SAM HAIN 10/22/06

When I was a kid, hallowe'en was a big deal. I don't know why that should have been cuz my grands owned a small grocery store with an old-fashioned candy cabinet. The cabinet was black with glass windows. The customers had to point to what they wanted and one of us would get it for them.

Halloween costumes, well I don't really remember too many. Actually, I can only recall two clearly. I had a red and white cowgirl costume complete with boots and hat when I was little. Later on, my stepdad made me a pilgrim costume on his sewing machine and I wore that one for several years.

Churches back then weren't all that hip on history or origins yet. Guitars were a revolutionary addition to some church services back then, the roman catholic church had just conceded to speaking the mass in english rather than latin, and the christian churches of various denominations had yet to get political. Halloween was non-controversial in my childhood.

My mother always insisted on inspecting my loot before I ate it. Stories were surfacing about kids eating embedded laxative squares or razor blades in their begged-for chocolates. And I think I was only supposed to go to the houses of people we knew. I went with my friend Gracie and her mother. When I was too old to go begging, I was commissioned to hand out the individually wrapped little chocolate bars and pennies to the little beggars coming up behind me.

"Mischief night" was an annual source of terror for me. I don't know why. We had a driveway so it wasn't our cars getting egged upon. Even so, I wasn't driving back then. I suppose having lived through the riots one summer and a house robbery during which I'd woken up could partially explain my fear.

The other part of my fear was my own sense of self-preservation. I'd never been in a fair fight in my life. The kids in my grammar school just didn't do that. By time I'd gotten to high school, my chicken status was well-established. I didn't have the guts for fighting with my fists. I learned to fight with my words and with my ever-present adolescent sullen attitude.

Throughout tenth, eleventh, and twelve grades for me life was either religious obsessions or drugging. I never thought there could be life without either. It wasn't until many years later with significant time in recovery from my addictions that I learned that there could be life with neither.

I came into recovery believing, or at least attempting to believe in the religious ideology I had discovered while surfing between drug runs. It no longer worked for me. After several frustrating years of intellectual and emotional dishonesty, I hooked into the Star Wars craze and "The Force" became my higher power. When that stopped working for me, I used my dog. I told people that my dog was utilizing his common sense in his life far more than I'd been able to in mine. I re-discovered paganism and some new age oddities, spiritualism, and then briefly a group of people who self-identified as "wiccans."

I knew I was no "wiccan." A witch I was through and through. I discovered through reading the various creation myths and linguistic studies that I no longer believed in any god at all. Not the polytheism of my fantasy life, not the duo-theism of many wiccans [Lord and Lady, one god and one goddess with many faces....], not the monotheism of my youth.

Shortly, the wiccan group had to go. I re-affirmed my own identity as a solitaire and that is where I am today. An eclectic solitaire with no deities to muddle things up. Believing in the sanctity of life, in the sacred within, in the divinity within every living being has freed me to make my own decisions and forced me to seek out the rational, logical, and scientific.

Today, I celebrate the seasons. The four seasons are my major holy days. In my schemata, Sam Hain is a celebration of my ancestors-- both biological and spiritual-- and the legacy they have left. As I keep what I know of the old ways, I remember who I am and I tap into my roots for nourishment.

Sam Hain is the Witches' New Year. It is also my new year-- a time of remembering. It is a time when the veil between the worlds [of the living and the dead] is said to be at its' thinnest. Since I don't go in for a yearly seance or calling in of the ancestors as some witches do, I had to find another way to acknowledge Sam Hain.

I have an ancestors' altar which has mementos of some of the folks I hold near and dear to me who have passed on. It is there I go to remember those who have come before me. In remembering where I came from, I am better able to live today.

~sapphoq life