How To Get Rid Of Ghosts

A Halloween special..or something.

I wrote the piece that follows, minus the odd edit, a few years ago, so I thought I’d share it here to mark a day that, like so many other festivals, seems to have lost its original meaning. It reminded me how easily we lose our own sense of meaning and how important it is that we don’t.

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I’d begun to wonder whether there would be any chance of cutting the grass again before Spring, so relentless has the rain been this week. Then it stopped, and the wind came blowing through to dry the ground briefly, just long enough that I could tidy the garden and harvest the three remaining pumpkins.

We won’t be carving these and scooping out their flesh, putting candles inside and sitting them on the doorstep waiting for children with plastic buckets full of sweets. We’ll be eating them.

The Halloween tradition is borne from the Celtic festival of Samhain when people believed that, on the 31st of October, the night before their New Year, the dead returned to earth in order to cause trouble and damage crops. So they’d light bonfires and put on frightening costumes to ward them off.

“I can’t stand Halloween” both my sister and my daughter tell me on the same day within a few hours of one another.

“You used to love it,” I tell my daughter.

“Yes, when I was a kid,” she says.

It’s an odd contradiction that the people who enjoy Halloween the most are the children, those with, on the whole, the fewest ghosts in their past and the least need to banish them.

As adults, we might not fear the threat of an actual ghost but perhaps it’s a good time to exorcise aspects of ourselves which haunt us.

Reading about Iris Murdoch’s concept of “unselfing” by concentrating instead on the beauty of nature and art I look at the dog sleeping in her bed while I, in the half-light, get up early to make use of the extra hour afforded by the odd ritual of changing the clocks.

The house is quiet and the air is chill compared with the past few days. The pumpkins sit on the garden table having endured a night of heavy rain and a buffeting by the wind. Protected by a thick, smooth skin I could have done with at times.

Walking with a dog through the park, I notice the tiny things I would never have seen if I was walking alone. A wildflower hanging on for dear life, and an intricate web illuminated by the rain. While Daisy is busy licking water from a blade of grass I stare up at a vast maple with its claret and amber leaves above and below my feet on the sodden earth.

Here, if I have the will, it is almost impossible to be concerned with my own vanities and insecurities.

Daisy tears through the muddy tracks towards the water, leaps in and swims across to the other side of the stone bridge. She stands dripping, her head pointing upward, reading the morning wind.

Later there will be work to do and things unforeseen to deal with but, right now, we are almost invisible. We are the best of ghosts.