Halloween

Thoughts for Hallowe'en This is to kick off a facebook weekly diary or some such. Get us being trendy! Woo hoo We have just witnessed the Hunter's Moon or Samhain: the full moon nearest November 1, which occurred this year on October 18. When Christianity swept across the face of Europe, Samhain is the observance that got rescheduled, repurposed, and renamed Hallowe'en. Indeed, it is the sacred night, the Hunter's Moon, when the Lady of Seedtime and Harvest steps down from Her highest place to make room so that the Lord of Hunting and the Forest can have His half-year of supremacy. At the time of the first new moon of the new Celtic year, then, we Frosts propose to begin a new phase in communicating with other Wiccans. Each of us has within us a spirit. We Frosts simplistically think of the two parts of the being as "I", the ongoing spiritual part, and "Me", the mundane part. At times the spirit's agenda may seem to be at odds with what the body wants in the mundane world. Through meditation we try to reconcile the two parts in a happy or rational way so that we are not pulled in two directions at once: such pulling leads to stress. People too often assume that the two parts conflict with each other. No. They complement each other in what we call progressive reincarnation, each playing a role that the other cannot play. Let us meditate first on the sort of things that Me really wants. Let's see whether we can separate the wants from the needs. Often we can do that by investigating (a) whether the want is real and (b) what it would cost to fulfill any pseudo-need. As an example: The other day our cherished friend Ronn came by driving a newly acquired RAV 4 sporting all the bells and whistles imaginable. Gavin immediately felt that he too would like to replace his antiquated Subaru (a whole year old) with a shiny new RAV 4. It obviously wasn't a need: The Subaru meets all the Frosts' needs more than adequately. Anyhow, one day we had a little time in the local market town, Beckley, so we looked into the real-world effects a trade would have. Very quickly it became obvious that the price equation wouldn't work: Even with the high trade-in value of the Subaru so meticulously maintained, the payments on the new vehicle would break the bank. This little story illustrates the difference between a want and a need and Me's influence which had weighted the spiritual side in this purely mundane-level fantasy of Gavin's. We spent an hour of our life getting a firm real-world answer to a question that would have been available to us in ten minutes of deep meditation. We're (shall we say?) old-line meditators, yet the want for a new toy overruled the need and the obvious answer. We encourage you, then, not to waste the time, even though in wasting the time it set Gavin's want in perspective. Remember: In the real world there are many places where you can put far fewer dollars than are required to get a new car into something that will be infinitely more rewarding--places such as the garden.