gratefully we welcome your shrines....and with them your stories, your heart songs, poetry. these shrines arrived the opening of our dia de los muertos art exhibit, hand delivered by a loving husband after a long cross country drive. the back is a dazzling blue sky with soft childlike clouds and this poem......
the dead
the dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.
they watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down on a field or a couch, drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon, they think we are looking back at them.
which makes them lift their oars and fall silent and wait,
like parents, for us to close our eyes.
billy collins
the inside.... has the golden light of a room filled with the dreams of children who long for their mother. how can i know this? because lynne became my friend when we were young. and as we grew, our laughter, our long walks across the open palm of a sun kissed earth in search of wild flowers like shooting stars in spring, was permeated with the fragrance of orange blossoms. and the long branches of mystery that grew on the tree of desire to know her mother....over shadowed even the brightest of her days.
so when my friends, lynne and carol, heard about the shrine project they stole away on a sun bright patio to create their shrines, while above them, in glass bottom boats.....paddling quietly, gliding over them....their mothers....watched the golden heads of their precious daughters.
so when i peered inside the shrines of lynne and carol, friends so close to my heart, i was flooded with the intimacy and tenderness of their tributes, their longing, their ability to transform an empty box into a moment where they found their mothers, alive and well. where they confirmed the permanence of their journey through life together. where the blue sky sang out beyond the longest branches of mystery to reveal without uncertainty how much their mothers love them.
