It is All Hallows Eve and, as my days blur with repetition, the work of keeping the many plates spinning pulsing in dull rhythm across my soul, I have found a question beating time with them:
What is a hallowed life?
This newsletter, however, isn’t me providing you with a definitive answer, mostly because I don’t think there is one. Rather, I should say, I think that every person will have a different answer as it is dependant upon several variables. The variables include, but are not limited to, 1) how you interpret the word hallowed, 2) what your life circumstances are, and 3) what stage of life you’re at.
What I’m doing is sharing my meditation on the question, an exploration of what that life might look like for me, an elucidation of my search for ways to start bringing the numinous into the every day.
Why?
Because I know from past - bitter - experience that if I let the drum beat of daily drudgery and the incessant thud of the horrors happening across the globe drown out everything else I become hollowed out. Less able to face the day with hope, less able to find the energy for the necessary never mind the good, just … less in every way.
I do not want to be less, I want to be more. More alive! More vital! More open to those moments where the mundane shines with divinity and the uplifting energy that comes with such an experience!
Because I need that wonderment, that enchantment, if I am to both live as fully as I can in the life I have and be able to make as much difference as is possible for me to make in respect of those global horrors that will not cease to be horrors if everyone is to flattened to try and fight them.
Plus I hope you might find that my musings spark your own thoughts and explorations on the question, if it’s one that interests you.
Also, to bastardise something Joan Didion once said, I often write these newsletters to find out what I’m really thinking.
When the question first popped into my head, a quote followed hard on its heels:
Near the end of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novel Feet Of Clay, Dorfl - a golem who has just been emancipated, given a voice, and offered a job in the City Watch by Sam Vimes - responds to Vimes asking whether he needs his holy days off by saying:
‘Either All Days Are Holy Or None Are. I Have Not Decided Yet.’
Pratchett, Terry. Feet Of Clay: (Discworld Novel 19) (Discworld series) (p. 407). Transworld. Kindle Edition.
As far as I am concerned, to lead a hallowed life is to make that decision.
It is to say “Yes, every day is holy, every day is hallowed” and then live that.
The trick is to work out how!
A hallowed life isn’t about things.
There is nothing I can buy, beg, borrow or steal that will suddenly make my days holy.
It isn’t about aesthetics1.
That isn’t to say making the space around me pleasing to my eye won’t help but it is far more than just careful curation of my world. It is about recognition and gratitude, opening up rather than closing off, of not merely looking but truly seeing.
It isn’t even about my witchcraft.
Well, that’s not entirely true. My witchcraft, which is woven with animism, wholly informs my understanding of the word hallowed and thus my response to the question.
Hallowed, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, means the following:
Sacredness and holiness are not, for me, at all tied to Christianity or, in fact, any organised religion. Those things are linked by the divine and I believe they are intrinsic to life itself; divinity being something inherent in every single thing in the universe and thus something that creates an invisible web of connection between all things, humans included.
Thus a hallowed life would be one where I am tapped into that divine web, where I recognise that divinity in everything I am interacting with in an ongoing way, and where I accept that divinity in myself completely and purposefully.
And how do I do that?
Honestly I’m still trying to figure that out.
What I do know is that I’m not trying to become fully and permanently connected to the divine web of life. I’m not after some woo-woo experience2 that takes me to a different plane of existence via magic mushrooms or other psychedelics. I don’t want to become disconnected from reality. I want to find the divine in the here and now and keep finding it, day after day after day.
So what might the continued search look like?
Part of it involves building rituals into my day and year, to provide constant reminders of what I am trying to do. In the same way as monastic life - which seems to me to be one the ways many organised religions offer people a way to live hallowed lives within the bounds of those religions - runs on daily/weekly/month repetition of various prayers/actions, so too can mine.
Given that I already have some daily and yearly rituals in my life3 I don’t have to start from scratch, instead building on the foundations I’ve already laid. My walks, for example, can become more than daily exercise and a way to clear my head, offering a space for communion with the divine in the natural world. I can do it with tasks, too, maybe try and see the weekly laundry as a way to honour the divine in not only the clothes and the machines I use to do the laundry but in the work of keeping me and my parents cared for. I can do something similar with each meal I prepare.
I can use the morning and evening routines - those I have undertaken daily to care for my body and mind for so long they have become automatic - to honour the divine in myself. I can extend that to my journalling and planning, making sure I give myself credit for the work I do to keep myself and my family safe and well, and also see divinity reflected in the rest that is also an essential part of human life.
If you read those last two paragraphs and felt it sounded a bit pious/preachy I will say such thoughts have not escaped me either. I fully accept that - especially on days when the clouds of sadness or anger are occluding my spirit - these attempts may feel twee and ridiculous. I realise that I might find it impossible to do some of the things I mention above on a regular basis without driving myself to infuriated distraction.
That is also okay. These are possibilities, not absolutes. I’m testing rungs on a ladder not fixing bars on a cage.
This is also only one half of the equation and, alone, will not give me what I seek.
Acknowledgement does not automatically turn into action and without action, without embodying this understanding of the world, I would still be hollowed rather than hallowed. As I said, aesthetics alone won’t cut it. The rituals are not, and cannot be treated as, an end in and of themselves. They are a door that opens the way to living in a manner that honours the beliefs which underpin them.
And what is that other half? It is action and it is change.
