All Souls

Community ritual is a pretty powerful thing. Community rituals give us an opportunity to come together and share about how something means to you. Over the past month I have had the honor to participate in a lot of community ritual. A wedding, Dias de los Muertes, and the All Souls Procession have all fallen in the last 31 days. It was a fascinating experience to design a wedding ceremony that reflected both me and my partner. To not feel pressured by tradition, but to acknowledge its role and to examine if any pieces fit us. We ended up with the most non-traditional ceremony I’ve ever witnessed, but the response from our very traditional Grandparents down to our friends was the same. Everyone was overwhelmed with emotion and reflected the beauty we shared right back to us. My Grandma later asked why we exchanged books, but didn’t even seem worried about the lack of exchanging rings.
Dias de los Muertes came and as I set up my altar I knew that people all over the city and world were also remembering their loved ones who passed. Technically I celebrated by myself, but even driving around the city seeing altars and the colorfully decorated cemetery I knew I was part of a ritual that allowed a community to grieve, celebrate and take time to remember.
It seems like the common theme of community ritual is the act of “showing up”. Thousands of people turned out for the All Souls Procession last night. It was an opportunity for people to share what death meant to them, to remember, to let go of the past. Death is political, it can feel silent and still, it rattles us to our core and that was all reflected in the procession. Anyone could be part of the procession and everyone took part even if they were watching on the sidelines. Hundreds of people marched through the city made up as skeletons, giant puppets, or on stilts. There was a lone saxophone player, every kind of drums imaginable, a mariachi band and bagpipe players. There were groups of people who created symbols of many people’s death. There was a giant twirling world for women who had died of breast cancer. There were kites with writing, sharing stories of the L, G, B, T folks who had passed. Hundreds of paper butterflies from strings for those who have died in the desert, altars and banners for those who had died in the war, a giant oil slicked crane on wheels for all the animals that died in the B.P. oil spill. Death is also personal and hundreds of people carried signs with pictures of loved ones, dragged behind them simple to elaborate altars with flowers, candles, giant paper-mâché creations or simply marched down the street. There were babies in strollers and Nanas using wheelchairs in the procession. Everyone was expressing their story of death. Those of us on the sidelines were oddly quiet for a scene that to an outsider looked like a parade. We witnessed what we did not have the words or creativity to share. We clapped when something hit home. We added our items and intentions written on slips of paper to the massive bowl that is set on fire at the finale performance at the end of the procession.
Many Mouths One Stomach sponsors the All Souls Procession. From their website they say, “Many Mouths One Stomach (MMOS) is a Tucson-based collective of artists, teachers and community activists who come together with the intent to create, inspire, manifest and perpetuate modern festal culture. “Festal Culture” is the expression and fulfillment of core human needs through public celebration, ceremony, and ritual. The All Souls Procession is an event that was created to serve the public need to mourn, reflect, and celebrate the universal experience of Death, through their ancestors, loved ones and the living. Our events establish a legacy that reclaims public space through art and blurs the line between participant and observer, ritual and performance. Together with our commitment to education, outreach, and collaboration, MMOS stewards a vision wherein the creative act becomes a mode of living.”
……And that it did. For me community ritual at its heart is a chance for renewal. Being able to come together with people who I live near to share about something, that experience is what makes me feel like I live in a community. I need that expression, that chance to listen, the ability to learn and grow. It gives us a different kind of path then just talking or debating to examine some issue or change which affects us all.