The Child and I headed up to Seattle to join in the Dia de Muertos 2010 celebration hosted by Taller Mexicano para la Cultura y las Artes (TMCA) at Seattle Center's Center House. The Mexican festival honoring the departed was rich in imagery and culture and family and tradition. Especially beautiful were the various altars built for the deceased. They were filled with flowers and fruit and pan de muerto (bread of the dead) and candles and sugar skulls and artistic renderings of skulls and skeletons. Many of the altars also had items that the dead person or persons would have enjoyed in life—a bottle of beer, a bottle of tequila, a cigar, a stick of gum—that were temporary experiences, the emphasis primarily on temporary and experience.
There was also a large sand painting in the center of the Center House floor, as well as many pictures, sketches, linocuts, woodcuts, lithographs, and paintings depicting skulls, skeletons, and death. It was a nice reminder of how temporary we are, I am.
To highlight that point, The Child became ill, apparently from one of the various viruses drifting through the classrooms of the new school year. That cut our time short and sent us scurrying for the safety and comfort of home, for rest and stillness and hibernation.
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