October in the Haloed Earth*

By Michael H. Kew

A blessing: hum heat trails the equinoctial rain. River: fishy, algae-freed. Reflexes of myrtle and maple laze upon its jadecrystal waters pulsing like aurora borealis in the hot-hung pause of afternoon.

Quintessence: Indian Summer.

Clear quiet days of reverie and nights of tinkling crickets and creeping bears beneath Saturn and Jupiter and waning crescent Moon would all approach the annularity that coastally was not. Low clouds killed the south Oregon shore. Yet the shadows of soul—they grew.

Apt for October.

It would come eighth (Latin octo = “eight") in the 10-month Roman calendar which of course Caesar stretched to 12. October finished with Samhain, even later the pagan Iron Age seed of Halloween and the last "festival" in the ancient Celts' eightfold year wheel. This was and is a cosmic spin entailing four based solar—two equinoxes, two solstices—and four based lunar: Imbolc (start of spring), Beltane (start of summer), Lughnasadh (start of harvest), Samhain (end of harvest).

As a late-'80s teen I saw the Gaelic word in the form of an American deathrock/horror punk band led by Glenn Danzig of Misfits fame (both bands boosted my tinnitus). Years on I learned that Samhain, pronounced sow-wen, was not merely a mysterious quartet of scowling men but something much larger and older spiritually hinging summer to winter, a liminal (Latin limen = “threshold”) space whence the veil between physical and spiritual worlds—between us and our ancestors—is thinnest.

Samhain coincides with the Sun's push through Pluto and Scorpio, the latter a water (autumn rain?)-based astrological sign that rules the eighth of each year's 12 horoscopic "houses." These are found also in the zodiac wheel, a 360-degree chart denoting the 12 signs (mine is Leo).

The houses (spaced 30 degrees apart) follow the yearlong ecliptic plane through which the Sun travels. Each house is paired with a constellation (zodiac sign) and a planet. Like each sign, each house has unique personality traits, fortunes, futures, and symbolisms.

For you and me, astrologers take these planetary positions and the jive between them to define and cast natal charts—the chart a glimpse of the heavens at the precise time and place we were born. It's a dozen tidy sects, each tied to whichever astrological house and month they fall within. Devised by Babylonians in 1500 BCE, all 12 houses have distinct themes.

River Chetco, Oct. 29, 2023. Photo: Kew. (Crater Lake eclipse photo: Dave Killen/The Oregonian)

Our current zodiacal theme, then, is one of transition and transformation—of sex and death, of beginnings and endings. Even at a microvegetative scale here around Brookings, with the brown summerdead forbs and grasses reborn green after the cyclical early-autumn rains and still-warm sunshine that soothes the still-warm topsoils and freshening the now-chilled watershed. The way the west-wind-driven clouds will blow in from the Pacific to block and filter the ever-sinking beam of Sun and blanket the Earth in fleeting shadow.

Much like an annular eclipse.

Mid-month, for millions of lucky eyes, the Moonblocked Sun fused the illusion of a vertical orange halo, a black hole ringed, a cavity of ringing bells. The light dimmed, the light brightened. The veil between day and night laid bare. On a windy cape, we missed it all. Rain would occur. (Ironically thick wildfire smoke denied me the 2017 total eclipse.)

Life by sundial moves faster than death. So I can still dream and admire the wheel. About the fire of sublimity torquing that first shift in light as it bows deep into the ancestral yawn. I can doze in damp grass on a Hunter's Moon ridgetop prairie and feel the last bones and footprints of prior lives living forth in these loams and rock forests and subsoil microbial eternities. All beneath ear-ringing limbos of aforementioned tinnitus.

Dazzled by Venus before it drops into the peaks, I can revere the lambent zodiacal light of the Kalmiopsis in a misty skydawn of dawns following that elusive ring of fire. Dawns that will rapidly sink colder and wetter. Dawns for a mind rapidly withdrawing to the orange ataraxic glow found at a woodstove of sap-crackle per the huge Kalmiopsis-facing fir felled last winter by a southern gale.

There's an ambient gap between September and October where you first smell the star-tickling woodsmoke in lengthening night. There's the remembrance of loved ones gone. There's the clang of autumn resembling a dark mountain song, a slow plunge from the warm peak of summer down to the meditation valley of winter. There's the mnemonic Orkney glug of Highland Park whisky poured into my Glencairn glass—something I always do on or near Samhain, when I also exhume my three Samhain albums and play each at least once.

All of this and more—messages from a distant past.

Back amongst myrtles and maples aside the river Chetco. See the ancient king and Chinook salmon, leaping, dodging fishhooks, weaving upstream to spawn. If they can. The slim veil of life and death. Though time gets away, seasonal voices always tell us where we are.

*Nod to Kerouac's "October in the Railroad Earth" prose poem, penned in San Francisco, Calif., October 1952.