Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead)

It's that time again!  Día de los Muertos  approaches with celebrations beginning on November 1, (Día de Muertos Chiquitos--The Day of the Little Dead) ( also All Saints Day) and continuing on November 2, (All Souls Day). It is a joyous occasion when the memory of ancestors and the continuity of life is celebrated, and a beloved holiday in Mexico and South America.  It's celebrated in Tucson with a famous parade and festivities that go on late into the night.

Like the Celtic traditions of Samhain, which were also associated with the end of the year and the last harvest festival, it was believed that at this time of the year the souls of the departed can return to visit the living (the "veils are thin"). It is not a time of mourning since, as the Latin saying goes, "the path back to the living world must not be made slippery by tears".


Celebrations for the dead originated in indigenous Mexico before the Spanish conquest. Following the Spanish conquest of Mexico during the 16th century there was a blending of indigenous customs with the new Catholic religion. All Saints' Day and All Hallows Eve (Halloween) roughly coincided with the preexisting Día de Los Muertos resulting in the present day event. Although the skeleton is a strong symbol for both contemporary Halloween and los Días de Los Muertos, the meaning is very different. For Días de Los Muertos the skeleton is not a scary or macabre symbol at all, but rather represents the dead playfully mimicking the living.

Very often, a large community altar may include many small personal shrines, such as the one below that includes Frieda Kahlo.

Or here are some personal shrines made by artists:

Preparation begins weeks in advance when statues, candies, breads and other items to please the departed are sold in markets. A sweet bread, pan de muerto, with decorations representing bones is very popular, as are sugar skulls made from casts. All sorts of art objects and toys are created. This gives the economy a boost in much the same way as our Christmas season does. Alters ofrecetas (offerings) are set up in the home with offerings of sweets and fruits, corn and vegetables, as well as the favorite foods and beverages of the deceased. It's not unusual to see a good cigar and whiskey bottle beside a photograph of a loved one. These offerings may later be given away or consumed by the living after their "essence", and the loving remembrance, has been enjoyed by the dead. Marigolds are the traditional decorative flower.

The particulars of the celebration vary widely. On November 1, Día de Muertos Chiquitos, the departed children are remembered. The evening is sometimes called la Noche de Duelo, The Night of Mourning, marked by a candlelight procession to the cemetery. On November 2, Día de los Muertos, the spirits of the dead return. Entire families visit the graves of their ancestors, bringing favorite foods and alcoholic beverages as offerings to the deceased as well as a picnic lunch for themselves. Traditionally there is a feast in the early morning hours of November 2nd although many now celebrate with an evening meal.

There are sugar skulls and toys for the children, emphasizing early on that death is a part of the life cycle, and the importance of remembering those who have passed on to another kind of life.

Descanso: Shrine for Extinct and Endangered Species

 Dia de los Muertos:  "Reliquary for the 6th Extinction"

Xerces Blue Butterfly, indigenous to Northern California.  Became extinct in 1945.

 

"We have been raised to think that our body ended here, with this bag of skin, or with our possessions or education or house.  Now we begin to realize that our body is the world."

Joanna Macy 

Bonobo, Africa, critically endangered

Ivory Billed Woodpecker, native to Southeaster U.S., last seen in 1944

Red Crowned Crane, indigenous to southeast Asia, critically endangered

  
African Elephant, critically endangered

 
Cheetah, Africa, critically endangered

 

Staghorn coral, Caribbean and Bahamas coral reef, critically endangered

 

Only in this hoarded span will love  persevere.   

Whether you are pretty or not, I outlive you

bend down my strange face to yours 

Anne Sexton, "all my pretty ones"

The Bill of Reproductive Rights

I've always loved Meryl Streep, but I especially appreciate her as she appears for Draw the Line (with thanks to Trish MacGregor for this).  Listen to what Meryl Streep has to say, and let's avoid a future in which old men in congress tell women and girls what they can do with their bodies (and minds)  (in other words, not much). Among other things, this democracy was created to separate Church and State, which these patriarchs clearly do not respect. The rights of women should be self-evident.  And as overpopulation threatens all future generations,  these are the same men who decry the "welfare state" and would leave all those unwanted babies, and their mothers,  to lives of poverty.  Sign the Bill of Rights.  Meryl is right:  this is no time to be complacent.

