The Bastard's Ball

Last week I talked about how to work with/around unwanted ancestors in your family tree. In a couple of weeks, I’m going to talk more about doing a bit of ancestor work at this time of year. But this week I offer another way to honor those unwanted ancestors without having to invite them into your personal space. I set it up before doing any kind of work, before calling on my full ancestral line. It’s simple and easy and it can take a myriad of forms.

I call it The Bastard’s Ball.

• Start with a space set away from where you intend to work. It can be a far corner of your yard, outside your home. It can be a small altar in the next room, a shelf beside the front door, or a folding table in a closet.
• As with most magic, intention is everything. It’s more important than props or aesthetics. If you set aside a space and you mean for it to be isolated, it is.
• First I light a candle. I call on the bastards, the drunks, the abusers, and the thieves. Some I call by name. But I concentrate on my family tree and I pull down those whose energy echo is dark and murky. And I light the candle, drawing them to it.
• Then you need to entice them to stay. I leave a variety of vices out, like alcohol, cigarettes, candy, coffee, pastries, etc. If you know of specific vices, use them. It will make the spell stronger.
• If you’re feeling especially uncertain, you can ring the small space with a circle of salt.
• It can be that simple. Walk away and leave them to play while you do your own work elsewhere.

After my ancestor ritual, meditation, or dumb supper, I put the lights out on the Bastard’s Ball. I send my guests on their way, hoping they enjoyed my hospitality. It’s a twofold intention. I do it as a means to keep their energy from my work, as well as offering them a thank you for being part of the reason I exist.

Not everyone can stand in the place I do, and that’s all right. I think it’s important to acknowledge the dark as well as the light. When I claim my ancestral lineage, I accept it all. Without even one of those links, I would not be here.

To see where you’re going

You must know who you are

To know you who you are

You must know where you’ve been

The story of your ancestors speaks through your blood

Light and dark

You choose the way forward

I Choose Peace

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the lives taken in Charleston, South Carolina. For the first time, I haven’t cared to read about the shooter’s background, whether or not he had a rough childhood, or how he learned to hate. I have no pithy statements. My heart is too heavy. Knowing his specific circumstances won’t revive the dead.

I thought differently a year ago when I decided to read Eliot Rodgers’ one-hundred and forty plus page manifesto last May. I’ll never get the hour of horror back as I kept saying, “This can’t get any worse.” What I took away from it was he was wrong in the head. Not mentally ill wrong. He believed he was entitled to certain things, simply because he was a man. And I really mean, entitled due to the fact that he was born. When he couldn’t have the things he felt entitled to (i.e. other people), he got angry and took it out on the world.

He didn’t know what he was doing was wrong because he didn’t believe it was wrong. And that’s what happened, again. So what do you do with people who don’t believe racism or sexism is wrong? What do we do with people who are angry at the world because it doesn’t exist the way they think it should? In my opinion, that is not mental illness.

I no longer believe knowing everything about what the shooter was thinking will give us any insight to help stop the next act of senseless violence. I am certain there will be more. [I agree with Jon Stewart, that this wasn’t a tragedy. This was an act of American terrorism.] There will always be circumstances and explanations. There will always be a “reason” that makes sense to no one but the murderer. And in the end, we will still be left with the loss and grief.

Nine precious lives were snuffed out, in their sacred space, in their temple. And that is where my heart is, with the loss of those lives and the realization that a twenty-one year old thought nothing of taking them. One young man stepped into his place in the world as an adult by taking nine lives. It boggles my brain, like I don’t even understand the words I’m writing out. They stretch out and twist in my gut and I am wary of others who display violent anger.

Anger isn’t a mental illness. Racism isn’t a mental illness. Excusing a murderer as mentally ill because they were angry is a disservice to the people who handle their anger every day. In our culture anger is easy, and we all work our way to the place of why we need to handle our own anger and stop making it anyone else’s problem.

I understand anger. I used to have an angry heart, like anger-ball, explodes-in-milliseconds heart. Beneath that I wanted peace, but I was so broken by my experiences in the world I thought it was impossible. I didn’t want to be angry. It was eating me up from the inside and it was infecting my relationships.

I had a small awareness that I was looking at the world and waiting for it to make itself better for me, so that my sensitive soul could fit in it. I didn’t realize that if I wanted the world to be a more peaceful place, I needed to feed it love, not fear. I needed to feed it peace, not hate. I needed to feed the world peace.

