The sun is shining and the clouds rove the sky with a vigor that speaks little of summer's long gone pleasantries. Sunny in this moment, cloudy the next. Moving almost as fast as the seasons themselves, once it was summer and now it is not. Time, and clouds it would seem, wait for no one.
It is the season of phantoms - all those for whom time has moved ceaselessly on. For our own part, we measure time as the mechanical repetition and accumulation of cycles - night and day, 24 hours, a week, a month, a year - a life.
The tribes we call "Celtic" seem to have measured their time as beginning with the night. Their year began in the darkness of winter on November 1. But their time was also attached to place - to the landscape on which their lives transpired, where their crops, cattle and children grew, and where, like the growing season, they died back to the ground. The year itself revolved, like a pilgrimage, around various stations of life, death, renewal, birth, planting, harvest, the hearth. On a greater scale, authors such as Michael Dames have suggested that the Irish year rotated around features and sites in the landscape such as Cnoc Aine and the Hill of Tara as seen from alignments on the central hill of Uisneach.
It is to the landscape, the terrain where the energy of life is spent, that the ghosts of the season return. The rituals of Samhain call for the respectful and welcoming treatment of flickering ghosts, to curry favor and luck from them in the coming year. Phantoms are those who are literally "out of time." Like all creatures of the Otherworld, the space they occupy is infinite, their time is irrelevant.
But we are not creatures of the Otherworld, neither our space nor our time is infinite. Yet we have ghosts. Ghosts whose time is long past, but who yet reside in our present. They wait for us in the dark, in our memories, in our relationships and they scare us at the most unexpected moments. Theirs is the energy that was cast away, that even time couldn't burn off - the fear, the grief, the horror. They might be something that was done, they might be something left undone, they flit, they hide and they suck your breath away when you recognize them. They reside in the landscape where they spent the most time - in your mind and in your body. And no amount of repetitive cycles of days or months or years will make them go away.
They are the hungry ghosts and this is their season. If you are unlucky and don't give them their due, they'll stay with you throughout all your seasons. But though they be specters they, like all of us, seek only return. They too appreciate a warmly lit room, a heart with space to feel the pain, their memory. Darkness has its place, but it is a hard place to spend forever. Despite their dread look, recognize that light in their eyes - it is yours, after all.
Once it was summer, now it is not. Our time continues to turn. We have darkness and a difficult world around us. Draw close, hold friends and family dear, and spare some warmth and compassion for the ghosts that gather at your door.