I went looking for something appropriate to post for the day and was confronted by the vulgar commercial form of Dia de Los Muertos stuff, everywhere. If Anglo Americans are responsible, I don't know, Anglo-America is capable of vulgarizing and corrupting every holiday it can make a buck off of, though we're hardly the only people able to do that.
Then it came to me there must be material about how Day of the Dead is done in the smaller communities, where it's more a roots and family phenomenon than all about the money and found some but little, none of which seemed just what I was looking for. I did hear some really good Andean harp playing in cemeteries. I love that music, but the recordings weren't great.
This morning it came to me, I wasn't looking for the living dead, I was looking for SOULS, not skeletons, skulls, and the such. Not Day of the Dead in the commercial manifestation of it, the spectacle of it, maybe all that is really visible to an Anglo who didn't grow up with it. That's all about the discarded clothes, not the people who once wore them. They've moved on.
It's not for me to tell other people how to do their holidays but if it were me, I'd want to dump some of that stuff before it turns as ugly and awful as American Christmas or Halloween. I wouldn't want it to turn as stupid as Hollywood style zombie apocalypse.
I'll go to the cemetery with a thermos and pour some coffee libations or something instead. For a really serious coffee addict like me, pouring it onto the ground is real serious stuff. Put out some bird seed, too. My mother was really big on feeding the birds. Then I'll be very Catholic and pray for the dead and ask them to pray for me.
It would nice to see a Latino family there having a quiet, dignified picnic but it is cold November in diversity deficient Maine and it's a school day so that's not going to happen.
I'd better get an early start. It's a work day.
And I'll repost the dialogue on All Souls Day between Rupert Sheldrake and Marc Andres. Some of those I wanted to annoy with it last week might have missed it then.
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