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Life, A Festival of Sacred Adornment

                              by Lynn Andrews

I love the season of Fall! It is so invigorating, as the long hot days of summer begin to wind down and the air becomes crisp and cool. I love the wild oranges and magentas of the countryside as Mother Earth prepares for her time of hibernation. I love Halloween costumes and the many festivals of thanksgiving that are celebrated across the entire world.

To me, autumn is a festival of beauty inspired by the majesty of this great earth. It is a time for adorning our bodies and our homes with the rich abundance of the First Mother that is all around us, a time for honoring and celebrating our kinship with the land and with one another that makes life, itself, possible.

Halloween, of course, has its roots in Celtic tradition, our northern European ancestors who festooned their doorsteps and decorated themselves with scary images to frighten away evil spirits that might bring sickness to the people or cause damage to the food that was being put by for the coming winter. Harvest celebrations have been celebrated the world over since ancient times, the coming together of communities to give thanks to the gods and goddesses of their existence for the great abundance of this earth.

Until recent times, all of these activities, from placing talismans around our homes to decorating our bodies, grew out of people’s spirituality. Indeed, anthropologists say that we have been putting tattoos on our bodies for at least the last 15,000 years. The ceremonial painting of our faces, our bodies and even the earth upon which we stand, to call in and honor our relationship with spirit, goes back for nearly 50,000 years. Whatever the occasion, whether for a harvest festival in the fall, a planting ceremony in the spring, a healing ceremony, vision quest or ceremony of initiation, a celebration of birth or death, the heralding of a new leader or a fallen hero, every mark that people put on their bodies, every decoration in their homes, all of it was carefully designed to reflect some aspect of the people’s relationship with God, the Great Spirit in whatever way they knew God.

Throughout history, adornment has been an important part of sacred culture, and all peoples have given it careful attention. Too often we think only of indigenous cultures or perhaps our own ancestors when we think about festivals of adornment, while in reality we dress up for special occasions all of the time. The difference today, at least in the modern world, is that we no longer do it as an expression of our spirituality, and I think that this is a great loss both to our own individual psyches and to our relationship with the world around us. There was a real magic in the ways ancient peoples celebrated their world, the ways many cultures continue to celebrate the world today. Magic, that unknowable aspect of existence that makes our lives extraordinary: do we really want to relegate it to the realm of fiction and remembrances of times gone by?

Think about this as you adorn yourself and your home during the coming season. Think about it as you costume yourself and your children for our modern celebrations of Halloween and all of the feasts and festivals that autumn brings. Are you doing it in ways that express or represent some aspect of your own spirit? What aspect of your spirit are you expressing, what aspect of your relationship with the Divine, with the Great Spirit, with God as you understand God, are you bringing into your celebration?

When we decorate our faces, whether by putting on make-up or styling our hair in a certain way, when we decorate our bodies and our homes, it really and truly is our gift back to the Great Spirit, our way of saying, “Thank you, God, for this beauty. Thank you for this home. Thank you for this beautiful body. Thank you for these friends and this community, and thank you for the miracle of my existence.” How different might your life be if you were to do this in a conscious and intended way, every day of your life?

How do you express yourself in the world? Are you clear about what your style is? What colors bring you power? What time of day do you find yourself feeling like you should be out in the world, and when do you want to withdraw and be in your cave to meditate or contemplate?

By paying conscious attention to the ways in which you adorn yourself and your home, you begin to understand what works for you, and why. When you understand this in a conscious and intended way, you begin to understand your own power and your own energies, and this is the magic of sacred adornment. When you move into an understanding and acceptance of sacred adornment, what you are really doing is moving into a celebration of your own life, a celebration of your own true beauty, your own true nature, and your own true wildness which is so uniquely and specially you. That is when you find and own your own power in this world.

And isn’t this a great gift to give your children this Halloween? Reach out to them and help them learn how to celebrate their beauty, find and express their own true spirit as they dress up to scare away the bad spirits and celebrate with their friends. It is how they learn to own fully their inner power and become willing to express it in the world.

If you are joyous today, what is it about you that expresses your joy? Share it with your children, and help them learn to express their joy into the world. What is your favorite color? How would you show the world that you have seen the face of God? What would you wear to show that to someone?

When you live life as a festival of sacred adornment, you go into spirit. It is one of the ways to find the transformation of our spirit that we all seek. We are adorned every moment of our lives, really. If we have a shaved head, we have an adornment. If our hair is magnificently cut or curly down to our waist, it is an adornment. The way you walk, the way you speak, the way you use your life, what are these really but an expression of your spirit? When you look at someone, do you look at that person directly, or do you hold your gaze to yourself? Are you aware of when and why you do either? It is part of your expression of your spirit in the world.

Adornment is a very sacred aspect of your creative nature. It is how you write. It is how you create your physical being, how you play by yourself and with other people. We have come to a very awkward place in our modern world, where we use attachments and distractions in an effort to fill a huge void in our lives, the void that is created because we have lost our connection with Spirit. We have lost our connection with magic. We have lost our connection with the sacredness of world around us. We have lost our connection with sacred adornment.

It is great fun to paint your face and your body. What fun it is to become somebody new and different. Would you like to be somebody new and different?

So often people view Halloween as a time for hiding their identity. Instead of looking at it as hiding your identity, try looking at it as your ability to be many different faces, many different beings of light at one time. When you live a life of sacred adornment, you are not hiding behind your celebrations. You are quite literally coming out of hiding. What better way to find your own true freedom and satisfaction in life than by coming out of hiding!

Lynn Andrews is the New York Times and internationally best-selling author of the Medicine Woman series. She is a shaman teacher who is recognized worldwide as a leader in the fields of spiritual healing and personal development. Learn more at www.lynnandrews.com.