When Zombies Walk the Earth

Halloween doesn't scare me. It's not supposed to. It's supposed to be a celebration, of the sacredness of life past, of the inevitability and sacredness of death past and future. Without the ancestors whose bones we walk upon, whose dust we breathe, whose water we drink, whose ever-living spirit sustains and inspires us, we wouldn't be here. And when we end, hopefully after long happy lives, our dust, our water, our spirit, returns to the great communal life force which will sustain the future. That is awe-inspiring and mysterious: sure and yet un-knowable, not really.

There's nothing wrong with the popular Halloween masquerade: laughing at things we might not always find funny, or trying out different identities or experimenting with the absurd. Indeed in trying out the Halloween swap of identities aren't we also trying out what the world would feel like without us as we know ourselves to be?

On Halloween I try to remember the ancestors who contributed to who I am; and to the friends and loved ones who have passed over to somewhere else after sharing a moment of space and time with me. I've lit a candle and burned some sage and copal. I've shared some rum and water. I've spoken names I haven't thought much of lately. I've prayed to the spirits who guide my life with perspective and inspiration. I'm not forgetting the tasks before me, but I'm counting my blessings and offering my thanks.

None of this stuff — what an old boyfriend called heebeejeebee stuff — scares me. I like the Mexican tradition of making skulls and headstones of sugar candy, pretty, colored in bright decorations, adding sweet deliciousness to reverence: turning fearful imagery to something else that in levity brings understanding.

But I'll tell you what does scare me: the deadness of living human souls.

Consider our politicians: liars all of them, from Democrat to Republican. Dishonest, manipulative people who will say anything for votes. And how horrible that we 99% — to use this new and relevant language — have to live in a world of illusion and corruption made meaningless and hateful by these zombies filling up the halls of power despite the fact that without us, the 1% would be nothing at all.

Today UNESCO admitted Palestine as a full state member, and within moments the U.S. cancelled its funding of that important United Nations agency: the Democratic Obama administration saying recognition of Palestine was an "obstacle to peace." Consider the walking dead across the political aisle: Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum: these are masked monsters without an ounce of human empathy. Consider those who cheer these politicians on: cheering on the death penalty, hooting for the deportation of people away from their homes and families and jobs, jeering people who are gay. How virulent is the zombie infection. Consider the fear that these people instill in the rest of us, clinging to the faintest of hopes that politicians like Obama might hurt us less than the ones we know will hurt us more. Because well, what could possibly be the alternative but something worse?

Perhaps it's fitting that in this painful era, where some people are finally waking up to the way things actually are, that zombie movies and zombie TV shows have so captured the popular imagination. Because that's what we've been too often, zombies feeding on each other, going nowhere fast.

Maybe the alternative to life among the zombies isn't gathering together in a boarded-up shopping mall or circling the wagons, or choosing whether to eat plain shit or shit with broken glass: Maybe the alternative is to choose something better.

Winter is almost here, it's true. This weekend's freak October snowstorm certainly reminded us of that. But winter ends. Spring is coming.

Be gone, zombies, be gone.

42, La Calavera

Alexei Kondratiev and Len "Black Lotus" Rosenberg were two friends of mine back in the 1990s when I was a Neo-Pagan. Both men were brilliant, hugely knowledgeable about Pagan paths and fonts of lore and tales. Alexei was a Celtic scholar, and Black Lotus was a student of the Shakti path of Hinduism; both were also "witches" of NeoPagan tradition. They projected a kind of quirky eccentricity. Len was a bit of a bear, bearded and bellied and balding; Alexei had a wild mane of unruly graying hair. They both had the air about them of being too concerned with the cosmic forces swirling around them to be too concerned about such trivialities as unwrinkled clothes, but they were wonderfully warm and open men. In a fortuitous stroke of cosmic fate, they found love in each other and were partners as long as I knew them. Len had some terrible health problems; when I knew him he walked with a cane, often grimacing though never complaining about his physical limitations. I ran into Alexei out and about a few times after I left that circle and he seemed always unchanged. Both Black Lotus and Alexei passed on this past year, a few months apart. Ibaye. I'm sad to think I won't be running into them again this side of, well, that cosmic veil said to be so thin on Halloween night, what Len and Alexei would have called Samhain. But I'm hoping their spirits, having shuffled off the proverbial mortal coils, are running together, united in the mysterious world on the other side.

It's what Halloween is traditionally for, this day of the dead, besides donning amusing costumes and projecting momentary alternate egos: remembering the transformational passage at the end of this plane of life. Those skulls and bones make us laugh, but they're a reminder of both the temporary nature of our flesh and also the core of bone at our center: a dialectical alchemy of the ephemeral and material.

This world lost a lot of wonderful musicians this year. Marion Brown, the creator of hauntingly evocative jazz suites in the early 1970s. Aminata Moseka Abbey Lincoln, who brought the fire of the civil rights movement into jazz in the 1960s and then aged and mellowed like fancy cognac. Soul singer Solomon Burke. Calypso singer Arrow of "hot hot hot" fame. Lena Horne, actress and singer, one of the most elegant women who ever lived. Malcolm McLaren, innovator of punk rock, hip-hop, and house music who approached and then curated urban music as high art. Ibaye. Fortunately for us still on this side, the music, the sounds they made, are left behind.

It's a good night to light candles for the spirit world. It's a good night to offer up a few prayers for the spirits on this side and for the spirits on that side. It's a good night to remember those who have passed, and to ponder the mystery of it all. You can't know yet what happens in that fearsome transition. There are hints, and you can hear whispers from the other side, but get used to it, sooner or later you will know. And this is the night when it's not dark or morbid or obsessive to look at the skull like a kind of magic mirror. What do you see there? Boo!

A Prayer for All Souls

It's Halloween. Pagans believe the "veil between the worlds" is thin this time of year, the holiday they call Samhain, and the dead walk among the living. Others, like the Mexicans in my neighborhood, believe today is the day to honor the dead. Most people believe the day is one for playing with identity and challenging the rules of life and being and reality.

Let me offer my prayer of thanks to the ancestors and spirits.

Thank you to all my ancestors for living the lives the helped me live mine:
Dorothy Scott Horst Holden, George Horst, Conrad Horst, Lisbeth Horst, Dorothy Ashcroft Fitzgerald, Thomas Fitzgerald, Bertha Menzies, and all the unknown Horsts, Scotts, Fitzgeralds, O'Neills, Ashcrofts, Menzies and all the others, from the US, from Ireland, from Germany, from the Russian Volga, from England; Christians and Jews alike.

Thank you to all the good and kind spirits who open the path and guide me to a better, more knowing life. Thank you to the American spirits, to the Indian, African, and European spirits.

Thank you to the lost souls and my beloved dead, to all my friends no longer with us in physical form.

Thank you to the earth, to the elements, to the spirits of nature. Thank you to the gods of old. Thank you to the Orishas. Thank you to the worlds above and below.

Thank you to God for the world that is, was, and will be.

For peace, for health, for balance, for wisdom, for prosperity, for abundance, for hope...for me, for my parents, for my relatives, for my loved ones, for my boyfriend, for my friends, for my pets.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.