Altars & Time Travel

Coming into this time of year I begin to reflect on the fabric that strings together life and death. The Mexica Nahua describe time as a cloth on a loom, in continuous cycles of being woven and fraying away. 

What is time? What is my or your experience of time? 

Without getting too philosophical, as I feel into the nature of time, I see the sun and the moon. I see the light and shadows. I see the innate timing of seeds with their environment. I see biological urges listening to subtle whispers from the trees.

 Much of my experience of time has been colonized, wrapped around an artificial rod that is a culture that would not make sense if only the Land was here to tell the story of how we moved in relation to this mysterious force. Time is the marker between life and death, between the living and the dead. It is as tangible as it is ephemeral. 

There is a lingering feeling that the great grandmother of my blood lineage is sticking her hand out from the veil of time to hold mine. And in that same way, I place out my hand into this shapeless world to feel the tender grip of generations to come. 

In mass culture they speak about the “thinning of the veil”. I have many questions about this phrase, very few facts, mostly opinions and intuitive nudges. Between August and November there are many indigenous cultures that view this time as a moment to connect with the Ancestors and those that have passed. At the end of October and beginning of November, I celebrate Dia De Los Muertos as a Xicanx frijolito keeping the traditions of my Abueles and culture alive while making space for myself within it. Dia De Los Muertos is how I understand the “thinning of the veiling”. I understand it as the time when the ancestors walk closely or rather when we can walk closely to each other. 

Pre-colonization, Dia De Los Muertos was celebrated in the summer and was changed through the wound of colonization in Mexico to align with Catholic holidays. There is no right or wrong, there just is. This is a reminder to the wounded critic in myself that seeks a utopic escape in the rightness of what was. There is much medicine and truth in the details of my pre-colonial ancestor’s knowledge, but I also don’t get cut off from the connection to their love because we as indigenous people have had to adapt. Medicine and love understand adaptation.

The texture of this truth reveals that we are dancing through time to a melodic beat that makes space for our ancestors to greet us as closely in the Summer as during the Fall. Our experience of time is shaped just as much by our collective beliefs as it is by the steady cycles of the Earth. We are living expressions of the tension between the natural cycles and the collective narratives that we tell to make sense of the creative, magical, illusive spark of life and creation. 

When the ancestors walk close, I like to believe that what is being alluded to is that time travel, time warping, time gooeyness becomes more possible, present, alive. We become more present in a nonlinear expression of time. It’s as if the cosmic weaver of this life story during certain stretches of weaving intuitively hears the calling of our collective beliefs and the rhythm of the Earth and as a response uses a special stitch that brings all the threads closer; past, present, future, and all formations of time beyond words. 

What a delicious possibility. 

During Dia De Los Muertos special altars are erected to honor the Ancestors and allow them nourishment and passage to our world (whatever world this is). If what separates us from our ancestors is a trick of time, then altars are time traveling devices as much as they are gateways and tools for facilitating conversation between us and them.  

At the altar, we send our ancestors food and drinks and relics of joy. We travel through time by revisiting memories, feeling their presence, processing grief collectively (as it should be), and stepping into the future by asking for their support in living a prosperous life. 

Time is the tela/cloth that connects us. Blessings, prayers, and necessities shuffled between hands so there may be healing, feeding and joy in the multi-dimensional tapestry that connects us to our lineages.  This tapestry is our blood, it is the Earth, it is the lineages that choose us. 

The cosmic weaver attentively tends to the fabric on their loom and introduces a unique weaving and pattern to course correct so the larger tapestry is in order. When someone is asked to live a rather specific life, unlike anyone around them, before or after, perhaps it is the lineage introducing medicine or the necessary redirection to keep the fabric in order. The queers, the anomalies, the mutant glitches are course corrections to restore cosmic order.  It is the weaver correcting the fabric to maintain balance in the cycle of life.

How powerful is it to be queer and to be in lineage to queer ancestors whom you are bonded to by the act of Loving. Love is an expression of the heart and heart soul (teyolia) which lives on forever according to Mexica Nahua metaphysics. This is truly an immeasurable bond. At our altars we share love and call it offerings.  Love is the ingredient that allows our offerings and altars to “travel time” because love is universal, everlasting, like teyolia.

As queers, we walk in a lineage bonded by our purpose to bring order to the tapestry of our lineages and the cosmos by the disorder, or special stitch,  that we introduce that brings balance to the whole. Our disorder is really an untangling of a societal knot, an unraveling that frees us all.

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧ Altars ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*

This memory Is

You

Waxing and Waning 

Fraying and Weaving

Cycles

That soften the edges of separation

An Altar is a sacred place 

Because it holds our memories 

I lay out the last meal you ate and your dearest vices

To hold your hand

And

Fall into your arms 

Like Time crashing 

At the rebozo weaver’s feet 

That special stitch that brings me back to you and you to me 

I never met you

I did once in the memory of my grandmother and in the bone hissing whispers of the you that lives in me 

I met you once at the altar and again in the quiet hysteria, cuando el aire nos soltó, when the wind let us go

New endings and old beginnings

Waxing and Waning

Fraying and Weaving

Living in the afterbirth of your memory