Reblogged from Not Tomatoes:

A moon shadowed by clouds

I have a confession to make: I don’t really care for Halloween. I don’t dress up for the occasion if I can avoid doing so, even though I admire and appreciate a well-crafted ruse. I avoid Halloween gatherings like the plague unless they are Samhain in nature. This morning I got to thinking about why. Where the more modern-day celebration feels false and empty to me, the more ancient ceremonies and rituals from which it sprung, strip away the pretense in honor of the soul. Their substance feels like truth.

This morning, after waking from a dream in which I was debating whether to buy a sweater that looked like one I already had, I was reminded of the garments we choose to cover ourselves with. I thought of the modern-day tendency to amass large quantities of clothing and shoes in an effort to make ourselves stand out from the crowd, when in fact what we are actually doing is donning a false garment to cover up the true self. A self, that in its essence, is the same as the others around it. Halloween, I realized, in its modern-day materialist form, feels like another example of covering. Of hiding in the masquerade of pretending we are something we are not.

Continue reading: Halloween or The Mask of the Self | Not Tomatoes