On This Halloween

At first they were just a collage of textures, white on blue. What was the wind doing up there? I didn’t care, I was in awe as I laid my head back in the evening light and allowed the textures to take form.

The first one I saw was a dragon head with large horns curving back toward its slender, writhing body. As my eyes were tracing along the end of his tail, I was surprised to see a woman with the head of a cat and with wings. She was fierce, her eyes daring me to say she was just a cloud, a product of my imagination. At her feet a goblin with pointy ears and long nose echoed her challenge, “How can you say we’re not really here?” Startled, I looked away to see who or what else was lurking up there in the sky but when I looked back, they had dissolved, their detail and attitude floated limply in the sky.

Allowing my mind, my imagination, the creative land that forms ideas and eventually knowledge, to be so free, sometimes scares me. Perhaps on my quest to rid myself of fear I could use my creative powers to transform the wariness of the darker, menacing parts of myself into a wisdom that I am the center of time and space, I am a part of everything, not in an egotistical way, but in a cosmological way, an energetic way.

Scary images, phrases, people and places that create the feeling of fear in me are heralds of my residual biases and traumas. I am flesh, an earthly being and fear is a biological function of my flesh. This knowledge isn’t even enough to rid the reaction from my cells forever.

It’s the joining with, the becoming all, that will begin to dissolve my fears away like the entities in the clouds.

On this Halloween, when we are aware of the darkness and the possibility of fear, what is the right mask to wear so that none of it can scare me to my core? How do I reassure my senses that it’s all just a play, a test, to see whose brave enough to approach the house, where the windows glow eerily and the gravestones and skeletons might be pretend? But how would I know?