I was sat waiting to meet my dad on the high street of my childhood when the scene unfolded. Whose shouts I heard first I can’t say: the street preacher himself or the passerby taking offence. The one with the microphone was white, fifties, smartly dressed. The one without, also white but younger, had the stagger of drink or drugs, and perhaps the anger of his own injustice. I listened from a distance on my bench, alerted by both curiosity and the thickening air of conflict, my own head joining the many turned.

The preacher warned of the dark, unseen powers all around us and among us, citing psychics and mediums and tarot card readers, decrying them all demonic. The staggering man hurled back his own invective, swearing loud his disagreement, and was soon declared demon himself by the man with the mic. With the recognised power in all regards. Ladies and gentleman, a demon.

Separately, stage left, a hurried man with dreadlocks joined the high street - a broad, stepped street actually positioned in the town like a raised stage - shouting ‘racist bastard’ over his shoulder back down the lane from which he came. The woman in her headscarf selling The Big Issue outside Greggs, also watching this unfold like me but so differently placed, quietly packed up her things, returned her coffee cup, and left.

And soon too did the preacher, his opponent melting into the shopping crowd, as the high street resumed business as usual from the breach. As he passed by me with his friend, I heard him chat about the latest podcast software, so seemingly unruffled by the scene that it could only smack of the commonplace, or of privilege, or of both.

//

I wanted to write something that introduced my next therapeutic writing hour, coming up on Sunday 27th October. It’s on the subject of Samhain, a threshold into winter, a deepening into dark. I’ve been gathering notes and inspiration, writing on the train journey there and back from my once-hometown, as I love to do. Yet I felt compelled to tell this story, to write it here in draft as a bid to understand why it held me in such thrall. I think I know now, or at least I know more.

We humans have a tendency to demonise what we cannot see, what we do not understand, and what challenges our identities, prejudices and privileges. We make demons of the other to claw on to the status quo in our own lives. We pantomime self protection, stoking fear to keep us away from our own shadows, trying with all our might to throw them off, to cast them over there instead.

I’m fascinated by the things we don’t or can’t see, and the things we don’t or can’t say. The things that get hidden away in the unconscious yet become restless there, far from inert. Instead our ‘shadow’ becomes subverted, projected, symbolised. At all costs elsewhere, and those costs invariably lie in our own health and relationships.

Much of therapeutic endeavour is a courageous, incremental, turning toward the dark, and feeling our way through it together. We gradually discover that there is much to know in the edges and the shadows, far less threat than we fear, and always, always, we find there encouragement to grow as well as sustenance for the journey.

//

I have led writing sessions around Samhain before, but have only recently learned about the twin Celtic principles of Samos and Giamos that existed in complementary duality and guided much of personal and collective life. Samos speaks of summer, daylight, sky, order, the profane. The crest of the wave. Giamos stood for winter, night, death, chaos, magic. The trough of the wave. These principles not only related to summer and winter but were expressed through cycles of life and death in all of nature, in every rise and fall, expansion and contraction. Always in essential interplay. Never, until later with Christian influence, did these principles point to good or evil.

Samhain then was an acknowledgment of the end of Summer and the beginning of enduring the winter months, a journeying through growing darkness lit by gathered resources, by storytelling, crafts and togetherness in shelter.

This Sunday Pages will support reflection at this threshold, with prompts created to take a candle to the dark. We will consider the ways we have grown and changed, the old ways that now ask to be shed and the new layers we might now seek for the warmth and protection of self and community. What needs now to be centred, how will you gather your energies? What needs to be grieved (and how, love, how) and what needs your nod to be beckoned in?

We need not demonise the darkness. Instead we might look to the shadows to teach us, not as sole means back to the light (though we can trust in its return), but for its own sake. We can look to the balance of Samos and Giamos in all things to navigate a just and wholehearted life for all.