The "Day of the Dead" Altar at St. Nick's

The people of my past walk beside me, not behind me,
singing their songs to remind me
of who I was and what I once called home---
to point me to the future that is mine alone.
They stay not far away.
But it's up to me to control
the hold they have on my soul.


There is something fitting and more than coincidental that this year we turn the clocks back, in recognition of increasing hours of darkness, on the feast of All Souls, or "Dia de los Muertos." The whole "hallowed eve" rite,I am told, had to do with entering the "dark half" of the year. The Celts who depended so much on knowledge of seasons, paid great reverence to light and darkness. In the morning, the men would doff their caps to the rising sun, and in the evening the ladies would bend a knee to the moon on the horizon.
As the great Welshman Dylan Thomas urged, "Rage! Rage against the dying of the light!"

In our age we have done everything we can to push back darkness... ugly artificial lights are everywhere, in a kind of florescent purgatory, we being the poor souls, afraid of the dark.