Good morning.
On Bali, several years ago, I went to an evening ceremony of blessings, with a family. At 10.00pm, it had been going all day, moving into the later night, early morning — past midnight.
I had this encounter, with a priestess:
Above her, there was a revenant…
revenant \REV-uh-nahng (the final “ng” is not pronounced, but the vowel is nasalized)\ noun
: one that returns after death or a long absence
Frightening or friendly, the classic revenant was a ghost a specter returned from the dead. Even in figurative uses, death played its hand. When Sir Walter Scott, in his 1828 novel The Fair Maid of Perth, used “revenant” in one of the earliest uses of the word in English, he was referring to a criminal who had survived the gallows,
who “was cut down and given to his friends before life was extinct, and … recovered.” Eventually, though, we appended a more earthly meaning: a revenant can be a flesh-and-blood returnee when we use it simply to mean a person who shows up after a long absence. We borrowed “revenant” from the French, who created it from their verb “revenir,” which means simply “to return,” as does its Latin ancestor, “revenire.”
Wishing well, in the returning presence of any revenant — either real, or imagined…
all ways —
tsg