You can change your wiring. You can change your emotional responses to stimulation. It’s not easy but I’ve done it. The trick is you don’t let go of your anger and fill it with something else (like reparations or justice). It isn’t a give and take. You transform that anger into something new. You can’t expect to receive anything in the place of letting it go. You don’t let it go. You change it.

It doesn’t make being in the world-as-it-is easier, but the more I release my anger, the more I sink into our interconnectedness. The more I sink in, the more I see every life as the same, the more kindness I have for strangers. After all, if I want to live according to my beliefs, I have to accept that everyone else I see does, too. The only belief I think we must all share is that we cannot harm other living beings.

These shooters, these American terrorists, are disconnected from that web. They don’t see everyone as the same. They don’t give everyone the same worth. But we do. We can. And it starts with feeding the world our kindness, patience, and peaceful hearts, and allowing that to heal our angry, vengeful, anxious hearts, so that we may walk the earth leaving peace in our wake. Wakes ripple outward.

When faced with anger or love, I choose love. When faced with violence or peace, I choose peace. When faced with teachable moments, I speak up to diffuse angry moments before they can escalate.

I have had violence and rage directed at me. I do not want to be the cause of that pain and grief in anyone else’s life. When I anger, I feed it down to the earth through the soles of my feet, not out into the air with my words and breath.

“Sometimes we wait for others and think that Martin Luther should raise among us and Nelson Mandela should raise among us and speak up for us but we never realize that they are normal humans like us and if we step forward we can also bring change just like them.”  ~Malala Yousafzai, 17, Nobel Peace Prize winner from Pakistan

Someday I Will Go to Europe

Someday I will go to Europe.

Many of my ancestors have walked these lands since the Mayflower landed. But before that, and after, they came from foreign, European lands. The cities in America, even the oldest ones, are young in comparison to their ancestral cousins on the other continents. At a recent retreat, we met a wonderful woman from Spain who attended our Ancestor Devotional. She said that her mother’s family has lived in the same city for one thousand years. One thousand years!

I almost can’t even imagine that… But I have experienced the layers of time overlap in a place that has held many generations. I have gotten a taste of that magic.

Years ago I visited Philadelphia for the first time, a city rich with history. Taking a night stroll through old city, I stopped in the middle of a cobblestone street. It felt as if I had crossed time zones. Only instead of hours of difference, it was decades. I opened myself to the moment.

While the street I walked down was dark and silent, I heard horses clip-clopping past me, as well as old cars chugging along. I heard three different kinds of music playing at the same time. Someone on the street was playing classical piano, someone strummed a guitar on a stoop, and somewhere a small jazz band performed a set. I couldn’t see any of them but I could hear them.

Time stitched itself together and I could feel in my flesh and bones, how many generations of people walked those streets. I could fell all those who have laid down their energy, and anchored it into the earth there. I dream about the lands where my ancestors layered their lives into the earth.

I keep a list of the countries, cities, and towns known to me. If I could feel the intersections and layers of time in a young place like Philadelphia, what could I tap into in England, France, Ireland, Scotland, Poland, Germany, Wales, the Netherlands, and Spain?

Someday I will find out. Someday I will follow the threads of those whose journey ended in me. I will go to Europe and find the spaces where their journeys began.

Prayers for Nepal

"Prayer Flags" by Michael Day

On April 25^th, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake devastated Nepal. No matter where you were, it dominated the news. It was hard not to see the photos of the destruction, of the people living in the streets and open spaces, of the bodies buried in rubble. Over 8,000 people died as a result of that quake, and another 17,000 people were injured.

Last Tuesday morning, on May 12^th, a second earthquake, magnitude 7.3, struck outside Kathmandu again, this time to the east. From reports, many people had yet to return to living indoors. As of this past Sunday a total of 8,583 deaths occurred between the two quakes.

I cannot imagine having such fear of the earth beneath my feet, like the people of Nepal. Or of the ocean along the shore, like those who survived the tsunami that hit Japan in 2011; we’re still watching them try to rebuild. And what of the thousands who were recently evacuated from their homes near the volcano in Chile? Can you imagine watching lighting, lava, and ash blow into the sky. Your sky? Into the air you breathe?

Nature is full of awe, and in its stretching and pulling we are shown that we are no more important to the planet than the ants seem to us; little buggery nuisances that get into our pantry and eat our food. As I pack for a yearly excursion to the mountains, I wonder what would happen if they woke briefly and turned in their slumber? How would we, who build on earth with the expectation that the stone will support us, feel if it were to suddenly shift beneath us?

