and the dead lived and the living slept

I made an offering of lovely things to the spirit of MLK yesterday, and also to the spirits of my ancestors. There must be as many of them as there are stars in the sky, all going back to a shared seed of humanity. If the tree of humanity can bear such fruit as our passionate tremulous song-voiced dreamer, then I dearly bless its germination.

Since January 1 I've found myself making altars in honor of the family dead, the ancestors I knew and the ones I didn't. This was an unplanned resolution. The altar-mandala-beauty offering, whatever you call it, does help me feel a connection. It seems to be a portal that breathes hidden life and warmth. I find myself in tears with a sense of the courageous and troubling and beautiful moments that shaped the lives of my forbears, all the jewels of their beings hidden from me but within my sense somehow. It is a place for weeping. I understand the Romans and their Lares a bit now, through a Talmudic story. As if to say, if as fetuses we were willed to forget the truth, then as the dead, we remember it again. So I pray for guidance for us living-sleeping from the endless dendrites of veiled but still warm beauty.