Some suggestions would be appreciated about starting to create an ancestors altar. I just have 2 pictures, but only names for the rest of ancestors... and of some of them I don't even have the name.
Thank you for this series of A Year of Living With the Dead. It would be wonderful if some more days would be added when possible 🌼
I was overly ambitious Imma...and my motto for this new moon, new year of the wood snake, is slow down and do less.....BUT let me answer. For most of time, people had NO photos, just names, and sometimes no names. We can use stones, feathers, sea glass, we can create our own oracle cards...the only limit is our imaginations. As to the ancestors you know many many more dead than you think you do....it's not just "relatives" but ANY SOUL you have known on the other side--pets, animals, neighbors, teachers, classmates, strangers who strangely touched your heart (otherwise known as saints), trees too....and they are all, every single soul, mothers on the other side and mothers love all the different names we give to them, whatever they are.
Sometimes I think that my whole apartment is an ancestor altar! They are everywhere. Their tools, their pictures, the glass bottles my grandmother used to feed Daddy as a baby, his camera that he carried always everywhere and took so many pictures of us camping and at cookouts (me always putting food in my mouth -when I berated him about that he just laughed), my mother’s favorite ceramic birds, the one picture (in a rustic frame of a bird) that was the one thing (so the family story goes) that my great, great grandmother was allowed to bring to this country from Ireland as a child . . . “Every picture has a story” is so true in my small space. I had to winnow down when I moved here, so everything here is, well, sacred to me. (The rest is in a storage unit that I hope is emptied before I die.)
I pray for and to my beloved dead daily, and want to know how to find out more about certain ones who respond by offering their names when that’s all I know about them, even with the help of Ancestry.
Dear Perdita,
Some suggestions would be appreciated about starting to create an ancestors altar. I just have 2 pictures, but only names for the rest of ancestors... and of some of them I don't even have the name.
Thank you for this series of A Year of Living With the Dead. It would be wonderful if some more days would be added when possible 🌼
I was overly ambitious Imma...and my motto for this new moon, new year of the wood snake, is slow down and do less.....BUT let me answer. For most of time, people had NO photos, just names, and sometimes no names. We can use stones, feathers, sea glass, we can create our own oracle cards...the only limit is our imaginations. As to the ancestors you know many many more dead than you think you do....it's not just "relatives" but ANY SOUL you have known on the other side--pets, animals, neighbors, teachers, classmates, strangers who strangely touched your heart (otherwise known as saints), trees too....and they are all, every single soul, mothers on the other side and mothers love all the different names we give to them, whatever they are.
Thank you dear Perdita 🐍❤️
Sometimes I think that my whole apartment is an ancestor altar! They are everywhere. Their tools, their pictures, the glass bottles my grandmother used to feed Daddy as a baby, his camera that he carried always everywhere and took so many pictures of us camping and at cookouts (me always putting food in my mouth -when I berated him about that he just laughed), my mother’s favorite ceramic birds, the one picture (in a rustic frame of a bird) that was the one thing (so the family story goes) that my great, great grandmother was allowed to bring to this country from Ireland as a child . . . “Every picture has a story” is so true in my small space. I had to winnow down when I moved here, so everything here is, well, sacred to me. (The rest is in a storage unit that I hope is emptied before I die.)
I pray for and to my beloved dead daily, and want to know how to find out more about certain ones who respond by offering their names when that’s all I know about them, even with the help of Ancestry.