Hello, It’s Halloween
Halloween is just around the corner. In my neighborhood, front lawns are
adorned with a haunting array of ghosts, pumpkins, and spiderwebs,
prepared for an evening of eerie enchantment.
The Halloween we know began as Samhain, a pagan festival that signaled
the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter. It celebrated
the introduction of darker days ahead and marked the time of year where
it was thought the veil between the physical and unseen world was the
thinnest. In Mexico, Día de los Muertos,
or the Day of the Dead, celebrates those who have passed on. Families
encourage visits from the spirit world by setting up altars for their
departed loved ones, decorating them with photos, offerings of favorite
foods, and flowers.
In Buddhism, there too are Halloween corollaries to be found in unseen beings, multiple realms of existence, and even hungry ghosts. There also exists a deep appreciation for the mysteries and wisdom found within life’s more shadowy aspects.
As the three stories below will tell you, Halloween brings with it the
opportunity to reflect on and even celebrate the darker side of life.
Beyond the traditions of costumes and candy, it reminds us of the
delicate balance of life and death, light and dark, and the great
lessons of both.
—Lilly Greenblatt, Digital Editor, Lion’s Roar
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What do you want to be for Halloween? Who do you want to be in life? Ira Sukrungruang on the costumes we wear.
I find the cartoon my son watches catchy and creepy. Hello, it’s
Halloween echoes in my head. I say it without knowing I’m saying it. I
hum the tune without knowing I’m humming the tune.
If I dwell on it — I try not to because it makes me think I’m a bad
parent — the cartoon depicts a boy and girl entering a haunted house and
encountering evil beings out to do them harm. Sometimes I wonder where
are the parents of these two children and why are they allowing them to
walk in desolate places. Sometimes I want to say to that boy and girl,
Turn around. Do not go in there. Bad things happen in places like this:
zombies will stagger out of graves; witches will boil something green in
cauldrons; vampires will bare their pointy fangs. Boy and girl, there
is danger in this venture, the possibility of death.
Perhaps I overthink this. Since becoming a father, I overthink a lot of things.
Perhaps I should not shield my son from the notion of death, because death is inevitable.
Perhaps there is something beautiful in the celebration of the darker side of life.
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Bonnie Nadzam relives the childhood ritual of playing dead.
The year I was in the third grade might have been the last year we
played dead beneath the Skeleton Tree. It was just before dinner —
nearing dark. The tree stretched its bare, iron-limbed branches above
us. There were rippled gray skies and golden leaves spinning on their
stems. When it was over, we sat up to check in with each other: Did you
die? “I really did this time,” I said. “The person you’re talking to
isn’t even the person who was here before.” My older sister was
skeptical. “Who are you then?” “I don’t know,” I said. I was
wonderstruck. “I don’t know! But I know I’ve never been here before.”
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Karen Connelly on giving unseen beings their due.
In
a rural Thai village, when I was seventeen, I learned to respect
(rather than loathe, fear, deny, or denigrate) ghosts, witches, ghouls,
and spirits. I’d had a painful divorce from a punitive Christian
religion, which declared, without irony, that all supernatural phenomena
were the work of Satan. So for me, until Thailand, fear of the
supernatural was always about fearing evil.
Imagine
my delight to discover Buddhism and the many legends and practices it
has absorbed from folkloric traditions. Buddhism in Southeast Asia is
big and old enough to hold entire worlds of spirit, which contain
energies we cannot always see but often feel. Most homes and businesses
host a spirit house, like a miniature temple, where humans honor unseen
visitors with flowers, incense, food, and water. Many highly educated
Thai people, along with millions of the rural population, believe in the
tutelary spirits of place. From spirits, ghosts are hardly a leap: many
people in Thailand believe in those restless beings trapped between
realms and lives, often because of crimes committed in a previous
existence.
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