altared

We arrive, quiet, one by one, just after dark. We carry offerings: candles, food cooked at home, and photos of recently (and not so recently) departed loved ones. The gate stands open at the old house near the river, which means the dogs must be detained or distracted elsewhere. The immense grandmother cottonwood keeps her sheltering watch overhead. Chill blue sky, sighing of nearing frost, swirls clear and bright above the gardens in back of the house, over the ochre ache of marigolds in full bloom.

In the kitchen on the antique cookstove, beans, pumpkin soup, atole, and cafe de olla (like sweet, thick, dark edible earth) steam and mingle their scents. Our host mops the dusty wood floor in the living room, which is cleared of all furniture save a perimeter of folding chairs. He gives two of us scissors and asks us to go out to the garden and cut two oversized buckets of marigolds -- "the best ones" -- for the building of the altar.

This will be my first complete velación-- the all-night vigil of remembrance held, in this case, on Dia de los Muertos. Over the last nearly-three years as part of this community, I've made less-committed efforts to attend on this night. I've stuck my foot in the water a couple of times and then retreated. But this year I need to commit. No person has asked this of me. The circle itself has asked this of me, as I've finally learned a little trust of the unfamiliar, and I'm of a mind to say yes. Thanks to recent unexpected circumstances, I have no job to go to in the morning, as some do. I am blessed with the absence of any distracting obligation.

Except, perhaps, this one: to maintain equanimity in the presence of the two exes who will also be here tonight. And of the polar opposites of heartache they bring to my perception of any space we may share. To stand between these two, as in fact the actions of the circle often require of me, is to know how a magnet buzzes when set between two other powerful magnets. It is to know how sea breathes, between moon and earth. Poles of opposed desire and despair. Forces reaching to remake and unmake these alternate positive and negative ends of my story, though both, ultimately, are endings. Equally unjust openings and closings, limboed in unresolution. Existential invisible YES and NO, two wholehearted pleas that will remain without witness and without answer. The photos don't represent the only departed in this roomful of memories. I meet my own spirits, here at this momentary crossing of dimensions. And this inner vigil -- for my own attempt at wellness, for respect of my community, for my intention of outward peace -- I hold, perpetually, alone.

But for now the lights are bright, and the vibe is cheerful cooperation. The altar is begun as a low table draped with a simple wool blanket. Someone brings in a heavy tray of fruit, and arranges apples, oranges, bananas, pears, and tunas -- the oval green fruit of the nopal cactus -- around five loaves of pan de muerto (sweet heavy bread made just for this day). Others add bowls of soup, earthen mugs of atole and coffee, and small dishes of the food that each of us brought to share. The departed will get a taste of everything we're having, as well as the drinks or sweets that were their favorites in this life. Next, the photos are arranged with great care among the edible abundance. A varied collection of frames holds images of parents, grandparents, friends, cousins, and the yellow lab that just left this world a couple weeks ago. Each item is blessed with the smoke of copal incense before it is set in its precise balancing place. Several vases of the marigolds are brought in. The glow of their yellow, orange, and red-rust petals are like bursts of bright flame among the memories. Tall votive candles of all colors, and white candles of varying size and significance, are set at predetermined points above, on and in front of the table. The resulting arrangement is stunning: it would be a still-life masterpiece, only it's not still. Already it hums with life and energy, and the real ceremony hasn't even started yet.

The sonorous note of a conch shell sounds, and we all gather in the small room. Our chief gives each person a role to serve in the hours that will follow. Each will take a turn to lead a song, and to come forward and enact a particular stage of the process that will transform the altar from inanimate object to espacio para las animas -- a space for the energy of souls to inhabit. Lest this sound spacy or seance-like, let me be clear: there is no magic or occultism here. This is of the heart, and this is real. If my limited understanding serves, the space we create (to put it in more psychological terms) is a temporal, non-rational, agreement. A space-between-spaces, an alternate awareness in which our living souls may seek, and in some way meet, that which continues of those who have passed from this life. Whatever mixture that may be of memory, energy, spirit, love...

This expressed intention, inviting our dear ones to "come in and sit a spell", is one I hadn't fully considered before. How nice, I had thought on first hearing years ago of the traditions of Dia de los Muertos: the departed get a token remembrance. A candle or a plate of cookies. Perhaps the lack of connection was in part that I went for years, somehow, without losing anyone close to me to death. This year I lost my dearest grandmother, the primary (and sometimes only) source of unconditional love in my younger life. I also lost a cousin, whose leaving, though we weren't close, shook me because he was only 28. Both left this lesson and inspiration: they embraced life unreservedly. My grandmother embodied welcome, with a keen enthusiasm for the diversity of people, their problems, and their life-stories that belied her small-town environment (and shook that small town's expectations, more than once). My cousin left on an exchange program for Argentina at age 17. After a year there, he committed himself to living and travelling in South America, which he did for the next 11 years. I have a renewed sense of the courage I draw from them both, as I sit now for a night in view of their smiling photographs. Particularly I hadn't realized how I'd missed my grandmother, and how I'd repressed that missing. Just a few more minutes of her vivacious, openhearted company -- before she got so tired, frustrated, forgetful; back when she sang constantly, savored food and experience, and flirted with every man she knew, young and old -- what a gift that would be. Glancing throughout the night at her photo, with her favorite hot-pink jacket and her radiant smile, I feel that something like an agreement has been made. I feel that I've invited her (whatever that means) into a good and welcoming place. I feel that (in whatever way) she was/would be/is happy to be there. I also become a little clearer on what an intimate relation there is, unresolvedly paradoxical, between holding someone tight in memory and letting them go.

Maybe I should thank the presence of my grandmother's healing energy -- and that of the other grandmothers and dear ones in the room -- for the elevation that comes to me, toward 3 a.m. or so. Around that time (a guess, since there are no clocks) all the familiar and protective and necessary defending walls...disappear. Between past and present. Between the so-called dead and living. Between me and the wish to belong. Between the US in the room, and all we still don't know of each other, or each other's families, or pasts, and the fact that here, now, we are totally present to each other. Present to an endeavor greater and more beautiful than the sum of its parts. Even the painful past-relationship-energy...well, that doesn't disappear. It is...softened, in a sense. Mercifully more distant. Like a photographic image in soft focus. Like an aged, weathered photo of a beloved one long gone. Blurred the clarity of detail, visible and still present the form, thanks to the light that illuminated it for one moment, at once preserved and lost.

Of respect for sacred things, I won't speak of all that fills the night. The building of the altar is pure act of devotion, luminous work of creation, collective birthing and then transforming of a kind of living light. It is the complete quickening of an inanimate physical environment, and the psychic emptying of self that seems only to be found in sacred ritual, fasting, or the extremes of traumatic or euphoric events. It actually takes several hours to accomplish. I can only say that, by the ceremony's completion an hour or so before dawn, I am undone. Completed and undone, in the most beautiful way possible. Constructed into the work that we have made. Devoted, anew, to the cause and the wellbeing of my community. Given up, as one lost, in grief, abandoned, hopeless, detached, untouchable, possibly, one of these days, free. Given up, as offering of praise, gratitude, service, reverence for all those ancestors, spirits, valiant ones, those lights that led us here. Changed, for now, into emptiness, into sacred space: I am altared.