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The Flower That Waited for the Dark
If these mornings have become part of how you keep your days, there is a room for you inside the almanac. The Garden Gate opens every full edition free for a month, and The Living Book sends each day home with you as printed pages to write on.
The Living Book: 180 printable pages this November, six for every day
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All Souls, a waning Moon beside Mars and the long night some things need before they open
The pot of mums on the porch step came home from the hardware store in September as a tight green mound, and it sat there through the last heat doing nothing a person could see. This morning it is a dome of rust and gold so thick you cannot find a leaf. It is Monday, the Moon's day and the first full working morning since the clocks fell back, so the light arrives a little earlier than the body expects and will leave before five thirty this evening, like a neighbor who only stopped by to return a dish. It is also All Souls, the day the Church has kept since the Middle Ages for every one of the faithful dead whose names no calendar holds, the ones who are only ours.
Morning
If you are up before six, you might carry your coffee out into the cold and look high into the southeast. The Moon is there, a little less than half lit and thinning toward next Monday's new moon, with the red spark of Mars just below and to its left, so close that two fingers held at arm's length would cover the gap. Jupiter burns farther down that same slant, and lower still sits the star the old astronomers set in the lion's heart. Low in the east, as the sky goes from ink to pewter, Venus climbs out of the trees. A waning Moon gives back light it borrowed from a sun it cannot see at that hour, and on a morning set aside for the dead the picture asks very little explaining.
The Essenes greeted the Angel of Life on a Monday morning, and you might do the same in the plainest way there is: put a hand on something living before you speak to anyone, the cold leaf of the mums or the warm side of a dog, and let the morning's first breath be a thank you for being among the breathing a while longer. Steiner's verse for this week speaks of a light rising from the soul's own depths and pressing outward like a small sun, turning into the will to go on living and shining into the dullness of the senses. It is the right verse for the week the outer light gives out early. Something in us has to start making its own.
One practice for the morning, if the day allows it. Take an index card and write the names of your dead in a column, the ones everyone remembers and the ones nobody does, the grandmother and the distant cousin and the neighbor who taught you to bait a crab line. Set the card where you will see it at noon. This is how the commemoration began, after all, as a list of names said out loud.
