Essential Samhain

I spent the morning in Mexico.

I drifted into Mérida and glided silently into the city.  I smiled at people I passed on the street, and I didn’t mind at all that they didn’t smile back.  I couldn’t smell the frijol con puerco being prepared or enjoy an icy mojito.  I couldn’t hear the traffic or feel the mosquitos’ bite.  I could, though, enjoy the ancient Maya ruins and the pyramids of Uxmal.  Handily close to Mérida, it didn’t take me long to get there.  I didn’t have to queue in the hot sun for tickets or decide if I wanted a guide to accompany me. I had the site to myself and I marvelled at the magnificence of the Pyramid of the Magician.

When I was tired, I closed my laptop lid, and came back home to Dublin.

In the real Mexico, the women are making masks in preparation for Día de los Muertos.  They are decorating graves with candles, marigolds and photographs, and honouring the lives once lived, with love.  This ancient ritual sees mourning the dead as disrespectful to the natural world, which is why the festival is filled with dancing, music and parades.  Food is presented at alters for the dead to enjoy, and the bells ring out on the village squares.  People dress up as skeletons or in their Catrina costumes, and the festival goes on for two days.

Meanwhile in Dublin, this city feels like a ghost town.

Office buildings look like haunted houses and all the non-essential shops are closed.  The streets are mostly empty of people except for an hour or two at sunset when they queue for free food outside the GPO on O’Connell Street.  Sometimes they get soup, sandwiches, free masks and a small drink, and the queues are getting longer every week.

Sometimes I wonder if our government really know what they’re doing?

I wonder if the group of mostly men who govern us, would be better off trying to teach us all how to work with this word “essential” rather than expect us to comply with contradictory advice about virus management?  I agree with the public health messaging and I am privileged enough to be able to follow the guidelines.  I also understand that what was essential for me in March isn’t necessary now, and what I need for my body and mind today, I couldn’t have imagined way back at Easter.

Our first objective must be to protect one another.

At the same time, if Person A knows that a sea swim will increase her immunity and psychosocial durability, does it matter if the water is outside her agreed 5 km radius for outside exercise?  If the swim will make her more robust, which will ultimately protect her should she catch the virus or other diseases, isn’t that a good thing all round?  If she harms no one on her journey to, let’s say for arguments sake, the Forty Foot bathing spot on the southern tip of Dublin bay, shouldn’t she be allowed to do this? 

Apologies for sounding very Kim Kardashian over here complaining about my lack of access to coastal views when the world is both on fire and melting at the same time.  I just think that as this virus is going to be with us for the foreseeable future, we need more than the bare necessities of life to continue; we need reasons for living.  We need to learn how to mitigate risks carefully but confidently, so that we can balance the real dangers of this disease with the types of lives we can endure.

If we replace the word “essential” with “very important” or “really quite necessary” perhaps this helps the discourse.  My situation and set up is so vastly different to yours and both are changing with the seasons.  Of course I’m not advocating non-compliance with public health measurements, but your unique decisions are based on your circumstances and mine are based on mine.  Short term solutions don’t tend to work very well with long term problems, so I just think we should be trying to learn how to live, rather than exist, in the meantime.

Or we could overthrow patriarchal capitalism and replace it instead with a system that values public health more than private wealth, thus supressing the virus to a manageable level.

We’ve been living like this for seven and a half months.

I feel like Time is the ultimate Trick or Treater and putting the clocks backwards last Sunday didn’t help my perception of where we are at all.  My concentration is so low that this morning I took my breakfast dishes into the bathroom and it was only when I got to the hand basin I thought, “well, this doesn’t feel right at all!”  Yesterday on my way to the supermarket I wondered why the world was all fuzzy and out of focus.  I realised that I was wearing my reading glasses while walking around the street, but as I was thinking about other things, I hadn’t noticed that I couldn’t see!  I’m forever forgetting the simplest of information, and my mind is like a runaway LUAS.

Luckily, I keep a journal, so I can check my entries to see what I was doing during the days of the pandemic.  For example, on Saturday the 24^th October I have written: “saw a squirrel, ate five bags of cheesy wotsits”.  This means that in the future I will be able to look back at my time here and remember that this was the day I saw a woodland mammal and ate some corn-based cheese snacks. 

What a life! 

This weekend, however, I have great plans.

I have already carved out my pumpkin and prepared my Treats for my stay-at-home-solo-trick-or-treating-activity.  I am going to celebrate the ancient Celtic celebration of Samhain by eating a whole chocolate covered cheesecake and by watching season one of Pose and The Vow, which I’m sure my ancestors would approve of.  After the harvest, we are supposed to enjoy the fruits of the forest, to fatten ourselves up for the dark days of winter ahead.  So eat, be merry, sacrifice a cow or a goat if you have one, and keep terribly cosy and warm.  From here until the solstice in December are the darkest days of the year, but don’t worry about it too much, it will get light again.  Enjoy the blue, full moon on Saturday night and know that soon, it will brighten up again.

Happy Samhain to you with all of my love.