I find myself thick in the Samhain tide this autumn. My world is filled with dying and the conscious taking of life. And I am very wakeful to it. Riding the emotions have been a great challenge. Through it all, I keep looking at the ethics involved, questioning myself, looking to my ancestors for support, looking deep inside my own soul for clarity.
My Samhain tide has started with the autumn leaves falling, their slow desent into decay as the sunlight fades by noticeable minutes each day. The scent of leave mould filling the air. Nature moving through its unending tides between growth and death. This is the dynamic in which I walk each moment.
After nine years of being a strict vegetarian, I have made a shift. It became apparent that ethically my path lies in living locally, divorcing myself more and more from reliance on things from away. My wife and I are rearranging our lives to immerse ourselves in the local environment. My spiritual path is one of engaging in a sacred manner with the Spirits of Place. It is a path of finding my right place in the ecosystem and being content with it. It is one of being ultra-clear about the line between needs and desires. And as I have journeyed this path for the past year or so, I decided to eat meat again. But I maintain these stipulations: it has to be local, organic, and/or wild. I cannot ethically spend money on meat that I don’t know where it comes from. Ultimately, I decided that in order to ethically eat meat, I needed to own the role as killer.
This year, I started bowhunting. And last week I managed to kill a small deer. The arrow was startling effective. The deer died in three seconds. Having completed what I set out to do, I was now face to face with consequence. There was no undo button. I didn’t “enjoy” the killing, the cleaning, or the butchering. This was the first large animal I have killed in my life. I could write a lot about this process and my feelings but suffice to say, this wasn’t easy. It was very unsettling (and this is a good thing).
The Samhain tide then got thicker. A close family member had heart surgery and dangerous complications. A week in ICU and things are beginning to look up. As you can imagine, especially this time of year, the connection and threads of family have been very strong during this crisis. Thoughts of my father who passed eight years ago have been in my mind. My connection to the ancestors has been tugging at me. It all just gets thicker and thicker.
Last weekend, I participated in culling ducks at a friend’s farm. They really needed the help. This was perhaps the most difficult thing I have ever done in my life. We used cones to hold the ducks (it takes two people, one holding the feet). I had to push a knife behind the trachea and cut the main arteries, holding the head while the animal bled out and died, holding tight during death throws, watching its eyes, feeling its soul to know when it had died. One duck took twenty minutes to expire. This sort of intimacy was the deepest I have ever experienced. It laid me more soul bare than sex. It was extremely challenging, heartbreaking and exhausting. Again, this wasn’t easy.
All around me is the harvest. We are picking the last of the vegetables before the first killing frost hits (it is late this year). My hunting has been successful. We are ridding ourselves of stuff in our living space. All around is conscious killing. It is visceral. It is challenging, humbling, and powerful. My being involved in killing hasn’t brought guilt or shame. It has brought the weight of responsibility to the forefront. Never again will I pull a carrot up, tearing its roots from the Earth, endings its life, consciously killing it, without a deep awareness of the act. And this act is a sacred one. Life feeds on the killing and death of other souls. And one day our death will be the food source for others. And the cycle of life and death, the tides of living and dying will continue.
So I invite all of you to be wakeful to that which you kill, whether it is an animal, vegetable, weed, relationship, process or household item you use and dispose of. We all need to be extremely wakeful to these acts. Each of us, without exception, is a killer on some level. We have to shoulder the responsibility for the killing we do. And for those of you who eat meat, I strongly recommend you involve yourself in the process of taking a life and the processing of the body. This is your obiligation for having this food to eat. And I garauntee you will not be able to eat the meat without a profound awareness of the life you have taken and the significance of the act. And this I assure you will draw a clear line between what is a need and what is a desire.
And finally, I encourage everyone to spend the energy to go as deeply into this Samhain tide as possible. It is time for dying, for letting go of year behind us. It is time for us to dive into mystery, deep intimacy with the darkness around us, within us. It is a opportunity to be extraordinarily wakeful to our own way of being in the world, from our most brilliant creativity, to the killing we do. This is our path as a pagan people.
Please share your thoughts.
Blessings of living and dying,
Snowhawke /|\
Powerful. This brings back memories of my early life on the family farm. I had very similar feelings back then and I am sure that I could NOT participate at all now. I often wrestle with the concept of eating meat and would probably be a vegetarian (or more likely stick to non-mammal protein sources) if I had to take the personal responsibility that you have shown. I need to resolve this issue. When harvesting foods from the garden, I usually thank those plants–a practice that I adopted from Native Americans friends years ago. I have had a long-standing respect for the Jains’ reverence for all forms of life. Much to consider.
Snowhawke – you have given me much to contemplate this day and Samhain season. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and challenging us to further understand ourselves.
Well written my brother. This conversation always brings to mind words that Charles deLint put into the mouth of one of his characters in the novel The Onion Girl on the matter…
“We all need sustenance. The wolf, the puma, the eagle as much as the rabbit, the deer, the salmon. Even the trees and grass require nourishment that’s dependent on the lives of others. Nature was never benevolent or fair. But by the same token, we have to live together in this world and cruelty is neither gracious not defensible. So when you take from the bounty that others provide for you, bless their gift, treat it with respect, give it dignity. And always ask before you take, give thanks for what you receive.”
I wish I could have written my post as eloquently as Charles wrote for his character! That is beautifully expressed.
Yes indeed – every meat eater should also be involved in the killing process. I remember an episode of Northern Exposure, where Dr Joel decides to go hunting. He loved the hunting, but hated the aftermath. Crying in his cabin, he admitted to his friend that “the killing, the killing was the best part. It was the dying I couldn’t take…” – that really resonates with me. I am not a meat – eater, as I am not able to be a part of the killing process, and personally have no need to take the life of another animal. When taking the life of a plant, the acknowledgement is always made, and offerings and prayers given. It is the connection with our food that we need to regain – we become the food that we eat, and return our own bodies to the soil to nourish future generations. We kill each and every day – our antibodies killing viruses, our cars crushing beetles on roads – where is that line drawn in the sand? Being aware is what it is all about, and acting with compassion in all things. I think that the duck culling you took part in could have been done more humanely – ie. shooting for a quicker death, as 20 mins to die is an awful long time, and bleeding out any animal is not an easy or humane death, in my personal opinion. Shooting, either with guns or bows, and immediate evisceration is the way to go. Blessings of Samhain. x
I much agree with the sentiment here, something my family and I wish to do as well and are making small changes towards an end goal of sourcing all of our food locally. Eventually we want to homestead our property but that is a few years distant yet.
Kevin, you continue to stir my soul and challenge my thoughts
You are a very wise man and Priest.
[…] I remember being disappointed when my friend (and now Druid College colleague) Kevin made the switch to eating local meat that he had killed himself. I saw no need from my vegan perspective for the killing of another animal. Having spent time further researching the various implications of western diets on the rest of the world, I’ve changed my mind about his choice, and while I wouldn’t eat meat myself I applaud the well-researched and informed choice he made about Conscious Killing . […]