As an alternative to the usual Halloween festivities in the city of Lagos, we chose to celebrate this night in a ritualized way, in a warm and intimate community environment.
It was a lively session, with particular invitations, throughout which the participants surrendered to the proposed journey. The itinerary included invocative meditations, alluding to pre-Christian ancestral practices, going from the Celtic peoples, Iberian Peninsula peoples, to imaginary scenarios indigenous to Central and South America.
We inhabit time by embodying rituals that were integrated in the cycles of nature, populated by symbols representing the elements of nature as well as of the human and cultural landscape of the Algarve and the transmutation that death and life carry.
We dressed ourselves in curiosity, mystery, authenticity and the arts to perform other perspectives about the death of those we love and about our own finitude.
Using specific strategies, we reflected on the historical reasons that explain our distance, as a society, from the subject of life/death, their rituals and how to rekindle them.
We sang, we gave thanks and we celebrated life!
At the end of the session, feelings of peace, serenity, freedom, joy, connection and reunion took over the group. Some people added new pieces to their grief puzzles, giving these more colour and presence.
Others demystified the conceptions linked to death, which tied them to sensations and emotions associated exclusively with sadness. They experienced the joy and candour of allowing themselves to relate with their dead loved ones from a new place, where the manifestation of rejoicing and laughter reveals that the relationship with those we love is a constant reconstruction in which the transition of death invites to new configurations.
In the beautiful words of António Barahona:
To start again is a verb that I conjugate
each day that dies and no longer returns,
while on the horizon there is twilight
and, after the bright night, the star of dawn.
For more information, regarding future events follow us at Casa Sakra.
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