Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Images from "Messages to the Ancestors 2012"

Messages sent in by comment & email were printed out & displayed



My friend and colleague Sallie Ann Glassman pays us a visit
Visitors added their handwritten messages



Panoramic view of visitors celebrating their Ancestors

I will post more pictures when we burn the messages and put the ashes in the Mississippi near the Headwaters. If you would like to send a message to your Ancestors or departed ones, leave a comment or send us an email. Messages will be collected throughout the year and displayed at Anba Dlo Halloween Festival and our Vodou temple's Fet Gede/Day of the Dead Celebration in 2013.

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Why send a message to your ancestors?


A relationship does not end just because one person passes away.  We carry our dead with us: in our DNA, our memories, our culture, our hang-ups. Sometimes our guilt. But after their death, we can choose to have a relationship with the best part of someone, and let the worst parts go. We can forgive them. We choose what we carry forward.

Read more

I originally wrote this for State of Formation because I found it troubling that so many of us seem disconnected or even fearful of our departed ones. The article was a start, but now I hope to help people reach inward to their own psyche and back into their own history.

What message would you give to your ancestors? These can be people you knew in life, or those who passed away many generations ago. 

Please leave a comment or email ancestormessages@gmail.com. Your message will be handwritten and displayed in the Spiritual Space at the New Orleans Healing Center for the Anba Dlo Festival. Afterwards, they will be respectfully offered into a fire and the ashes put into the Mississippi near the headwaters. They will make the journey from your thoughts to manifestation, from Minneapolis (where I live) to New Orleans, then back to the headwaters of the river and down to the Gulf. Like our own history, coming forward and looping back. Connecting us.

The past is not silent. It speaks to us all the time. Isn't it time we replied? 

Gede (Spirit of death) veve (geometric representation) on fence leading to Ashade Meadows Peristyle, New Orleans