Thinning Worlds

At Samhain I honor my Ancestral Dead and formally welcome them into my home and hearth. It’s a common practice for witches, pagans, and ancestor worship practitioners. It’s also something I do every day, not just in autumn. The other side of the Halloween coin is May Day, otherwise known as Beltane, and it’s another time when the lines between the living and the dead blur.

The living, the dead, and the energy beings that bleed into this world from another. There are too many stories of fairy folk from differing mythologies for me to not be open to the possibility that they exist on another plane. I mean, once you believe in ghosts the door to what is possible stands wide open.

And I believe in ghosts.

            They visit me in my dreams. But when the worlds are thin I see them in the waking world as well. I see movements out of the corner of my eye, things tucking behind chairs and bookshelves that aren’t there when I look for them straight-on. I feel people entering the room behind me but no matter how certain my body is that I am not alone I cannot see anyone with my naked eye. And my scalp prickles as if a hand has gently touched me. It warms beneath another palm. I no longer reach up to check because I know it is not a physical presence.

This is how I live. The blurs are what I refer to as wayward spirits, harmless travelers drawn towards memories of being alive. The thinner the worlds get the brighter my inner lighthouse gets. I have a room lurker who is also an old fixture I call the German Guy. I know he belongs to my maternal Grandma Art’s side and as she passed last spring I am not surprised he has come to sit with me. The hand I feel on my scalp is my Great-Grandma Elsie. She is my spirit traffic cop, never far. When the worlds bleed across each other her presence is more vigilant.

I leave out cups of tea and horribly salted chicken wings as a thank you to her. Or strawberry shortcake in season. She lived with us in the summers and was alive until I was seventeen. There is a space in my heart that was shaped by her, a part of me that remembers how she molded me. She saw what others in my family did not see and now, from a grown-up perspective, her experiences with a difficult son dictated the advice she gave me:

You have to love, anyway. You can’t let the bullies stop you from living your life.

That goes for spirit bullies, too. If you are sensitive to them, they can crowd the room and demand attention. So when I clean my Ancestor Altar and refresh it I call in peaceful spirits that do not wish us harm. I take a shot of some pungent liquor and make an offering at the edge of our property for those spirits seeking offerings with no regard for the living.

There is room for them all to be honored…just out there. Not in my home.

In this thinner world I ask the Ancestors to safeguard those who may not yet be at peace and to watch over their families.

I still grieve for Recent Dead. It wells up as the thinning comes and I can feel spirits more viscerally. I am both reminded of their loss and equally hurt that their ghost has not come to visit. I wish them peace even as I grieve the loss of them, the loss of their physical presence, of their wisdom, of all the time we’ll never have to repair or strengthen wounds and hearts. And I am left to figure out how to move on from unfinished work.

But not alone. Those Who Have Gone Before aid me in my grief. The Ancestral Dead, the centuries of others who have felt such loss, have been deceased long enough that they can hold space for my sorrow. Their physical connection to the World They Knew is long gone and they are drawn to that familiar emotion of loss. Whether intentional or not, they sit with me. I know this. When I am open to it, in my darkest moment, I do not feel alone.

For some people the thought of ghosts is isolating and frightening. It can drive them from a space. We often feel such a way about things we cannot explain. I’ve always trusted what I am experiencing more than just my eyes. We do not see everything and we do not see everything the same way as everyone else. It makes our personal experiences valuable.

Ghosts are real.

Those blurs I see out of the corner of my eye are not all ghosts. After years of working with spirits you can sense/see the difference. Some are land wights waking after a wintry slumber. Finding a way to embrace the life-waking in the same breath as life-transitioning-through-death is a way to honor those who are no more.

Look up the histories of your ancestors and leave offerings appropriate to the lands of your people. I leave out bread and seed and fruit and tea to feed those just waking and I do it in the name of those I miss. In my grief I choose to feed life.

Open your heart to the thinning of the walls between this world and the next. Do not try to quantify or qualify. I will tell you that yes, your loved one is gone. And they are alive. And they are reincarnated. And they are with you. All of that is true, all at once, right now.

Now they are gone. Now they are everywhere.

How will your heart honor them?