And I pray for those people, for the lives lost and for the ones surviving those losses. I pray for the ones still living in tents in the streets, wondering when the next will come. I pray for the worried villagers whose folklore says that once the mountain wakes, it will never quiet.

I am not saying that prayer will help those who lost homes and families and ways of living in the earthquake. It won’t help them recover. It won’t bring the dead to life. But it does something else, energetically in the world. It builds compassion.

When we pray, we put ourselves in the shoes of those who are suffering. From the purist place of our spirit, we ask the universe, through whatever divinity we ascribe to (which all pool into the same energy source when you go back far enough, just like genealogy):

May the hands of those who can save the injured be steady and strong.

May the hands of those searching for life and death find purchase in the rubble.

May those hearts that have felt loss and terror be healed.

May those hearts, displaced and fearful, know comfort in such dark times.

May those in power with the ability to aid the people in need do so.

May this be a time of magic, miracles, love, and hope.

Whether or not we choose to find compassion for those in need, it should not matter who it is happening to or where they are in reference to ourselves. We are all dependent on this earth to support and sustain us. What happens to one of us could happen to any of us. To all of us. So we reach out to those in need because we would hope someone would do the same for us.

We create a world of compassion and brotherhood in these actions and it ripples out. Kindness is remembered. When we engage in acts of kindness, we build up the web of compassion, an energy source that others can tap into during dark times. We add our light to hope, and the world is better for it. 

Ancestor Reverence and Ancestor Work

Part of the path I walk involves a deeper sense of metaphysical belief and requires more understanding of what we call super-natural, as well as a strong sense of communion with the natural world. It’s important to me that people find their own way towards creating a personal relationship with their ancestral spirits, to help process and find peace with the death that affects their lives. I have taken my reverence a step forward and use my ancestral line as an energy source for my work. I will often differentiate between reverence and work when I speak about my practice.

Ancestor reverence is accessible to everyone. I also call it honoring, worshipping, and remembering. At its simplest, ancestor reverence is the act and mindset of honoring your family lines, known and unknown to you. It’s the act of remembering them as living and breathing people who paved the way for you to be. It’s the way of thinking of them as a greater whole, one entity that is Those Who Came Before.

This is something that everyone can include in their lives, regardless of religious beliefs. In this model of thought, the dead are dead, and what you are remembering is a name and the history of the life beneath it. That has tremendous worth in itself, and is a way of finding connection in uncertain and unsettling times. It’s also a way of teaching your children their history, of teaching them that same connection; that we are each wonderful and unique, but not more so than the ones who bore us.

To take that next step into ancestor work, you must be open to the possibility that there is more to the world than we comprehend. You must be open to believing with certainty that the world is more wonder full than our brains can comprehend, and while science will come close, it will never be able to explain that wonder away. You must be willing to step into the wonder and be a child again, releasing your ego to learn a new world.

My work involves developing a personal relationship with what happens in death and the kinds of transformation that take place during and after. I understand spirit as passing on from its physical body and reincarnating into… something other. I see spirit as a residual echo of the living, in the way that we know the star light we see in the night sky flickered in a past long gone. Both exist simultaneously.

That spirit reincarnates and becomes something new. And it evolves and becomes something better. And it transforms and becomes something inconceivable. And it retains a familiar shape of the body it wore. All things are true. Some residues still ring strongly with persona, so much so that you can call on individual or specific spirits to work with- ones you have connections to. I do that.

What I mostly do involves energy work and energy manipulation. I break up elemental energies into qualities of earth, air, water, fire, and ancestor, striving for some kind of equilibrium between them, depending on what the moment calls for. If I’m feeling pulled in all directions, I seek some earthy grounding. If my emotions overwhelm me, I let them flow like water so they might pass through me. If I’m stuck on a problem and a solution seems impossible, I open the top of my thoughts and let them float free through the air until they arrange themselves in a different order. And if a family member is ill, I tap into the ancestor energy so that they might watch over them, and aid their healing.

Energy is energy. I break them up into elementals as a tool to help my brain understand them and to help me understand the qualities of their differences. The important part is recognizing that they are different aspects of the same thing. Energy is life, is deity, is divinity, is interconnectedness, is one, is everything. Everything that grows and decays is connected, depending on each other for the space to grow and flourish.

