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The Road to Pozos

NOVEMBER 3, 2012

Beneath a vast blue sky filled with thunderheads,
our group visited the ancient village of Pozos, Mexico…

We were invited to participate in the village’s procession from the church to the graveyard, a pilgrimage celebrating life and death and re-birth.

I have few pictures from this experience, as I fully participated and joined the villagers in the slow procession through town where the ancient traditions and modern religion wound through the tiny village, which was once a huge and industrious mining city. With copal incense filling the morning air, the beat of the ceremonial drum caught in my heart and pulled me forward through the recitation of the stations of the cross…

Carrying an armload of flowers I stepped onto the ancient road of honoring the dead. Soon, the sun became so hot that I had to pull my shawl over my head to shield me from its blazing fire. It was in that moment, for the first time in two years, that I felt the mantle of widowhood settle upon my shoulders. I felt my loss weave through this community where sorrow and grieving and suffering are allowed to be seen and honored.

At one point I looked down at my feet and found a single line of stone running through the tumbled cobblestone street and the metaphor of the labyrinth appeared and I found the way through the emotions that were flooding my entire being…

When we reached the cemetery, the dancers with their painted faces and body and masks of death, witnessed us passing through the doorway that at some point in time, we all must enter. Once inside the graveyard people were busily weeding and cleaning the graves of family members and placing fields of flowers...

With another woman from my group we approached two graves that had no one gathered round and began to pull weeds and place the bright orange marigolds upon the tiny dirt mounds before us. No cement or rod iron gates separating us from the remains of these young lives returning to the earth… At another grave, a village woman knelt with me, and together we pulled weeds and she showed me how to brush the dirt with a broken tree branch. I then placed my bright sun-gold flowers upon this un-marked grave…

I feel that I was given the gift this day of seeing how the old and the new can live together, how we desperately need opposites and differences to be able to coexist, embracing life and death entwined like lovers, giving birth to new life…

Road of my heart…
I honor this path that opens before me,
may I walk and dance this way
with every fiber of my being...

*****

Pozos, Mexico
Dia de los Muertos
wth kindred travelers and Rebecca Brooks

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