Blessed Samhain!

It's that time of the year, the best time of the year! The third and final harvest has arrived and we reap the final results of our work. The days have gone colder, shorter, and the nights are darker. A cycle reached it's end, but that doesn't mean that life has ended, but that a new cycle is about to begin.

There are two things I'd like to bring forward on this Samhain night: the clearing and cleaning of the field, and the saving.

On one side there's the Final Harvest. The cycle brings us three harvests through which we feast and celebrate the fruits of our efforts, but in this last harvest, as we gather up the remaining of our results, we thing also about the future. You see, your work, your efforts and what you do shouldn't all be about satisfying your immediate needs, but also about making sure you can save for leaner times, or for times of rest.  With this last harvest, you think now about the things you'll preserve for the future, and draft up plans to make your stock last until the next harvest. By managing your results, you make sure you are provided when there's no work to be done, but also while you do your job and this hasn't yielded results yet.

This idea is pretty much lost nowadays, when everything is about instant gratification and getting things at once to use them up at once.

This harvest and the idea of making it last apply to transparent things such as one's work and salary or gains, but also at other things such as studies, relationships, projects, health and so on. These are all "things" we work for, into which we have to put a considerable effort to get results later on, but these are also things that have different ways to be conserved through time. Some things are managed through time by making a rational use of them, while others are managed through a more extensive, regular use or refreshing. Improving your reading skills, for instance, takes time and effort, and once you achieve your goal, in order to keep it and manage it, you need to practice your skills with certain regularity.

At Samhain we can take this thought and meditate about it, about the goals we achieve, our results, our harvests and what we do to preserve them, to stretch them through time.

At the same time, as the final harvest is gathered, the fields are cleared out, cleaned for the winter and left blank to receive the next project, the next year. This is something we don't think much about, but as a cycle ends, we already start the preparations for the next one, and how many of us clear out to start the next project with the right foot? Relationships started on the ashes of the last one, where we bring in the vices of a relationship that's gone and measure our new one according to it. And be these relationships of any type! Studies, where we start them with a preconceived idea of it going to be hard or boring, so with a job were we already assume that the boss is out to exploit us, or a relationship we start thinking that "every man/woman is the same".

Samhain is about clearing off the table, taking all off, all out and retire to meditate, give time to yourself to go over the past cycle, but at the same time leave nothing on your page, on the table, on your field that might fester and spoil the canvas for the new cycle. It's not the Spring cleaning, but it is the time where you save, you stock up for the winter and you take everything off your workspace so that nothing gets in the way of the next big project.