There is a unity and sameness to all living things. It’s why bigotry seems stupid. We fight between gender and race, trying to hold one up against another, when we are all humans. We are all humans who are no less entitled to live on this world than the elephants and the whales and the crows and the goldfish and the honeybee.

 [Revamped draft of an article originally published March 30, 2011.]

Malidoma Patrice Somé, Supernatural is Natural

“Earth is where we belong. She is our home. She gives us sustenance unconditionally and makes it possible for us to feel connected. Earth is where we go to and where we come from. The nourishment and support of the Earth Mother grants us the feeling of belonging that allows us to expand and grow because we feel strong.”

Western civilization superimposes us onto the natural world, as if we are above it, and it is below us. As if it is nothing more than a storage shed for resources at our disposal, and not a living, breathing world we are a part of. We see this viewpoint in the entitled way we dam rivers and when we clear-cut forest dwellers of their habitat, of their trees. We even blow holes in hills and mountainsides to make a way for ourselves and we call it progress.

Along the way, we stopped living with the earth and began to try to tame it to suit our needs and comforts. It is saddening. Yet there are people who walk with feet in both worlds, that of our constructed culture and that of the world we wandered far from as generations of nomads settled into cities. And these people are using their gifts to serve as guides, and awaken our perception to the larger truth.

“Human beings are most of the time unaware of the extent and intimacy of their connection with nature, especially the world of plants and animals. We act as if we are the proud and dominant other and thus can and should manifest our superiority in ways that are rather careless and devastating to nature. Indeed, trees live in harmony, and we create dissonance. Yet we want to live in a world where everyone and everything is harmoniously linked to everyone and everything.”

Malidoma Patrice Somé is one of these remarkable people, straddling both worlds and successfully acting as a mediator and translator between them. He was born to the Dagara people of Burkina Faso in West Africa. Malidoma was kidnapped from his village at the age of four by a Jesuit Missionary who had befriended his father. He was placed in a boarding school, on path to become a priest, to be used as a tool to convert the African people to the white man’s God.

When he was twenty he managed to run away and walked the entire distance back to his village, where he found himself home once more, and yet a stranger among strangers. He had been gone for fifteen years and could not even recall enough of the Dagara language to communicate with his mother and sister.

His Western world upbringing left him inadequately prepared for his return. He and his people did not understand each other. Well past the age of manhood in his village, Malidoma was required to undergo a month-long rite of passage before he could fully become a member of his community.

He had to first unlearn what he had learned.

His trials are compellingly written in his book Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman. In its pages he describes one of his first breakthroughs, where he was bidden to sit and watch a tree. He was aware of his own head processing through wondering what the purpose was, of wondering what the correct thing to do was. There had to be more to it than staring at a tree, right? Then he became angry and felt like he was being made to go through a public humiliation, as he was sat in the center of the village. Passed that anger, he broke open and began to speak to the tree. It became a sort of confessional where he poured his feelings of frustration out and apologized to the tree.

What he experienced next was a transformation of the tree into what he calls the green lady- a green human form spirit who felt like love and home. He ran sobbing to the spirit and she held him in her arms. When he came out of the moment and was hugging the tree he immediately tried to blame the vision on the heat and lack of food- which is the Western way of thought- except that the elders of his tribe who were watching had seen the same green lady in the moment he did. How could he explain that?  

“My experience with the green lady raises an important issue, namely, the true identity of the elements of nature. What if they are not inanimate objects, as people in the West have been taught to believe, but rather living presences? How would we need to change if we granted to a tree the kind of life that we usually reserve for so-called intelligent beings? If you peek long enough into the natural world - the trees, the hills, the rivers, and all natural things - you start to realize that their spirit is much bigger than what can be seen, that the visible part of nature is only a small portion of what nature is.”

            What we would call the supernatural, his people call the natural world. They have no word for supernatural. The closest word they have is Yielbongura, “the thing that knowledge can’t eat.” Western thought may have decided that it is separate but that doesn’t make it a truth for the larger world.

In fact, that way of thinking will only serve to separate us more from that which we all want most- to rediscover the sensation of wholeness. Spirit is real. What is spiritual can be explained by science, but not explained away. After all, you can put blinders on a horse so that he cannot see the distractions around him, but the distractions around him are still occurring. He does not see, yet they happen.

