The Colors of All Souls

Why is autumn the season of orange and black? The translucent brilliance of fall leaves? or the orange flesh of pumpkins? The ripe yellow squash and red gourds?

The colors of Halloween, of All Souls, represent two distinct concepts, and both have to do with creativity.

In the Earth cycle, autumn isn't recognized as creative. Instead, it's a time of fruition and shedding, of making provision for the cold months ahead. But the colors orange and black, and the symbol of the pumpkin, point to a different concept at work.

Orange contains the red energy of the earth, the blood of physical beings. Yellow is the light of the sun, the solar power to make us grow. When red and yellow mingle to conceive orange, they give birth to a creative glow.

In the pumpkins we see the shape of the womb. It's grown in the sun for months, fattening. In the center, seeds grow large, full of potential, protein, and nutrients. The center of the pumpkin, like the center of the womb, is black and warm, the home for nascent life.

"Hallowed" means sacred, as in "Hallowed be Thy name." The black of Hallowe'en - All Hallows Eve - isn't about evil, or death. It's about untapped potential, teeming with life. It's about formless energy.

Black is life waiting to become. This space of potential is a sacred space.

For people who are afraid of negative energy or see black as a negative color in an energetic sense, challenge yourself to a re-frame; these are places not touched by love. Touch these places with Love, and you will see the potential that had been sleeping in "negative" energy transform, and blossom into brilliant, positive fruit.

What about the Hallowe'en of ghosts? Ancient tradition has it that Hallowe'en, All Souls, is a thin time, when this world and the next become closer. Life goes on, this tradition says. We're still here; let that comfort you. Death is not the opposite of life. It's the opposite of birth.

All around us our landscape prepares for sleep, a sleep rich with life and potential ready to shoot up in the spring. In that richness we have dreams: ephemeral, non-physical, intangible, the shadow-selves of the forms we are about to create.

Which is why, after the riot of summer's fruition, we need autumn's shedding. As the trees shed, so do we. Our emotions intensify. Little crises force resolutions. You choose to stay or leave, to keep or to give away. We clean, we get rid of, we change over our bedding, our lightbulbs, our clothes. We cleanse.

All this sweeping, emptying, and choosing clears paths for the dreaming to take place. New goals, visions, friends, and foods arrive over winter along the pathways we swept clear, perhaps unconsciously, in autumn.

Creativity at work inside us, whether we realize it, or not.

Celebrate the colors of this season. The creative, joyful orange, and the teeming potential of night-sky black, strewn with stars and a bright moon, to light your winter's path.