Plasticity

In supermarkets Halloween summons pumpkins to the vegetable aisle.

It conjures all kinds of hellish plastic in mass display - the ephemeral becoming eternal and choking our world, accompanied by organ chords and the vocals of Vincent Price. 

I have been unthinkingly complicit in the past, short on cash and full of joy. 

In the cupboards here still are plastic pots and a scoop for carving. A skull necklace menaces from a door knob. 

There have been multiples of cardboard skeletons, paper spiders, vats and vats of pumpkin soup too; recycling into food is (maybe) my favourite kind. 

Love the celebration, despair of the waste; this is Halloween, and every day - beyond the eyeless stares and trails of bony fingers there are shelves and shelves, aisles and warehouses, full of packages of things we mostly do not need; things that have travelled more than most of us, that have been churned from leaky factories, things that make 'processed' a dirty word. 

Easy to feel yourself washed away, to feel joy paling, to feel nostalgic for when you could - with a light and easy heart - buy anything. 

Away from shops, away from daylight, out by the fire-pit and under the stars: here Halloween stirs differently. It stirs deep, waking up old bones. It calls to our grief, our losses. 

Things change, it says. 

Everything can change. 

Sometimes in the dark you plot your best course, for you do not see everything all at once.

Keep your desire to celebrate, keep the soup, the love, let this guide you step by step. Some steps will be well meant and wrong - curve it to learn. Some steps will be correct and terribly dull - all part of a bigger rhythm. 

Each log dropped in is rendered to ash. 

Tomorrow the ash can be raked up, put aside for plant food - or mixed with water and painted on skin before we dance naked into the nearest body of wild water.