital editing  brought all of these talents and magics together. And, for the most part, it worked.

(You can’t account for everything when you’ve never done something before, after all.)

So, we’re going to do it again this year.

Well, COVID has something to do with it.

Safety. Risk assessment. Space.

And, for me anyway, bringing together this many voices and groups was not possible without the internet. Without the time spent across different time zones and groups. Without planning started months ahead of the ritual date.

Without people collecting emails and names and photos and more videos and scripts and timelines and SO MANY MEETINGS.

So, I’ll be home for Samhain. You can plan on me.

Setting the Space for Spiral Dance

It’s the 42nd annual Reclaiming Spiral Dance. Not to make this about me, but I am only slightly older than this ritual. What the what.

This means many years of:

Children running widdershins to cleanse the space.

The horn.

The sacred space being set by multiple voices, sometimes songs, sometimes dances. Sometimes dances and songs. Sometimes individuals. Sometimes groups. Sometimes other things I wasn’t around for.
Calling deity. The way this has shifted and settled and unsettled. Expanded from the binary. Included more divine expression and mysterious ones. Because it was time. Because it was time.

The trance to the Isle of Apples. To the Beloved Dead. To the ones who wait for us. To the ones who offer wisdom and a place to grieve.

To the ones who recently passed and those who had been waiting for us. Who are always there. Because the dead are always just there. And there. And there.

Traveling in and out of stories. In and out of myths. In and out of intentions and activism and magicks and spells of weaving.

Into spaces of contemplation and sharing.

Into the magickal wonder of a spiral dance with hundreds of people.

“Let it begin…”

And each year, I turn to my heart, and sometimes to a friend, ‘This year we shall renew the earth.”

I’m not sure that job is ever complete. Or that Samhain is the only place it happens. Or how it happens.

Or if I notice the ways of renewal. I am only here in my place. Perhaps my eyes and feet do not traverse the little ways magick is pushing forward, slogging through hope sometimes, pushing past misunderstanding and misandry, oppression and patriarchy, pushing aside, reducing power. Calling shadows into light. Calling truth to power.

Let it begin.

I’ll be home for Samhain. With Spiral Dance. With witches that wander the spiral, hoping it will begin. Hoping for a new year that arrives with possibility and pushing things further into the stretches of time, time that holds perspective and makes way for what was always arriving.

A part of the dance.

For more info: Reclaiming Spiral Dance