I don’t know if you have seen the Disney movie “Coco”… what a great film. It is about the celebration of Day of the Dead, an important celebration long celebrated in Mexico. The story follows a 12-year-old boy named Miguel who is accidentally transported to the Land of the Dead, where he seeks the help of his deceased musician great-great-grandfather to return him to his family among the living and to reverse his family’s ban on music. It is a marvelous reflection on the intertwining of ancestors stories, the ways families live out brokenness and healing and the ways that we can stay connected to our ancestry.

The following poem is from the Celtic tradition but it echoes the same essence of using the thin space of this time to open to those who are gone and yet still with us and how we might rediscover the power of their presence in our lives.

Happy Halloween, All Soul’s and All Saints Day!
May you be the open light that you are seeking and may others be touched by your light this week.

Samhain
BY ANNIE FINCH
(The Celtic Halloween)

In the season leaves should love,
since it gives them leave to move
through the wind, towards the ground
they were watching while they hung,
legend says there is a seam
stitching darkness like a name.

Now when dying grasses veil
earth from the sky in one last pale
wave, as autumn dies to bring
winter back, and then the spring,
we who die ourselves can peel
back another kind of veil

that hangs among us like thick smoke.
Tonight at last I feel it shake.
I feel the nights stretching away
thousands long behind the days
till they reach the darkness where
all of me is ancestor.

I move my hand and feel a touch
move with me, and when I brush
my own mind across another,
I am with my mother’s mother.
Sure as footsteps in my waiting
self, I find her, and she brings

arms that carry answers for me,
intimate, a waiting bounty.
“Carry me.” She leaves this trail
through a shudder of the veil,
and leaves, like amber where she stays,
a gift for her perpetual gaze.

Annie Finch, “Samhain” from Eve, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Copyright © 1997 by Annie Finch. Reprinted by permission of the author.