Skulls

" Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, is not a Mexican version of Halloween. Though related, the two annual events differ greatly in traditions and tone. Whereas Halloween is a dark night of terror and mischief, Day of the Dead festivities unfold over two days in an explosion of color and life-affirming joy. Sure, the theme is death, but the point is to demonstrate love and respect for deceased family members. In towns and cities throughout Mexico, revelers don funky makeup and costumes, hold parades and parties, sing and dance, and make offerings to lost loved ones." - Logan Ward

November 2nd is Dia de los Muertos, not October 31 but, because we see so many skulls during Halloween, I thought I would jump the gun here.

For Dia de los Muertos, the skulls, ( think sugar skulls) are symbols of love and happy memories of loved ones.  If you have not watched "Coco", please do yoruwelf a huge favor and watch it.  It is powerful and beautiful.  The holiday, for Spanish Americans, is all about celebration.. like a birthday party in heaven.  It, along with Halloween lsot its traditional sacred meanings and is in danger of becoming totally forgotten the WHY of it in the first place.  We so struggle with death and grief and revel in sadness and mourning when, if we lived what we believed, wouldn't we celebrate too?

My middle daughter loved my father.  Grandpa loved Lainee to the moon.  He died when she was three.  She wanted to know where he went.   We simply told her he was sleeping... we should never have told her that.  She would not let any of us nap after that.  I realized we had done her a great disservice.  So, then, what do we tell her.. that God took him? and then have her hate god and ask him to give Grandpa back.  Bad God.  Do we tell her he went to heaven and then know we have not told that truth either because I know we go to a great sleep first... do I know why?  No!  Just what I have heard.  When my sweetheart died, I wrestled with the idea of heaven and where Man Hands went?  I had to ask my religious son.. .if we go directly to heaven or if there is a long sleep first.  He stuttered a bit and then said, we believe that there is a long sleep before resurrection of all.  Now, this did not sit right either.  So I had to just settle the idea in my own head.  I believe there is a great long sleep and that we do not stay with our loved ones who have gone before... it is all a kerfuffle if you ask me.  Why do we mourn if we know our loved one is out of pain?   Why do we mourn if we think they even went directly to heaven?  I, eventually, came back to a beautiful story I had heard.  It gave me some peace.  Perhaps it did not give me an answer, but it felt right to my soul.  I share it with you now.

"In a mother’s womb were two babies.  The first baby asked the other:  “Do you believe in life after delivery?”
The second baby replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery.  Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”
“Nonsense,” said the first. “There is no life after delivery.  What would that life be?”
“I don’t know, but there will be more light than here.  Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths.”
The doubting baby laughed. “This is absurd!  Walking is impossible.  And eat with our mouths?  Ridiculous.  The umbilical cord supplies nutrition.  Life after delivery is to be excluded.  The umbilical cord is too short.”
The second baby held his ground. “I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here.”
The first baby replied, “No one has ever come back from there.  Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery it is nothing but darkness and anxiety and it takes us nowhere.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said the twin, “but certainly we will see mother and she will take care of us.”
“Mother?” The first baby guffawed. “You believe in mother?  Where is she now?” 
The second baby calmly and patiently tried to explain. “She is all around us.  It is in her that we live. Without her there would not be this world.”
“Ha. I don’t see her, so it’s only logical that she doesn’t exist.”  
To which the other replied, “Sometimes when you’re in silence you can hear her, you can perceive her.  I believe there is a reality after delivery and we are here to prepare ourselves for that reality when it comes….”

- Pablo Molinero, The Parable

And so we struggle until we find a settlement to our giref, our reason for sadness, and pray it does not take too long nor be too debilitating.  I was debilitated with the loss of Richard.  I have never felt that depth of sorrow;  not at the loss of my father, my mother, my birth mother, my brothers and sisters, nothing.. no one had I loved and felt more loss for.  I broke.  I did not break because I did not believe in heaven, no, I broke because I had never been so thoroughly loved before in my conscious life.  I grieved for myself, my loss, my pitiful life to come without him. 

