“To forget one’s ancestors

is to be a brook without a source,

a tree without a root.”

—Chinese Proverb

Samhain blessings to you, dear one. And blessings to all the Ones who have come before you. The Ones remembered and the Ones whose names may be lost to consciousness, but whose resilience blazes in your bones nonetheless.

Take a moment to feel the weight and shape of your body.

Imagine the spiral of genetic material dancing in each cell, a string of pearls handed down to you by approximately 300,000 years of ancestral memory.

Consider the long lineage of all who have come before you.

*“Grandmother’s Prayers,” art by* *AnnaoftheMeadow*

Today is the Celtic holiday Samhain (pronounced Sow-wen), also called All Hallow’s Eve in the Christian tradition, and known more popularly as Halloween.

Samhain is a cross-quarter day marking the midpoint between the fall equinox and winter solstice. It ushers us into the darkest months of the year.

For the ancient Celtic people, it marked the end of one year, and the beginning of the next. A threshold time between what was and what is yet to be. A womb/tomb time of death that leads to birth.

It is also a time where the veil between the worlds of matter and spirit is said to be thin.

This is a season to honor the dead.

For many in modern mainstream Western society, we are highly uncomfortable with death. And the concept of ancestors is likely quaint, but strange. There is a focus on the future, and a forgetting of the past. And a lot of energy is spent trying to avoid death.

Just look at the frightening lawn decorations of monsters, ghouls and ghosts. The mainstream American idea of the living dead are zombies. Yikes!

But for most of human history, and in the majority of cultures globally today, the dead weren’t something to be feared, but to be honored and revered.

And for quite a simple reason, our lives are the result of the lives that came before us. Not only of the lives of our human ancestors, but also those of so many other beings.

Consider that the very air in our atmosphere is the result of ancient trees exhaling for millions of years before animal life could come to be.

Or how the water that you drink came from the body of a mountain who has been pulling down snow from the sky for ages, as well as a river who found the path to carry that snowmelt down the mountain to the valley where it is caught for your use. These too are our ancestors.

Honoring our ancestors, human and other than human, is an ancient practice of acknowledging the web of life in which we are all embedded.

It is an act of thanksgiving and respect that helps us remember our place in the family of things.

Honoring the dead gives us perspective that we may hold ourselves in a larger story of life and death. It helps us to feel both the limits of our life, as well as the eternal quality of life itself.

And while there is an argument to made for celebrating the spooky and fearsome, I wonder how our lives might be impacted if, in addition to handing out candy to cute neighborhood kids in costumes, we also spent time making offerings of gratitude and love to honor those who came before us?

I imagine the rampant sense of extistential angst and anxiety would be mitigated.

It’s important to say that honoring my ancestors is a new practice for me, and one that I am still finding my way with, so I am by no means an expert.

Although I am called to this ancient ancestral practice, I also want to admit that I am still healing from a culturally inherited fear of the dead. However, it’s also true that some of the people I’ve loved most in my life are dead. And my love for them quite naturally asks me to remember.

No doubt, you have some particular practices of honoring the dead in your own ancestral traditions, which I encourage you to investigate.

And, it’s also important to remember that this practice is as old as humanity itself.

Even before homo sapiens came onto the scene, archeological evidence shows that neanderthals honored the dead.

So please know that this practice belongs to you, and trust your heart and gut as you proceed with a spirit of simple reverence and care.

With that in mind, here are seven simple ways to celebrate Samhain and honor the ancestors:

7 Ways to Step into the Samhain Season

Create an Altar: You might create a simple space of honor for your beloved dead. Place photographs and other tokens of their lives as well as things that feel honoring, such as flowers and candles.
Make Something: Create something that honors the practices of the past. Perhaps a meal that your grandma made or a handicraft from your cultural lineage. Maybe a piece of art unique to you made as an act of remembering.
Give Food: Food offerings are a very common practice in many cultures. In my Irish Celtic heritage, it is tradition to set a place at the table with a full portion of dinner for the ancestors on Samhain. My Italian-American friend offers a simple glass of water. You can see what feels right or do a little research into your own family or cultural practices.
Say a Prayer: You might pray for the souls of the dead to rest in peace. Or you might pray to the dead directly by giving thanks, and asking for their help if you wish. If you don’t like the idea of prayer, you can write a letter or simply talk out loud to them.
Visit the Gravesite: If you know where your deceased family members are buried, visiting their graves with flowers is a beautiful way to honor them. You can also visit the local gravesite and honor those buried there by reading their names aloud.
Walk the Land: Go outside and walk the land with your heart tuned to the deep memories of this particular place. Consider how the land itself was shaped by powerful forces of geology and weather at work for millennia. Notice the plant and animal beings who are here now, and imagine who might have been here thousands of years ago.
Do you know the names of the indigenous people whose ancestral lands these are? If so, you might honor their legacy past, present and future with your own verbal acknowledgement of respect. If not, do a little research to start to learn the story of this land and her people, a story alive and unfolding.
Earth Offerings: You might honor the plant and animal beings who live near you as a way to pay homage to the great web of life of which you are part, and the other than human kin whose stories are tied to your own. Perhaps you set out seed for the birds, or offer water to a tree, or simply say hello and thank you to the beings you encounter outside.

I hope you find some ways that feel authentic and life giving to you to honor the lives of your ancestors and the great web of life of which you are apart.

And may these simple ways of orienting to the past with honor and love help us step into the future as the well and wise ancestors we wish to be.

Pssst….know someone who might like this post? Pass it on!

Connecting to the body’s wisdom and the longings of our soul are important aspect of the work I do as a 1:1 Soul Companion.

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Honor Your Ancestors

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