Remember:    Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a "slut" and offered to give her "as much aspirin to put between her knees as she wants.".  Todd Akin said that during "legitimate rape" (!!) a woman can't get pregnant because "her reproductive system shuts down." As Kevin Bacon comments below, a lawmaker in Georgia equates women to "farm animals" and comments that the problem would be solved if they would just stop having sex..........Do we really want people like that with the power to decide the reproductive future of half the population? Personally, I don't like the idea of people like that having the power to drive a lawnmower,  let alone the power to shut down family planning clinics.
http://www.drawtheline.org/

An Ancestor Synchronicity

We really are all connected, and I think that's the nature of the "new paradigm", the real meaning of 2012.  It's the time when the veils are thin, and I've remembered a story that I ought to tell it in this journal before it disappears from my memory. Because it's about healing on many levels.

First, I need to say that I have a daughter who is brilliant and talented, and she herself is a mother now.  I also need to say that she is someone else's daughter, because I was 18 when she was born, and gave Shari up at birth. Birth control was very hard for young girls to get in those days, nor was education about birth  control readily available then, and I was a relatively common adolescent statistic.

I requested, at the time, that she be adopted by a Jewish family.  I'm not Jewish, but I had many friends who were, her birth father was Russian Jewish, and I think I also wanted to make sure that she didn't grow up with Catholic guilt. (I remember only too well all that shame I was supposed to feel about getting pregnant and having an "illegitimate" child.....)  She was adopted by a lovely family, and when she was 21 we met again, and through the generosity of her parents, and Shari, I was able to get to know her, and in fact she lived for a while with me in New York City.

In 2000 I was living in California, and Shari and her husband-to-be were living in Brooklyn.  Shari's mother had arranged and planned her wedding (a very bohemian affair on a boat), and I was to officiate for the service.  They were both quite un-religious, so it was to be a non-denominational service - however, I wanted to honor the many Jewish relatives who were attending Shari's wedding.  So I visited a couple of synagogues, feeling very ignorant, to see if I could find someone to read a wedding prayer, and anything else that might be appropriate (I did find someone, and also learned about a few other things).

In the course of talking with my daughter's husband,  I learned something interesting.  He had an Italian name, and always thought he was Italian - but only within the past few months he had learned that his mother's parents, experiencing prejudice when they emigrated, had changed their name, and his mother grew up never knowing that she came from a Russian Jewish background. 

I remembered a sad story that my own mother had told me that same year.  It seems that her grandmother was anti-Semitic.  Her uncle had married a Jewish woman, and had two small children with her when he died of the flu epidemic.  After his death his mother forced his wife, and her children, to leave the property they were living in (she owned it), and my mother sadly commented that she grew up never knowing these cousins, who were virtually "erased" from her family. 

Both bloodlines had a harsh injustice in their backgrounds that came from intolerance and prejudice - how marvelous when these two young people joined hands, broke the glasses with their feet, and everyone shouted "Mozeltov!"  I never really mentioned it to them, because I suppose they would have thought me sentimental and unrealistic, but truly I felt the Ancestors gather that night, a deep satisfaction that after 4 generations, these wounds finally were healed.     

L'chaim!

Ancestral Visitations

Florence on horse, Griffith Park, 1928

Girl and Horse, 1928

by Margaret Atwood

You are younger than I am, you are
Someone I never knew,
you stand under a tree,
your face half-shadowed,
Holding the horse by its bridle.

Why do you smile? Can’t you
See the apple blossoms falling around
You, snow, sun, snow,
listen, the tree dries
and is being burnt, the wind

Is bending your body,
your face ripples like water
Where did you go?

But no, you stand there
exactly the same,
you can’t hear me,

forty years ago you were caught by light
And fixed in that secret place
where we live, where we believe
nothing can change, grow older.

