As The Story Goes …

Tonight, streets across much of the Western world glimmer with plastic masks, pumpkin buckets, and battery lights — a modern lantern festival powered less by candle flame than by consumer fuel. Halloween has become its own kind of tide: a seasonal surge of novelty and nostalgia, washing up each year with new colours, same shapes.

Yet beneath the clatter of wrappers and the faint hum of synthetic cobwebs, there runs an older current — one that once marked this time of year not with plastic, but with prayer. [Samhain, Pitru Paksha, Bhoot Chaturdashi]: in many cultures, this turning of the season has long been devoted to those who came before us, to the thinning of veils, to the quiet acknowledgement that life ebbs so that it might flow again.

It is no coincidence that this reflection arrives with the rain. Water has always known the truth that human tongues struggle to speak — that all returns, in time. The same moisture that condenses on our windows tonight once rose from ancient seas, once filled the eyes of ancestors who looked at their own harvest moons and wondered how long the light would last.

In Old English, this turning of the year was marked by tid — a word meaning not only time but season, occasion, proper moment. It’s the ancestor of our modern “tide.” Only later did “tide” come to describe the sea’s rise and fall. But perhaps that shift was natural — for what is time, if not a wave that lifts us and sets us down again?

Each festival, each ritual, each language drift reflects this same rhythm. The Ganges carries ashes of devotion; holy wells across Europe still glint with coins and wishes; in baptismal fonts, the body is symbolically submerged and reborn. Wherever belief has flowed, water has been its mirror — cleansing, concealing, connecting.

But the mirror now clouds. The sacred river of India, once pure enough to receive the departed, is burdened with the weight of the living — plastic flowers, chemical dyes, industrial run-off. And here in the West, even our rituals of remembrance float in the same artificial tide. We carve pumpkins by the billion, each one 90 percent water, and discard them by morning. If you counted the moisture wasted in that fleeting harvest of faces, you might measure a sea of our own forgetting.

Perhaps this is what Allhallowtide still asks of us — not fear of ghosts, but reverence for cycles; not plastic skulls, but patient listening to what returns each year to be understood anew. The season itself is a sermon: what ebbs will flow again, what dries will rise as cloud, what dies feeds the root beneath.

So as the night thickens and the clocks lean back into winter, we might pause before the next handful of sweets or the next thrown-away lantern, and ask: What tide do I serve? Is it the one that leaves residue, or the one that renews?

Because even language remembers. The word “tide” still carries its older wisdom within it — the sense of a proper moment. And this, perhaps, is ours.

“Further reading: Water in Belief and Traditions“