My love of animals has always extended beyond the living, breathing creatures that I adore. I also like the artifacts left behind when they depart this life. I remember begging my cousin for a “lucky” rabbit’s foot, like the one he had. And I was always a little envious of the things the boys in my class brought to school for show-and-tell…snake skins, pelts, bones, feathers, seashells, antlers, owl pellets….anything left behind by living creatures. It seemed like I never found those things on our farm; it just wasn’t wild enough anymore. I dug for dinosaur bones next to the front porch, certain that I was working on the femur of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. My mom was not pleased by the fact that I’d ruined a brand new outfit because I hadn’t bothered to change clothes before playing in the mud. But I wanted that dinosaur bone.

Later, when I fancied myself a punk, skulls and skeletons were my favorite motif. They were harder to find then! I always preferred the stylized versions…flat white on a black background. Friends liked to contribute to my skelly collection frequently, but often didn’t understand that I wasn’t interested in the horror-show versions.

This week, my nephew was visiting and started telling me about his school lessons about bird feathers. I pulled down my jar of feathers and we sorted through them, first separating the curved wing feathers from the straight tail feathers and the downy feathers. “Aunt T, this is a downy feather. They’re like the bird’s underwear!” Then we sorted through them again, identifying the birds when we could, consulting the Sibley Guide for pictures of the animal that left the feather behind. It made me happy that he handled the feathers without reservation…I’ve seen adults approach them with a sense of revulsion…what if they’re dirty?

And last weekend I finally found a way to display the two goat skins (from another ranch) that J gave me last spring. Salted and dried, they’d been hanging in the yurt behind my shelves. They now hang as curtains over a window that’s been covered for the winter. There might be some who are surprised that someone who loves the goats as much as I do would have these skins, but to me it is another way to honor the animal.

Last spring, during the rainy kidding season, the real blood and guts of life and death was ever present here. I sometimes spent days without leaving the ranch, and began to feel a little feral. I remember heading out of town one day, passing some people at the graveyard. Dressed up in suits, ties, skirts, I suppose they were waiting for a funeral. A voice in my head said, “They should be wearing skins and pelts and feathers to show some respect!” I was so surprised, and nearly turned around to see if someone was speaking from the back seat behind me. But I understood what this voice in my imagination meant.

We don’t accept death in our culture. We’re all trying to look younger, to find the magic health plan that will let us live forever. We try not to think about death too much. We develop weapons that let us kill from afar. The kids are left at home with the babysitter for funerals. Bodies are sent to professionals who sanitize them and arrange them to look “lifelike” in caskets that seal everything out. Meat has no connection with something people know as an animal.

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that I have both a fascination and love for these skins and bones, along with addictions to disordered eating and alcohol. I notice an attraction to these same kinds of symbols in others who share these problems. I’ve often wondered if it’s symbolic of a death wish. But I’m also starting to see it in a more positive light as a reaction to modern culture in people who share certain personality traits with me, specifically those of us with an introverted intuition preference. To engage fully in this culture we are born into, we’re forced to ignore everything in us that seeks to connect us back to the full world…a world that includes the unconscious, death, the underworld. And then, like Persephone, we are captured by it, enthralled by our skull motifs, by throwing off fears through drinking and then dying to the unconscious by blacking out; the stuffing down of the feelings of life with food or becoming a picture of death itself through starvation.

We’ve given up the rituals that connected us to the symbols of death and the underworld, so we create new rituals that bring the symbols into being through our physical bodies. How do we stop that? How do we heal? We need to honor the rituals and the symbols, and acknowledge their meaning and importance to us personally. It is not necessarily an easy thing; it goes against the flow of where our culture seems to be heading.

I think a lot about that, and how it relates to my fascination with skins and bones, during this time of the year. It’s the time of Halloween, Samhain, Día de los Muertos, All Souls Day…the time of the year when the veil between the worlds is the thinnest. A time, perhaps, to honor the skins and bones and the departed, to celebrate Persephone’s descent that makes new life possible.