(On the other side
of the picture, the instant
is over, the shadow
of the tree has moved. )

You wave,

then turn and ride
out of sight through the vanished
orchard, still smiling

(as though you do not notice)

GHOSTS

Where do the dead go?

The dead that are not cosmetically renewed
and boxed, their faces familiar and serene.
Or brought to an essence, pale ashes in elegant canisters.

I ask for the other dead:

those ghosts that wander

unshriven among our sleep,
haunting the borderlands of our lives.

The dead dreams,
The failed loves.
The quests, undertaken with full courage
and paid for in blood
that never found a dragon, a Grail, a noble ordeal
and the Hero's sacred journey home.

Instead, the wrong fork was somehow taken, or the road
wandered aimlessly, finally narrowing
to a tangled gully
and the Hero was lost, in the gray and prosaic rain,
hungry, weary, to finally stop somewhere, anywhere
glad of bread, a fire, a little companionship.

Where is their graveyard?
Were they mourned?
Did we hold a wake,
bear flowers, eulogize their bright efforts
their brave hopes
and commemorate their loss with honor?

A poem?
An imperishable stone to mark their passing?

Did we give them back to the Earth
to nourish saplings yet to flower,
the unborn ones?
Or were they left to wander
in some unseen Bardo, unreleased, ungrieved.
Did we turn our backs on them unknowing,

            their voices calling, whispering impotently
            behind us
            shadowing our steps?

              Lauren Raine   1997

Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands
somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him
as if he were dead.

And another man, who remains inside his own house,
stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children have to go
far out into the world
toward that same church,

which he forgot.

Rainier Maria Rilke (Translated by Robert Bly)

I see your  father's  gesture
(how is it possible, to remember him, after all these years?)
yet there it is renewed, a play of shadow and light
 flickering across your face.

You were a Milagro
that inhabited me

for a little while 
and then grew on without me.

What shall I call this door,
opening today between our lives?
Multitudes pass this way.  For that moment
I see them in your eyes,
then I pay the bill, finish coffee,
and descend into the subway, waving goodbye.

How can I tell you
that I am casting my love
like a daisy with petals partly plucked,
a firefall of dandelion seed
into the wind
into the world

as you must do as well?

Lauren Raine (1990)

Flora with Florence (1917)

old photos,

escaping a tin box:

stories with wings

 butterflies, or white moths

fluttering at the glass,

ephemeral, half-glimpsed stories

lighter than air, 

these unknown memories

quietly,
through 

an open window

Florence at 92

Plastic waste into low cost housing!

 

 View of a room made out of recycled plastic that the company 'Kuadro' used to manufacture low-cost houses in Tlajomulco, Mexico. Mexican engineers from the western state of Jalisco use recyclable plastic waste to build green homes that are easy to transport, set up and are durable.

Some good news!  Here's a company in Mexico (Published on Oct 12, 2012 by ReutersVideo.  )  building houses made of recycled waste plastic collected by trucks on their weekly rounds. The company, called Kuadro Ecological Solutions, says it is making the most of waste that would otherwise end up in landfills, while providing inexpensive housing at the same time.

http://youtu.be/7SqlQuDB2U0



And in the U.K.,  a company called Affresol  is doing the same - to view a video of their work with recycled plastics and housing, see:

  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/8531170.stm

"The Affresol house is a unique and effective way of building high quality homes using TPR™, which will offer a real and cost effective opportunity to the thousands of people who are currently unable to get onto the first rung of the “housing ladder”. The Affresol houses are specifically aimed at providing spacious, 2, 3, and 4 bedroom quality homes for lower income families."

And how about this house in Serbia, made from recycled plastics? Or the ones below?  Human ingenuity, how I love it!

 

Half the Sky Documentary

http://www.halftheskymovement.org/

Here's the practical side of the "Return of the Goddess".  The shadow of gender inequity, which is reinforced through the myths that inform both society and religion, is the continuing violence of gender inequity.  I applaud the film makers!

http://www.policymic.com/articles/15709/half-the-sky-documentary-review-nicholas-kristof-and-eva-mendes-force-female-inequality-into-the-light

Watch Women Are Not the Problem, They Are the Solution on PBS. See more from Independent Lens.