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Halloween is coming and the pumpkin is getting fat – or at least it should be.

It turns out, though, that 2015 is a particularly bad year for pumpkin farmers, so the traditional spooky lantern may not be quite as conspicuous this year as in days gone by.

Pumpkin

It just goes to show that whilst there is so much in life that we are happy to take for granted, things don’t always turn out quite as we’d expect. If you can’t rely on intricately carved and alarmingly gnarled illuminations on October 31st, what can you rely on?

Autumn is always an unsettling time for students, even without the chilly fingers of the ghostly and the ghoulish ticking away at our nerve endings. New courses, new faces and new challenges on any number of levels all feed in to making the months of September and October an especially tense time for anyone who’s away from home.

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Of course, that anxiety derives form not knowing what’s around the corner. That’s one of the reasons festivals like Hallowe’en were so important in ancient times. They were a way of dealing with fears about the unknown, a means to bring all that insecurity and unpredictability into a framework that could at least make some sort of sense of it all.

Halloween is maybe the best example because the changing of the seasons is so stark at this time of the year – the night starts to draw in, there is cold in the air and the leaves on the trees colour up to remind us of the inescapable cyclical quality to the passing of time. The fact that all souls day (or the day of the dead as it is sometimes celebrated) crops up at this point in the calendar is hardly an accident.

Spiders-Web

With all the grim overtones that the prospect of a cold, dark winter brings make this the perfect time to explore your spiritual side. As the light of summer turns to something altogether more opaque, now is the perfect time to delve into the other side – maybe even with a medium reading to really get to grips with what the past may have hidden and what the future may hold. Some people swear by them.

Websites such as the TheCircle.com can put you on the right track to establish just what sort of a reading might be perfect for you. The business of communing with the spirit world may be even older than our most ancient traditions, but that doesn’t mean you’ll have to go hunting through caves and forests to find someone capable of conducting a reading for you. In 2015, it is a simple matter of finding a medium who appeals to you and conducting a reading over the phone.

With so much uncertainty in our lives, and at a time of year when we are all slightly out of kilter, the reassurance and revelatory quality of a reading can be invaluable. There doesn’t have to be a creepily carved pumpkin or any other special effects for you to probe the possibilities of what the spirits may be able to tell you. None of us know entirely what may be around the corner – just ask those pumpkin farmers.

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