The falling of summer turns the heart. Last night the newest of moons helped us see our souls twinkle in the darkened sky. The laughter and love of long days now shine somewhere out there when the nights grow long and winds turn icy. We hope that our walks in the wild, idle chats with friends and kisses under the sun were bountiful. In the winter we want many stars to wish upon. They guide our way until the day when the yonge son climbs high again and we can breathe with all that is green again.
In preparation last week whipping winds came to the west of Ireland, biting and yelping us indoors. There was talk around town about the strangeness of these airs and a distant battle of hot and cold over the Atlantic. Meanwhile earlier this month in Panama it was reported that the annual, predictable swell of cool, nourishing waters did not come. While we worry on what-have-we-done, we put our hopes on the local. As the world shakes, our best chance is each other sowing together with the ground beneath us.
The tilt of autumn's light brings a turn within me. My family have travelled by caravan, by verda, for as long as we can remember. I have traveled the same roads as my great grandmother did from unceded ancestral lands of the Erie and other Native peoples in what we now call North Ohio to the unceded ancestral lands of the Cherokee in Georgia. Along the way through Southern Ohio, Irving Brown, a gypsy lore-ist (yes the Gypsy Lore Society is still around and the most funded body for Romani Studies and yes they are still studying our blood) observed of Romani women like her: "One has only to glance at a Romani girl to see how pure and strong the vital instinct flows in her blood: something in the sensuous, unfettered walk, something in the glitter of the eye, something in her whole feline being.” Still, our roads are haunted in US America by so-called "gypsy laws", police harassment (I was five when I first experienced this for our traditions) and lack of legal recognition and protection in the USA. Still, when the winds change I know it is time to go out on the road. More often wheels down have turned to wheels up in airplanes for me, but still the chakra, our sacred symbol of technology, carries me. That is enough.
We, the Roma, came to Europe in a fall. After the Romans for centuries had crushed much of indigenous Europe with a forceful enticing into a one-world modernity of trade, large-scale engineering and luxuriously traded goods, suddenly they were gone. Where they left, local war-lords (kings) and cult leaders (priests)—who they themselves, in many cases, lost their identity—dominated. It is throughout a millennium of this falling and wandering-in-place that we came to eastern Eurasia through middle Eurasia and North Africa, bearing the advanced knowledge of what we now call the Arab, Persian and Indian worlds. We brought a unique nomadic intuition with the land full of arts and technology most of Europe had never seen—or had not seen in a long time. In the centuries that followed, these were stolen. In exchange, we were given the lies and thievery of slavery, genocide and dire poverty. So much can stand on a road between us and the safe place we hope to rest our heads next to those whom we love.
As the light lays low on the horizon in the months to come, there is much to learn from the turning of tides and the wide winds of winter. They invariably come. We practice our memories of these ghosts and the spirit world shares their lessons of their haunts in the Irish tradition of Samhain—Halloween. In the muddled dawns, daylights and dusks of the dark half of the year, we listen to the stories of the night.