Newsletter for Días de Los Muertos
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Holding the Line: Together »
October 24, 2008
Throughout Mexico and parts of the U.S., people celebrate Los Días de los Muertos (Days of the Dead) on and around November 1st and 2nd. This ritual has been practiced for at least 3,000 years and was begun by the indigenous people of what is now Mexico. One of the chief ways of celebrating this day is by building altars and dedicating them to our deceased loved ones. Initially this ritual occurred in the ninth month of the Aztec Solar Calendar (which is approximately the beginning of August), but the Spaniards, in an attempt to make it more Christian, moved it to the beginning of November, such that it coincided with All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day.
At RDS, we are also celebrating the Days of the Dead. Our current Gallery exhibit, with contributions from the 5th grade art classes (canvas altars), the 1st grade (Day of the Dead boxes), 4A (alcove altar), and 5B (the central altar), reflect the spirit of honoring and celebrating those who came before us. Spend a little time looking at the students’ artwork, reading their memories, and letting the implicit and explicit emotions wash over and through you. Feel the developmental range of our students: from first to fifth grade. It is appropriate, impressive, and powerful.
Too often in our culture we do not give enough voice or time to our grief, such that it loses its transforming power. In the extreme, our fear of the pain associated with grief too often leaves us rushing away from the reality of death. These are natural defenses; after all, who wants to feel that kind of hurt? But this ignored grief does not go away; instead it resurfaces in many forms: depression, workaholism, anxiety, perfectionism, insomnia, under/over eating, addiction, obsessive exercise, and more. What these habits all have in common is the effect of making one’s world smaller, more manageable. The danger, of course, is that without working through our grief, our world forever stays reduced. From this perspective, healing is expanding one’s world to what it was prior to the loss; but even further along the spectrum is transformational healing which leads to an even more expansive world than we began with.
The rituals performed during Días de Los Muertos help us to internalize our loved ones who no longer walk this planet with us. That is, this annual celebration invites us to remember what is otherwise too easy to ignore. Over the years, the beauty of this process is that we recall more of the joy and less of the anguish.
As a school we embrace a ritual like this for many reasons, but one is because, in many ways, it teaches students how to grieve. When parents and guardians help think through these projects, children also get to see how adults grieve in healthy ways, thus paving the way for an improved generation. At RDS, our goal is a developmental and rigorous education that includes attending to intellectual, social, and emotional development with the idea that when one of these is excluded, all suffer. And vice-versa: when all are attended to, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
As in other Friday Folders, I want to end by wishing you all a great weekend. And this time, in honor of Días de Los Muertos, I also hope “great” includes some time to reflect on the people you would honor and the healing you would invite in.
Have a great weekend.
Mike
