We are ambiguous. We are physical, and we are not. Some places always have even amounts of day and night. The poles alternate that. There is “good,” and “evil,” but is there even that? A Hasidic story tells how what seems evil to us are actually acts of mercy.

Not a few of us don’t know what happens after we die. We don’t know how we got here, why we are here, or the consequences of our actions. Yet we are given answers to every question. Religions make every effort to comfort and assure us that all will be well. Jesus is said to have prepared a place for us. The Gitanjali exclaims, “and at last, to what palace gate have I come in the evening at the end of my journey?” The Apostle Paul wrote one sentence about how man is destined to die once and face judgment, but a bug is squashed and someone wonders, who or what had that bug been in its past life? Who/what will it be in its next? Unless it had no soul. Unless that soul had wandered its last and was now en route to Heaven led by creatures as ostentatious as the bug had been inconspicuous.

We live with knowledge, and ignorance. We have histories we know, and histories we don’t know. We are shaped in our earliest childhood by experiences we don’t remember. We do things that baffle our own selves more than anyone else. I am not a unified personality. Many parts make up the whole, and not all the parts can exist at once. Some parts can be taken out in public. Other parts we hope no one will ever know about, and try to keep hidden. We might even keep our better part hidden, and parade our more commonplace parts. In private, we will lend a helping hand to a downtrodden street person, and in private, guzzle malt liquor, hoping to still keep one’s reputation intact.

When Autumn comes with darkness and storms, we can be relieved that the world throws a cloak over us, that we need not be harshly exposed by the sunlight. When the barriers between this world and the spirit world are said to weaken, we feel a kinship with masks and costumes, because we each have our own spirits that emerge from our own unknowable histories and pasts– brighter masks, and darker masks. We might not choose the dark mask as our preferred identity, as reflective of our fondest aspirations, but every mask we hide, or wear, has its time and place.

Halloween coincides with Samhain, a Celtic, Druidic festival. The feasts of All Saints and All Souls begin November, the month devoted to the souls in Purgatory in the Catholic calendar. Samhain can be slandered as a pagan practice, but it’s not to be dismissed any more than we would preempt the formative experiences of our pre-memory childhoods. All Souls is inclusive of all souls, including the pre-Christian souls of pagan times. If our souls are Christian souls, that needs to include the primordial deposit within them that remains unchanged by any added identity. Though the soul be redeemed and transformed, the pagan soul remains as the soul that awakes within a world of light and darkness, accepting and honoring the blessings of forest, field, stream, ocean, spirits, the Other, wind, rain, fire, sky, Sun, Moon, stars, waiting and watching humbly and patiently as life unfolds, unforeseeably. Meanwhile, neither here, nor there, wondering where is here, where is there, between life and death, earth and sky, eternity and history, Hell and Heaven– meanwhile, here, this Purgatory of ignorance and knowledge, belief and doubt, here we try to make peace with others, within ourselves, with God, Heaven and Hell, our angels and demons.