It occurs to me that a scream is an echo, a sliver from the abyss. Its sound fractures lines into thin air. It is not only the sound, but the lines that terrify us, reminding us the borderland of chaos is not as far away as we might like.
There are lines that alarm and lines that don't and both are ubiquitous in our world. Lines between boxes on medical history forms, lines at the gas station, lines on an aging face and lines between friends that are better not to cross.
There are larger lines too, boundaries between night and day, the living and the dead, the past, the present and beyond. Even now we approach the boundary between this year and the next, the Celtic festival of Samhain on October 31.
There is an alchemical dictum that reads in part, "All that is above, Also is below." So it is between the parallel lines of nature and the human psyche. Above, the bright growing season fades and the year and the leaves grow restless, knowing as they do that change must occur. Below, our ideas, our relationships and our societal confidence fade and we grow restless, knowing as we do that change must occur.
Finding connectedness within ourselves and the world around us is the art of finding and feeling the lines. Deep within the living earth change is omnipresent. Slow pressure and movement alter the subterranean earth over great geologic time. Much like human consciousness, motion is unseen from above until the tension from below is too great and cracks onto the surface in a fault line.
According to Celtic tradition, the ability to discern where seemingly unrelated factors meet - where the lines are drawn - is the gift of the seer. And the lines of the greatest interest are always those with no width, the thin ones, where the water meets the shore, where one year ends and another begins or where a disagreement becomes so entrenched that there is not a hair's breadth for movement.
These are the "spaceless places" of Celtic myth where incursions from the vital, yet volatile, energy of the Otherworld are most likely to occur. To be "on the brink" or "over the edge" is to risk meeting the Other, for it is on the edges that much of the vivid movement of life takes place.
Even in the quiet moments, with the decisions that form the outline of our daily lives, change does not usually come until a certain unease has been felt, when lines become visible and a choice must be made. We are, in general, creatures of response.
Each Celtic season divides not only the calendar year, but cycles of human existence. At Imbolg we return, at Beltaine we grow, at Lughnasadh we descend and at Samhain, we transform.
At Samhain, the united tension of the passing season sweeps in the night of a new year - a feral reminder of the necessity of change. It rips at the edges of our most secret and sometimes disturbing thoughts. The distinct lines between possible and impossible dim and the view of our orderly lives and selves becomes unsettled in the growing darkness.
Along the edges we traipse, above the abyss in our thin coated lines. As above, so below, was it a scream you heard or a song?