My page is so unfinished and it is apropos that it is so.  I have not figured out what death is, means, yet.

 

Challenge:  Do a page on skulls for Halloween...  Or for Dia de los Muertos

©Carol Desjarlais 10.4.19

Fear of Spiders

**Done by drawing with a glue gun onto a piece of waxed paper, adding little plastic spiders, and then letting it dry.  When cool, adding glitter glue.  

Psychologists believe that one reason why people fear spiders is because of some direct experience with the arachnids instilled that fear in them. This is known as the “conditioning” view of arachnophobia. - American Psychiatric Association

Arachnophobia is real to some.  The fear is said to come from being genetic to being conditioned. Some, as children, realized they got attention for pretending fear and then it stuck.  It was 1950 when the movie industry decided that doing many many horror films including spiders, making money on people's fears and things that creep them out, commercialized and conditioned many more people of being afraid of spiders. 

We live safe lives, for the most part, and few of us, in the Northern Hemisphere, have occasion to run into dangerous spiders.  Some of our fear is disgust.  Some is real because we may have had a traumatic incident with a spider, or watched a film where a spider caused a traumatic event.. or... well, you get what I am saying.  They can be creepy if they are on me, but over there -----> they are fine.  Some people have forgotten why they are afraid of spiders, what event caused it, but the fear persists  and the creepiness sustains itself because one might land on us and that is beyond creepy. For most of us, fear of spiders is irrational but spiders are, in some areas, shrouded in mystery, and we have been taught that spider webs in houses equals dirtiness.  And since it is a fear to commercialize, Halloween became the time and place to enhance it all.  We were seduced into the occult of evil spiders we should fear.

Someone, early on in the world, when they made up the cult of witches, also decided that, if there were spiders, there were witches.  It waw believed witches used spider's web(s) in their spells.  Now, I do not know if generations of women, up to today, built on that belief and started using spider webs, but this is where it came from in medieval times.  I was taught to think if you had spider webs, you were not a clean housekeeper...so I seek out spider webs monthly.  See, haunted houses have spider webs because no one lives in them.. but spiders.  Spiders like dark places... for the most part.  And, First Nations have stories of Spider Woman as Creator and the teller of ancient stories.  I like this idea and make singing hoops and dream catchers to honor Spider Woman.

I do not know about you, but I will not kill spiders because it might rain.  And, someone must have been killing a lot of spiders because it has rained here for 17 days off and on.  And, on these rainy Autumn days, when there is fog in the mornings, the webs outside are simply stunning...

Challenge:  Do an art journal page with a spider's web on it.  I made my spider's web with a glue gun... easy peasy and I had some little spiders left from a Halloween bingo last year.

©Carol Desjarlais 10. 3.19

Haunted Houses

"Houses are not haunted. We are haunted, and regardless of the architecture with which we surround ourselves, our ghosts stay with us until we ourselves are ghosts." - Dean Koontz

All of us grew up, I am pretty sure, with the idea of a house or area being haunted.  That we believe in haunting at all begins from when the first person was on earth and realized most things were really scary; Mother Nature was scary. Being fearful kept our ancestors alive.  Now, we enjoy being frightened. Haunted houses are meant to scare you, they make money scaring you, and centuries of enjoyment from scary things exists even today because we make sure they do.

This is what a haunted house is supposed to do. They exist to scare people. The idea behind some of Halloween is the 1802 beginnings of Madame Tussand's wax sculptures of decapitated heads in her Gallery.  I might add that the very thought of death masks does not thrill me either.  Haunted houses hit America in 1915 fairs started having haunted houses (rooms/buildings) in 1915. It commercialized peoples fears.   During the Dirty Thirties, adults decided to dream up a night to distract kids who had little to do and time on their hands and, in order to stop kids from, say, turning over outside toilets (gulp, guilty!) was to set up a trick or treat idea where treats were a commodity and it paid the kids off so they did not do dirty tricks.  It became a tradition and kids are bought off.  Now, the trick and treating part is very sanitized with kids having their parties at clubs, schools, etc.  And treats have become healthier.  Kids will never know the taste of treats they do not get often and the candy apples, popcorn balls and homemade caramels and fudge. Why even have Halloween any more.. oh, yes, of course, it is big money!