This is the bit I can’t even partially answer right now because I have barely begun. However I can tell you how I’m starting; by looking at how I’m actually living my life.
All of it.
The bits I’m happy with, the bits I’m not, and everything in-between. It has to be an honest examination - what is actually happening as opposed to how I’d like it to be - and it has to be thorough. There is no point if all I do is polish the silver but leave the plates and kitchen filthy, so to speak.
Once I’m done examining I then have to make the changes that will align how I’m living with what I believe. There’s a phrase “be the change you want to see” and I think that encapsulates where I’m trying to get to. Having decided every day is hallowed, being aware that every thing, living or otherwise, that makes up this universe holds a spark of the divine, I have to choose, every day, to respond to it all like that.
This examination, this holding up of my life to the light and poking at it - checking for inconsistencies, holes and flaws - has already shaken things loose, left me feeling unbalanced, a little out of sorts, melancholy even. It isn’t enjoyable but it does spark joy because as I do this it is showing me to myself and - less surprisingly to me than it once would have been - for the most part I am liking the person I see.
I’m at the start of a path I hope to walk for the rest of my days, and one I’m forging for myself, one step at a time. Since I am human this journey will be filled with trial and error and as much space for failure as success. As such I refuse to hem myself in, limit myself in any way. If I think it might help, I shall have a go.
I want my days to be hallowed no matter what happens in them. To acheive that I have to able to open myself up to anything and everything that occurs. I don’t think that this is going to be easy, and possibly it won’t get any easier over time, but that is almost beside the point.
Because I know that it is going to be rewarding and, more importantly, that it is necessary if I am to become the person I am meant to be.
I’d love to know whether a hallowed life (and what that would look like for you) is something you want for yourself, if you’re feeling inclined to share!
Herding the Words
The words remain in notebooks rather than shared on my blog.
However I can assure those of you who enjoy my Tales from the Wildwood that they continue to appear out of my pen in dribs and drabs. If I can find enough time, I hope to have something for you before the end of the year but I make no promises since I do not wish to disappoint you or myself.
Other random thoughts I have been musing about in ink/pencil lead include the history and construction of labyrinths, Maggie Smith’s memoir “You Could Make This Place Beautiful, liminal living, death and dying, and quite a lot about perimenopause.
I also partook of a most liberating online course from Jo over at
wonderfully and accurately titled “Unfuck your Writing”. It was a fabulous couple of hours learning from Jo in the company of like minded writers and gave me a real boost.
Wrangling the Yarn
The last few months have seen me in my first ever crochet slump, not helped by the fact that everything to do with my crochet, bar the three WIPs I had on the go, is packed away and inaccessible. Two of those WIPs required more counting and complication than my brain can handle at the moment and the last is my travelling crochet which I am loathe to “waste” when I’m currently in one place and I know I’m going to need it when the moving part of moving starts in earnest. So I crocheted nothing, read more, and found myself becoming grumpier than was acceptable.
Thankfully my mother, who is wonderful and very astute, worked out what was going on and purchased a crochet kit for me. No thinking required, it came with a pattern, all the yarn, a stitch marker and even the correct sized hook with an ergonomic handle. All I had to do was opening it up and start.
Thus I am once again happily crocheting this delightful stripy lap blanket whilst indulging my TV habit with the latest season of 9-1-1 and Agatha All Along4 :
Living Life
Readers I did, in fact, jinx things with my last newsletter. So I’m learning my lesson and will be saying absolutely nothing about house selling and moving unless it’s already happened.
In news that is clearly completely unrelated I damaged my neck and shoulders in the middle of the month. I have no idea what I did to cause it since the pain only presented itself when I sat down to drink a cup of coffee but thankfully my local physiotherapist managed to find me an emergency appointment the next day and worked enough magic on the muscles to give me back a full range of movement. I spent just over a week in pain and on as light a duty as was possible given the circumstances (including no walking in woods or anywhere else uneven, jolting myself by falling over tree roots not being advisable) and am now fully recovered and very grateful for the exercises that I continue to do.
I’m also back walking in the woods again, much to both my relief and that of everyone around me.
The One Card Tarot Draw
As we look towards November my Prisma Visions tarot deck offers us the Three of Pentacles to guide us:
Take a moment to look at what you’ve been building for yourself this year.
What have you laid the foundations of?
What have you found a level of competency in?
What have you achieved?
It doesn’t matter how ‘important’ it was, doesn’t matter whether it’s big or small, next month is a time to acknowledge where you’ve got to, take joy in that, and allow yourself to have confidence in those abilities.
And then keep building!
And finally, a blessing …
On this All Hallow’s Eve may your heart be warmed by the love of those around you, and the memories of those who’ve gone ahead.
Yes, I am aware that the two photos I’ve used here as illustrations are very aesthetically pleasing. I’d done so because they have the numinous quality I am chasing and that matters, even if they can’t pass that quality on to me.
I completely recognise that many of you will already think I am indulging in “woo-woo” with animism and witchcraft and I wouldn’t argue with you about that. I am, however, very much of the mind that “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy” and tend to assume the same of my readers.
My morning and evening prayers, as mentioned in September 2023’s newsletter, and my Wheel of the Year rituals being the two most obvious.
Why yes, my current monthly streaming subscription is to Disney +, however did you guess.
I love how you began by talking about the Big World making you feel hollowed out, and how to counter that. So it's a progression from hollowed to hallowed!