Community Healing
Needed Here
(El Día de Los Muertos Altár Comunitario para sanar de las tragedias modernas y profusas)
This time of year, we are nearing the days that are called El Día de Los Muertos (the day of the dead). This celebration of life-lived is magical and empowering; it leaves me feeling less alone in life. In years past, this time has been a marker for me, to give thanks for one more year I walk this red road of the living. I give thanks for having shared life with some of the most beautiful souls I have known. How lucky am I that we got to be in the same time and space, that I knew you? For others who may have caused harm or pain, I give thanks that even they can go home to the Creator, to source and be healed. It helps me to heal by releasing that thread of harm that was sewed to my innards, that if we were connected, and now they heal, then that healing seeps down the thread and heals me too. It’s a prayer of mine, and it helps me.
This year, while making my first loaf of Dead Bread, I broke into tears.
In years past as I would knead the bread, I would add the prayers. I would remember my place in the circle of life, give thanks for ceremonies and celebrations that allow us to make peace with death. Death is also a part of life. Our experience of death since all time, has been made bearable and logical through the use of ceremony. That’s the reason why we bake bread, sing songs, offer spirit plates, gather flowers and celebrate life in our marking of the death. To remind our spirit that we are all connected, through all time and space, we are one. Birth – death – rebirth is a natural cycle and part of being human.
This year, while dusting off my altár, my heart breaks and death seems unnatural.
Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico under water and wind torn – how to bear the destruction? California burns – how to bear the destruction? Mexico City crumbles – how to bear the destruction? DACA and unaccompanied youth, mothers, fathers, families incarcerated and separated – how to bear the destruction?!?! Las Vegas murders – I cannot bear this man-made destruction!.... and now what?
This year, while saying my prayers into the bread I mix my tears, my fears unabated.
How do we continue to bear the destruction of our people en mass? All of these are man-made sources of cruelty, pain, and destruction. Our destruction, collective, in unnatural ways, on such a large scale isn’t new, but this is now. While I may hold the memory of my ancestors suffering I am bearing witness to vast and unavoidable pain. I am unsure of how to respond to the totality of it.
Suffering in this way, today, leads me to the need for new ceremonies or new life in old ceremonies; something to help us ease the pain and bear witness to and reclaim the sacredness of - LIFE. Instead of the couple of days of the dead, do we now need a whole year, ten years, a hundred years? Do we lead a procession around the whole of our country, the whole of our continents, do we need to encompass the globe? Could we convert the ICE agents into prayer agents? Could we build an altár on the back of a semi and pull it around the country with each person adding an ofrenda as it goes? Each community coming out to name their dead, make an inventory of the man-made offenses that stole life and minimized humans, and to reclaim life for the living? How do we as a people celebrate the lives of our dead, when the value of life seems to be diminishing in the present power structure of our society at large? We are not chattel, or solely workers/labor, or only victims. We are not welfare checks or debtors. We are not immigrants, survivors, offenders, no labels; we are human beings, the people. We are all related and come from our own original people.
This year, as I build a community altár for El Día de Los Muertos, I am stumped for answers. I mourn the passing of life. I grieve the diminishing of the importance of the first gift, the original creation: life.
I invite you to add your offering and join the procession, for it is through relationship and in community that we heal. Maybe with the power of our unity we can send up the thread, some healing ways to cover the whole of the Earth with life affirming prayers. While it seems so little in response, we already have all the tools we need, our ancestors, those who we celebrate on this day, made sure we had the original instructions to care for this original gift. Unity, communing, community – humanness, togetherness, sacredness. We are in this together. Together let’s be in this.
- Kristiana Huitrón