That’s true of the fullness of the world around us. Either we are open to it or we are closed to it, but it does not stop existing if we do not believe in it. If we choose to, we can do work to open ourselves up to the spirit world, the larger world, the greater web around us. We can see and hear with more senses than we use. People who have had these experiences, as Malidoma had, often decide in the aftermath that they must have hallucinated. So much of the spirit world is ephemeral that it takes a certain amount of faith and openness to make the connection.

"You can acquire what is usually seen as magical. When in fact the more you dwell in this kind of world, the less you see it as magical because it is the familiar, it is the kind of thing that every human being is entitled to and it is the kind of thing that is at the core of human nature, the search, the intense search for the magical." 

            I can’t recommend Somé’s writings enough. He has two other books The Healing Wisdom of Africa, which chronicles his life after the awakening, and Ritual: Power, Healing and Community. The story of his life’s journey and the purpose his Ancestors gifted him with is laced and woven with a breathtaking, wondrous, and seemingly simplistic awareness of the larger world that stretches beyond our everyday perception. Malidoma’s words act as a gateway, a doorway that the reader can grasp, an opening they can step through.

“Indigenous people see the physical world as a reflection of a more complex, subtler, and more lasting yet invisible entity called energy. It is as if we are the shadows of a vibrant and endlessly resourceful intelligence dynamically involved in a process of continuous self-creation. Nothing happens here that did not begin in that unseen world. If something in the physical world is experiencing instability, it is because its energetic correspondent has been experiencing instability. The indigenous understanding is that the material and physical problems that a person encounters are important only because they are an energetic message sent to the visible world. ... Ritual is the principal tool used to approach that unseen world in a way that will rearrange the structure of the physical world and bring about material transformation.”

            [This article was originally published July 20, 2011.]

Wearing Hattie’s Wedding Shawl

I have this wedding portrait of my 2x Great-grandparents Royal Levant Eaton and Hattie Eva Smith. In it, Hattie is wearing a lace wedding shawl, a piece of our family history I have recently held in my hands. With the exception of one small spot of water damage or rust, it is in perfect condition. There is no wearing of the lace, no pulling of the design. It’s exquisite.

Items we use become imbued with our energy. It’s why antiques are such a draw for people. They’re full of history and memory. I believe our pull to certain items comes not from its aesthetic beauty, but from how it makes us feel, whether or not its energy resonates with ours.

I draped the shawl over my shoulders to better catch a photo of it. I wondered how many people had worn it. What was its history? I knew that my great-great-grandma wore it on her wedding day. Was she the only one? Was it new to her? Was it a gift passed down from another family member?

Closing my eyes, I thought back to August 5, 1903, the day she wore it one hundred and eleven years ago. My great-great grandparents married in Eagle Harbor, Orleans County, NY, a small village along the Erie Canal. How did she feel when the wedding shawl clasp closed?

Her young life was shadowed with death. Her mother died a month after she was born, from anemia, a complication due to childbirth. Hattie Eva Smith was named for her mother, Hattie Eva Dutcher. Then when she was fourteen, her father died. Hattie and her older sister Sophia (a spitting image of their mother, by the way) went to live with their grandparents Reuben Feagles Dutcher and Eliza Marsh Bird.

Hattie on the left, Sophia on the right

By all accounts, the elderly couple doted on their granddaughters. I have a letter from Reuben’s sister Elizabeth to their brother Merritt, where she talks about the girls visiting- that Sophia was a teacher two miles away and Hattie was away at school in Albion. “It seems to me there never was a more faithful man to the good of his family than Reuben has been. His children and his childrens children are so much to him. The two little grandchildren are certainly beautiful in looks and manner.”

I also knew what Hattie Eva couldn’t know that day in Eagle Harbor. I knew that five years later her beloved grandfather would die, and only twenty-three years after that, her husband would succumb to wounds he sustained in a prison riot, due to his occupation as a guard.

All of these thoughts swirled in my head as I stood in my childhood home, wearing her shawl. Whether I could feel it or not, an echo of her was attached to the lacework. I know this is true. Due to my ancestral meditations, I was able to reach back in time and share in a moment I couldn’t otherwise know.

Sacred Vows

The first step I took in starting my work was to create an altar in my home as a sacred space for my ancestors. To affirm my dedication to them, I chose to make a sacred vow in their name. It was just between me and them, something I wanted to do to prove my intent.

Making the vow was not as important as keeping it. To break a vow taken in someone else’s name is kind of like swearing on your mother’s grave, when you know full well your mother is alive and taking breath. It’s a lie. Lies have no place in what is sacred. Words matter.

