This weekend, and Dia De Los Muertos in particular, is a time when the space between worlds is thin. The world of the material and immaterial, the world of the present, the past, and the future. While there are many tools that help us walk the bridge between these worlds, this weekend has a special focus on the importance of memory as one such tool.

Music, as an artistic and communicative medium, is directly tied to memory, and also deals with questions of past, present, and future. A rhythm or a melody only exists in relation to what comes before and after. If taken as discrete events, each individual sound becomes noise, but our memory is an arithmetic that turns these sounds into something greater than the sum of their parts, turning noise into music, communication, and narrative.

Music is reliant on memory because it is a time-based medium, and time, as a social construct, also cannot exist without memory. Entropy does, things change, evolve, and decay, but without memory we exist in a constant state of now without comparison to what has been or what will be. Said another way, music, time, and memory are inherently relational, and they share an interconnection between themselves even as they open the door to understanding our own interconnected life.

Traditionally, we think of memory as relating to the past, creating a sense of time that leads to the present moment, a one way arrow with our living experience at the tip. Memory, however, also extends into the future. Just as every note in a melody or harmonic progression is defined by both what comes before and after, we are made up of those who came before us; who we are now persists in the other direction as well, creating time for us in both directions, shifting our relationship to time from an arrow into something bi-directional, shaping our identity from both what has come and what will be.

This notion of future memory is directly related to the concept of the Long Body, an idea found across many indigenous cultures in the Southwest and beyond. The Long Body is a larger understanding of our individual identity, a greater sense of interconnected self that stretches not only from the future and the past but also laterally, embracing a relational understanding of everything around us, both human and otherwise, acknowledging a wide interwoven tapestry of being between all things.

Psychologist Dr. Stanley Krippner says “Memory is the ‘long body’ stretched out in time, into the future, as well as the past…Memory is personal and individual, but it is also transpersonal and provides an opening to transcendent experiences.”

Dia De Los Muertos is rooted in the same concept of the Long Body, using memory as a way of bringing our ancestors present with us today. On this holiday we dine with the dead and wear their faces as our own in traditional Calaveras, shining a light on our mortality and embracing our identity as a future ancestor to those who are yet to be. Dia De Los Muertos is a celebration of our ancestors, an acknowledgement of who we are as defined by what came before and what will come; our line of past ancestors is unfathomably long but will always be overshadowed by the line of future ancestors that expand beyond us, and we exist, right now, at the crux of both.

Tonight we celebrate our dance between past and future, a continuous flow that does not contain itself to the world of the living, but encompasses all aspects of reality: this world, that which has passed, and the next. This music is eternal and ongoing, and we tap into it for a moment, picking up the melody others have begun and adding to the harmony as we continue to build the foundation for those who will follow.