Livin' an' dyin' in ¾ time

It's Tew's day and a Full Moon has begun to wane… shining fittingly on Halloween traditions.

Beyond the traditions of costumes and candy, Halloween reminds us of the delicate balance of life and death, light and dark, and the great lessons of both. The Halloween we know began as Samhain, a pagan festival that signaled the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter. It celebrated the introduction of darker days ahead and marked the time of year where it was thought the veil between the physical and unseen world was the thinnest. Perhaps the most famous of these traditions in our part of the world, the Mexican tradition of Día de los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead, celebrates those who have passed on. Organized Christianity moved to co-opt the pagan rites with All Saint's Eve and All Saint's day.

And, in case you missed it: . . . in spite of the ghouls and revenants and other morbid players from the sidewalk boneyard, Halloween is a holiday for the living. – Melissa Kirsch

While the stock market crash of 1929 was initiated in on the 24th of October, the actual bottom fell out of the market on the 29th that year. Heather Cox Richardson's blog Letters from an American provides a good account of the sequences and effects.

And, for a real horror story: There's a genuine movement to impose dictatorship in America — and it goes well beyond Donald Trump – Thom Hartmann

In the deep fall . . .

at evening especially,

the piled firewood shifts a little,

longing to be on its way.

– Mary Oliver, from “Song for Autumn” in New and Selected Poems: Volume Two. Beacon Press, 2005.