Daughter of Margaret

My name is Sarah, daughter of Margaret, daughter of Patricia, daughter of Margaret, daughter of mothers unknown. From womb to womb, this is the line of my mothers. From first breath to first breath, this is the line of my mothers.

My blood swims with the lives of Eatons and Riddles; Arts, Durants and Rustons and so many more… Berry, Bird, Burke, Clickner, DeLozier, Dutcher, Gillet, Ireland, Lenton, Lusk, Sears, Tenney, Whitcher, Wicker.

And those who have been forgotten.

I am the descendant of Mayflower carpenters, German bootleggers, Polish servants to royal houses, Irish settlers… People whose lives I can barely begin to imagine and whose stories flow dormant within me. All of them, names remembered and lost, written down and forgotten, were people who lived in their day just as I live in mine.

My ancestors were flesh and bone beings with hopes and dreams of their own. They each had their own idea of what the future would look like. Their feet blazed new trails in the world and wrote my history. My ancestors were people whose hopes lived on through their deeds, their dreams and their children.

My thread in the universal tapestry dies with me. Which is the realization that prompted me to wonder about the names on my family tree. The names I don’t know. The names we don’t remember because their branches didn’t bear fruit. My Grandfather had a brother who I never met. I received birthday cards every year from the mysterious Uncle Sonny who no one ever spoke of. When I mentioned his cards to my Grandpa, there was always a swing moment of silence marred by emotional swallowing. And then he would smile and say that was nice of him to remember us. I think about my Uncle Sonny, and how far he strayed, and how he died with estranged family ties. Who will be left to tell his story? When will he become one of the forgotten?

An uncomfortable truth lives within me. I do not want to be forgotten.

That is something that has come into clarity only recently in my practice, though I am sure the emotional need colored my early immersion in what it means to create my own spiritual path. I wanted to actively honor Those Who Came Before, who pushed forward through the decades and made my experience here possible. I want to bear witness to the effect our Ancestors have had on our world. I want to know their stories, their hopes and their dreams. I hope to bear witness to the impact your lives have in our world. In this purpose, my life is sacred. In this purpose, I give my breath weight.

The Yorubans who practice Ifa believe that you cannot know who you are if you do not know the stories of seven generations of your ancestors. I do not have that wealth of knowledge. But I do understand that it’s important to know where we came from, so that we can wholly see who we are, so that we can take the necessary steps forward on our path. The purpose of this blog will be to share the work I have done and continue to do, so that others may also strengthen their connections to their ancestors.

We are each trees of the earth, standing with our feet firmly planted on the bones of our ancestors, our heads and arms lifted up to the attend to the stars in the night sky… Those stars twinkle at us with light that is millions of years old. Every night that we gaze up at the ancestral energy of the larger cosmos, we become a stronger part of it.

We gaze up at the same stars our mothers did, and their mothers, and their mothers, and their mothers did.