Calling the Spirits of my Ancestors!

Last night was the first Halloween me and my girlfriend had actually physically spent together (last year was a disembodied table tapping seance thingy on MSN...which I suppose is somewhat more appropriate considering the occasion.)

Anyway, after eating too many salt and vinegar Hoola-Hoops with an ice cream chaser and howling like a werewolf at Vincent 'Mr Camp' Price in 'The House on Haunted Hill' I stepped out into the frigid Scottish air to consult my personal oracle.
Said oracle is in fact a hand rolled cigarette with an extra-slim filter and the...eer night sky.

It goes like this: I take deep draws on the ciggy, watching the ember glow like the flaming hearth of Valhalla, then I expel the smoke violently into the Stygian depths of the cosmos above me. I see it as the breath of life, the fiery spirit attempting to connect to the cosmos - its a bit Shamanistic I like to think and paradoxically brilliant: I feel closer to life when smoking while all the time its speeding me closer to death (for some reason at this point in the ceremony I'm always reminded of that scene from 'Roots' where Chicken George holds up his offspring to the full moon?)

Anyway,summoning to awareness in abridged form everything I've learned about the possibility of 'life after death' - Terence Mckenna, Graham Hancock, Everett's 'Many worlds theory', Bohm's Holographic universe, Schrodinger's moggy, 'The Matrix' 3-disc set, Kant's noumenal/phenomenal dichotomy and Colin Wilson (when I'm desperate) - I silently raged at the threadbare veil that separates this world from the other/s on Halloween and called on my ancestors for some kind of communion.

My departed grandparents, my mother, my aunts and uncles were crowding the sky, their faces huge and shimmering in the scudding clouds like Hindu gods, monumental and timeless and beyond all knowing and understanding by simple living things - they were just there in the darkness with the rest of the dead and I could feel them.

When you're dead you become a myth for others, eternal and vast, you transcend space and time and spread out into shimmering waves of probability, coalescing here and then there, like exotic schools of fish, playful and finally free. The dead are poetic and have no roles to perform anymore, they are just essence, source, and essentially THEM as they always were in themselves unknown even by their closest lovers, friends and family.

This is something of a Halloween ritual for me this communion with my personal dead, I guess a lot of people do it this time of year too - our communal Day of the Dead. It becomes more poignant as I get older and more of my kin and friends become timeless apparitions and I am still so embodied and animated by earthly desires and petty concerns.

I just like to speak to them for a while, give them an update on my life, tell my mum I finally met a great girl and am okay and not to worry - its only life after all. Then I wave goodnight, stub my ciggy out and hurry indoors, leaving all the friendly ghosts whispering at my back.