These birds are just ordinary, the little yellow-fronted ones, hordes of them, that cluster at the bird feeder and peck the putty (and what else?) around the edges of the window panes. But there is a small laminated card, bookmark-sized, fixed, by way of a sucker like at the end of a child's arrow, to the kitchen window. On it, the little yellow birds, similar to these but not quite identical, are given an exotic name that I haven't heard before. So there is the possibility, small but pleasing, that my window panes and bird feeder are serving exotically named birds. They are such lively customers, and that was one of them above my head in the tree at first light. I wonder what names they give themselves.
That was Samhain, and we have passed through the doorway into the dark half of the year. Yesterday was an ending; today is a beginning; this is the time of the silence and what the silence holds. That was Halloween, first of the great festivals at which the barrier between the living and the fancy-dress industry is at its weakest. No costume sold that will last until this time next year. We celebrate two festivals - the traditional and the commercial - and in doing so, perhaps we can't help but celebrate the duality at the heart of all things; I learn that the heart has two sets of two valves - one set is called the "semilunar", which is convenient. Wild day yesterday, wind and rain, then rain in the night and a still morning. Convenient weather for a transition, although the fires would have needed to be banked-up, covered, allowing the flame to smoulder unseen ... which fits.
Perhaps next year I should mark the occasion with a bonfire, but perhaps the appropriate bonfire would be covered so thickly in leaves that it wouldn't burst into flame until well into the following day. First compromise of an earlier priesthood: give them a proper midnight fire, rather than the appropriate damp heap emitting no more than one or two wisps of smoke.
That was Samhain, and we have passed through the doorway into the dark half of the year. Yesterday was an ending; today is a beginning; this is the time of the silence and what the silence holds. That was Halloween, first of the great festivals at which the barrier between the living and the fancy-dress industry is at its weakest. No costume sold that will last until this time next year. We celebrate two festivals - the traditional and the commercial - and in doing so, perhaps we can't help but celebrate the duality at the heart of all things; I learn that the heart has two sets of two valves - one set is called the "semilunar", which is convenient. Wild day yesterday, wind and rain, then rain in the night and a still morning. Convenient weather for a transition, although the fires would have needed to be banked-up, covered, allowing the flame to smoulder unseen ... which fits.
Perhaps next year I should mark the occasion with a bonfire, but perhaps the appropriate bonfire would be covered so thickly in leaves that it wouldn't burst into flame until well into the following day. First compromise of an earlier priesthood: give them a proper midnight fire, rather than the appropriate damp heap emitting no more than one or two wisps of smoke.