In Western Celebration we have the side by side holy days of Halloween, All Saints, and All Souls. These three days bring our attention to an experience of the non-material and yet to dramatic stories. But I want to look at how we experience or imagine ourselves.
Halloween
celebrated on October 31.
Halloween is the night of freaks and fears. We have permission to look weird, strange, fantastic, magical. We seek the bizarre and the scary. We become unrecognizable in ways that could never be accepted…could never fit in to our ordinary life. It represents the hidden self – the dark and different. And it can be wildly creative and rewarding as we have permission to pretend, pose, and parody ourselves, our culture, and our fantasies.
All Saints Day
celebrated on November 1.
Saints are different in dramatic ways. Their deeds are miraculous. Their hearts are infinite. Their minds are awake and crystal clear. Often they suffer profoundly in their own reality and often they feel the suffering of others without filters or resistance. They don’t have lives that look like ours. But each of us has moments of sainthood or thoughts that we would like to be saintly.
All Souls Day
celebrated on November 2.
This is the day we focus our hearts on all the souls no longer living an earthly life no matter what their story. We send them love in our remembrance. This remembrance is not a grief and not about affection. It is about an unconditional reverence. And that is why this day is so important for us. If just one day each year we fill our hearts with unconditional reverence our hearts grow stronger and purer.
But we need another day to bring our consciousness and our celebration to the living individual that begins with knowing ourselves as a great composite and reverently and courageously acknowledging the way we each imagine our own self.
I want to give this day a name:
The Holy Day of the Misfit
and suggest we celebrate it on November 3rd
(actually everyday that you are willing to kiss a frog and find a god.)
Each of us feels to some degree and in some circumstances like a misfit…we don’t fit in where we want to fit in. We doubt we are a soul among other souls, and feel more like a saint among freaks or a freak among saints. And we keep this all secret and shadowy. This is the day when we shine loving light on the Inner Misfit.
Each of us including the freaks and the saints has an inner misfit! Each soul is unique, different, an amazing mix of ordinary and extraordinary, the universal and the unique, of the freak and the saint. Each of us has a degree of fitting in and standing out and varying degrees of comfort in the experience of both. This is the day of belonging, the day for everyone to celebrate their individuality and paradoxically, what we have in common including the commonality of being unique and different.
How would you celebrate your Inner Misfit? Can you focus your attention on your Inner Misfit and describe it in its complexity and contradictions? What would you celebrate, honor, reveal and revere that dwells in the heart of your uniqueness?