 By 1937 mothers were encouraged, through advertizing, to design trails of terror. But it was Walt Disney that did more for Halloween than ever before.  His designers developed a series of Mystery houses and  Haunted Mansions in his films.  He was able to develop illusions that made the genre stick. 

I do not support the commercialized holiday, even now.  Yes, I went to the Pit and the Pendulum but after that,. I never ever went to, paid for, or supported anything spooky since I was a teenager, scared out of my wits.  I guess I had discovered life could be scary on its own.

Challenge:    Do a scene that portrays haunted houses.  These are awfully fun to do since the imagination can run wild. 

©Carol Desjarlais 10.2.19

Finding Ways To Enjoy October

“October, baptize me with leaves! Swaddle me in corduroy and nurse me with split pea soup. October, tuck tiny candy bars in my pockets and carve my smile into a thousand pumpkins. O autumn! O teakettle! O grace!”
― Rainbow Rowell , Attachments

October can be such a beautiful month.  It is beholden for me to find things I enjoy about October because, truly, I do not enjoy it;   my body, mind, heart and soul feel angst as Fall gives way to winter.  

Yes, I love that pumpkin pie and gingerbread and apple pies and pumpkin spice teas and almonds, those peanut butter kisses that you can hardly ever find any more, shows up this season.  I love memories of being a child and the funny things that happened when we were out Halloweening.  And, yes, of course, the first wet snowfall, muddy boots that weighed a ton by the end of night, and hot chocolate made with real milk some people served as a Halloween treat.  Yes, there were things I loved.

I do so love the dancing leaves and the stunning colors.  It appeases me some.  And I would not mind 'a little' cooler, but am sadly put upon when it is downright, turn on the fireplace, cold.  I am wont to buy a jersey-flannel long cuddly nightgown, which is not bad at all because it is soft and warm and warm and soft.  It is, of course, easier to get warm rather than get cool. 

I never let my little kids go Halloweening because I, so, did not believe in it and, because, in part, sugar made a couple of my kids seriously wild.  Instead, we spent the day making treats for elders, for shut-ins, and for those we knew who were lonely and not have friends or family nearby.  My little kids thought Halloween was a day of service instead of a day of gimmee.  

I do not like nor am even tempted, to watch horror shows.  Life has had its horrible way with me for real, why would I invite i?  I do not need to be traumatized.  It is even difficult to miss out on scary things because the internet, Netflix, TV, etal. has plenty to try to seduce you into liking it.  And, as far as costumes, I was a pumpkin at school, once, as a teacher, because we HAD to, and the green paint on my face, (and I was skinny) and I stuffed a school huge garbage bag full of newspapers and looked like a huge pumpkin and I fooled everyone.  And, I FELT like a fool. 
  
When I was a child, there were not so many easily offended people and so we were not sensitive to cultural costumes.  Yes, once I went dressed as a Hutterite.  And, ran wild as any other youth seemed to think was/is okay.  I am sure any of us dressed up then, in insensitive ways.  But, I never saw a sexy, or sexual imagery or acting, person ever until I was an adult.  And, I never ever did that.  

And, as for running wild, well, I grew up in a small LDS town so wild was nothing more than TPing or , rarely, egging people, places...oh, and we moved outside toilets a few feet back... too gross now to think of it, but we did. 

I never even remember carving a pumpkin or seeing one in our town.  I am not sure when it came to be a Halloween activity, but that was not something we did.  Later, with my own kids, I did buy a pumpkin or two and carved them myself because it was too dangerous for kids to carve off their fingers or each other.  Then, putting it outside, it withered, rotted and stunk, so it was not a Halloween tradition with me.  

But, I do love the warmer winter-type nights when the stars are their brightest and the flatter flags of leaves dancing to their doom.  

Challenge: Halloween Color Scheme: Create a page using Fall symbols.

©Carol Desjarlais 10.1.19