Tomorrow is Halloween, the tradition of scaring the shit out of our souls.  Sensational?  Well, our title rhymes with the colorful sibilants, doesn't it?

Cuss words in English refer to body parts and functions, mostly to that part just below the belt, the section that gives so much pleasure that the puritans and pilgrims of old were horrified at the excitement they derived in the exercise thereof, giving it derisive meaning.  Sexual terms are taboo.  We use puritans and pilgrims in the lower case to indicate that we refer to the early New England Americans as a metaphor rather than as a specific group of people.

The looseness of our tongue flowing into the fluidity of our pencil reveals a relationship of the day to ghosts and goblins, inhabitants more on the world of the imagination than the tangible doorsteps of our apartment complex.

Not to my neighbor though.  More than a month before Halloween, the flying broom and the accompanying ghastly creatures of the moonless night grace her abode's portals.  Some of the creatures and Jack-o-lanterns on her door manage to get blown to my side of the walkway, and that might be an alert that the kids will "trick or treat" on the hallowed evening.

The weekend is actually a tridium of religious observances that evolved through the years.  There was the Celtic tradition of ghosts and goblins.  Then the Roman Church, in its wisdom, accented the local celebration, supplanted traditional meanings with the slant that the Church wanted.  Christmas is another and Thanksgiving (harvest festival) are examples, but let's focus on the three-day religious holidays.  Ghost and goblins are the scare of Hallowed evening (thus, Halloween, duh!), followed by exemplary darlings (all Hallows, holy, became All Saints Day), and to be generous and ecumenical, the third day became All Souls' Day to encompass everyone.

For now, we are into Halloween, a promoted holiday of the Chamber of Commerce for the sale events it engender.  Of course, with many in Saipan, generators are the hum of the times; Halloween sales are on all the way to All Souls' Day, by hook at every nook.

Korea has incorporated ancestral memory in its Chuseok festival, kept separate in China's Ching Ming, the latter exclusively for folks to go tidy out the tombstones of those who had gone ahead.  Late October into November is the Christian's turn to move its head in the direction of the gravestone, first with the ghosts that might "scare" us to remember forgotten obligations, to the memory of the exemplary ones we call "saints", and the affirmation on all the souls who went ahead.  We light candles and imbibe in our favored wine and brew all night at the CK cemetery.  And you thought the medieval mind did not have any practical sense at all!

Halloween is when we spook everyone.  What is it about being scared that makes us human?  It must be the aspect of uncertainty and wonder that overwhelms us in the total scheme of things, the arena between emotion and cognition that entails "belief". The specter of death waits at the terminus.

Thus, the tendency to bring in someone to get us out of any predicament we might have gotten into, often a Redeemer and/or a Savior, an Avatar and/or an Exemplar.  Our penchant for the dramatic leans on the dread rather than the wonder.  Everyone longs for drama.  How else do we account for the Korean, Filipino, and Chinese "tear jerkers" on our TV, the Days of our Lives as the World Turns?

Ghosts, demons and leprechauns are the goods of Halloween.  They are messy ones, rather than the antiseptic and anesthetic spotless specks connoted by the word "spirit".  Being "spiritual" is often no more than Merlin the Magician's hocus-pocus that promises an illusion of a world other and outside of this world.

We go with the world in the midst of this world, a veritable choice and a rich one.  The Earthrise consciousness permeated the globe since Apollo 8 sent back pictures of the Earth from the lunar horizon, a conviction of the interrelatedness of the whole planet, with its consequent reality of Earthbound commitment that holds one's self as an integral part of 7 billion some human whole and creatures native to the Earth.