The air here hums.
Okay… more than hums, it screams.
It is ALIVE with drums and horns, with the crackle of copal smoke and the laughter of voices sharing late night etoles on the corner below my window. Last night, I awoke in my bed at 10pm to a parade turning down my street and filling my room with music and cheer. Light streamed through my room as the celebration slowly snaked through the colorful streets. Though I braced, hoping my daughter would not wake, I also laughed… just how much joy can one city take… can one city make?!
And somehow…she slept.
The city of Oaxaca is wildly alive.
The skeletons on the streets multiply every day and trucks in the Zocalo overflow with marigolds. The whole city of Oaxaca feels alive in this thin space between worlds — where the living and the dead lean toward one another, laughing, singing, whispering, we will never forget you.
We’ve arrived after ten years of dreaming this into being. Ten years of lighting candles from afar, of imagining the sound of the brass bands, the shimmer of candlelight on the faces of strangers who feel, somehow, like kin. And now we are here.
We.
Here with a daughter I only dreamt about until now.
Here with her bright eyes, awe smeared across her face as we hold hands walking through the teeming cobblestone streets, each turn revealing another explosion of color — an altar spilling over with oranges and magentas, a group of women balancing baskets on her head next to two-story dancing puppets as another parade goes by.
How can something that brings so much life bring us so much fear.
Oh death…
The scent of roasted cacao and tamales thickens the air. Copal smoke catches the light like ghosts dancing. Somewhere down the street, a trumpet wails and is met by laughter so full it could waken and welcome the dead. And perhaps it does.
I watch my daughter take it all in. Her eyes, wide and unblinking. She pauses, pointing to a photograph on an altar — a man with kind eyes and a straw hat — like she knows him. She runs up to the paintings and sculptures of skeletons, looking to befriend (especially) the four-legged ones.
Death here, seems a thing of importance but not of dread. A thing of reverence but also of joy. A thing that brings people together, that village blossoms from. Death feels un-scary.
It is disorienting, to be among so many faces I do not know, and to feel at home. I can’t even say that what I experience here is grief, for it is so much more textured than that. It is so joyful, so alive, so full. Full of grief but also of joy and connection. A great celebration, a great excitement it is to welcome home our beloved dead… if even just for a short time.
And it’s true…I miss my PNW people — the small sudden village that gathers each autumn back home in Portland, where we cook ancestral dinners and tend our community altar under the tall Cedars. I miss the smell of wet earth, the fires burning cozy in our homes, and apple pie from the land cooling on the counter; the familiar ache of recognizing every face around the fire.
And yet, here too, I recognize something ancient — an echo of what we are all trying to remember. That death is not a thief but a companion. That love does not end, it transforms. That to grieve is to belong more deeply to life.
As night falls, we follow the music down to the zócalo, where hundreds dance — strangers, lovers, loners, elders, children. My daughter joins them, twirling in her white embroidered dress, her hair tangled with marigolds, fingers still flavored from dinner. For a moment, she forgets she is shy. For a moment, I forget I am just a visitor here.
I feel the pulse of drums beneath my ribs. Something loosens. Perhaps this is what the dead have been trying to tell us all along — that joy is the sound of remembrance. That joy is not the absence of grief but the integration of it. That joy is a responsibility of the living and a direct connection to the dead.
So tonight, I will light another candle. I will whisper the names of my ancestors into this Oaxacan night, adding their stories to the great chorus of the remembered.
And when we return home, I will carry this feeling with me — this knowing that across borders, languages, and lifetimes, we are remembering each other - and ourselves - alive.
May we learn from those who remember how to remember.
May our grief be known, and our joy expressed.
May we dance with the dead and call it love.
May every altar, in every home, remind us —
we belong to one another
.