Day of the living

October 22, 2025
Owl Feather Farm, San Juan Island

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” -William Faulkner

Halloween. All Hallows Eve. Day of the Dead. Dia de los Muertos.

The holiday approaching us at the end of this month goes by many names in many places. It takes shape as sacred celebrations of familial heritage, mostly in Latin cultures; as silly dress-ups where adults supposedly grant themselves liberty to be someone else for a few hours and fool around, mostly in Anglo-American cultures; or obnoxious drunken dishonorings of the whole idea, mostly in sports bars. Look online right now and you’ll find a tidal wave of pumpkins, bad candy (super-bad), goblins, skeletons, ghosts, orange beer, stripper costumes, special lattes, Frankenstein masks and pumpkin margaritas. You can buy all that, said Gram Parsons, if you’ve got money to burn, take it home right away, you’ve got three years to pay, but Satan is waiting his turn.

Day of the living

A real pumpkin—not orange, not plastic, no Cinderella in sight

You wonder what Faulkner would have thought, or… our actual ancestors? All kind of bizarre, when you think about it.

We don’t get any trick-or-treaters up at the end of our lane at Owl Feather Farm, which is fine. We do have pumpkins, which are not only seasonally decorative, they are actually superb culinary ingredients, if you can figure out what to do with all that squash.

This time of year here we honor both the amazing harvest—gifts of the land, air and sky to feed us and heal us—and all those who have gone before, back to the first lacewings of human time, unrecorded except in our very bones and blood.

That’s what Day of the Dead is for, from tens of thousands of generations back to our near ancestors. We all have sterling examples of the human spirit in our histories: the son of a Sicilian immigrant shoe cobbler who rose to be mayor of New York; hardy pioneers who braved the harsh Wyoming prairie; World War II refugees who escaped Germany and made their way through a half-dozen countries to reach the US.

Day of the living

Mayor of New York City, 1950—born in a little village in Sicily

And all the generations of Native peoples who first came to the Western Hemisphere 30,000 years ago… their blood is in us, too, because we are linked in a chain of hope and struggle that reaches both back and forward.

Native Hawaiians believe the universe is not a line but a circle. No one among us knows where history starts or ends. Let’s complete Faulkner’s famous quote from Requiem for a Nun:

“All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.”

So on the Day of the Dead we celebrate not candy and costumes but-

All of us.

—Eric Lucas

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