Breaking an oath means that you do not have the discipline or willpower to walk your talk. I’m not talking about making a promise to someone and then discovering that you can’t see it through. We’re all human. I’m talking about a sacred vow. I’m talking about something you know you can do that you firm you’ll see through, and not rising to meet it.

We can speak all the words we wish to speak. But at the end of the day, our character is defined by our actions. Not our promises.

A few years ago, when I read the book The Four Agreements by author Miguel Angel Ruiz, one of the things I took away from it was the agreement to “be impeccable with your word.” Maybe it’s a romantic ideal but, it seems to me that once upon a time, people were shocked to discover someone was a liar. Which leads me to believe that it was expected that people’s word was true, that their word was their bond. Their reputation was staked on it. To lie or break your word could ruin you.

That’s not true anymore. We assume that people could be lying, that stranger’s words could be untrue. Even in kindness, we lie to be polite, to spare feelings. We know that just because somebody says they’ll do something, it doesn’t mean they will.

I try hard, and sometimes fail, to mean every word I say. I try not to fall into speaking from a place of fear and anger and releasing words I won’t mean later. I try not to just say things to fill silences. Silences are beautiful. Silences shared are more beautiful yet.

There is a clarity that comes from being able to stand behind every word you say. All of your words have more shape. More volume behind them. I no longer speak in smoke and whispers. Now I speak from my truth.

Words are magic. The throat chakra, Vishuddha, is the energy center that sits at your throat and voice box. As your kundalini energy rises through your chakras, it passes through Vishuddha and opens to Ajna, the third eye and deeper consciousness. The throat is the gateway to a spiritual level. To speak out loud a sacred vow is a strong form of magic.

In making a vow to my ancestors, I wanted to challenge myself. I wanted to show my ancestors that, known or unknown to me, they were important. I didn’t just want to open a doorway to them, I wanted to build a bridge. My initial oath was simple and revolved around building that bridge and my awareness of them. I vowed to light a candle on my ancestor altar at the same time, every day, for seven weeks.

The ritual I created was straightforward. I called to my ancestors, reading the names I had. I poured oblations to them, offering them remembered nourishment. I lit a candle to help them find their way to me. And then I spoke my vow. I promised to light that candle every night for seven weeks, as seven is a magical number for me. I promised to perform my little ritual every night at 7 o’clock for seven weeks.

It is the speaking of words out loud that casts the spell around the oath. We should never say something if we do not mean to do it. The strength I found from seeing my commitment through was enormous. It became the firm footing I needed to begin my work. I always wondered at the images from history that show men making oaths on the blade of a sword. As a kid I thought the sword was the punishment for a broken vow, but now I understand the metaphor better. Where personal growth is concerned, the only one truly hurt by breaking a sacred oath is yourself.

All the Ancestral Roads

Where I live, the trees are bursting with fire, revealing the true carotenoid and anthocyanin color of their leaves as the more dominant chlorophyll fades away. It’s a reminder that life has cycles. Even though the trees don’t die, they shed their leaves every autumn, to be reborn in the buds of spring. This is the time of year when we open to the ancestral energies around us, in preparation of honoring their memories at Samhain. But the ancestors around us are more than just the names and dates of those who lived so that we might be born.

Open to the Recent Dead, to those who have ceased breath since last Samhain. Open to the loss of the newly dead. Remember their lives and the affection you shared. Remember their struggles and their loves. Sing songs of them and make offerings to them, even as the grief wells raw within you. Wish them peace and safe passage as the veil opens to welcome them to what comes next. Take in breath and blaze through your days. Make memories in honor of those who no longer will.

What is remembered, lives. What is remembered never truly dies.

Open to your Beloved Dead, to those you have known in your lifetime who have crossed over. Remember the years of love. Remember the touch of hands and the sound of voices. Remember the lessons learned and the laughter. Remember the false days as well as the true ones, for no one is perfect. We do better to honor them by remembering them whole, flaws and all. Remember who they were to you, and what part they played in the journey of your life. Remember paths diverged and merged. Remember the sorrow of loss beneath the joys of having known them. Remember to let the joy outshine the grief. Remember those you loved who snuffed out their own light. Remember those who had no choice in when death took them. Remember those who suffered and remember their lives beyond mother, father, sibling, friend, husband, wife, grandparent. Remember the stories they told. Remember who they were.

What is remembered, lives. What is remembered never truly dies.

Open to the ancestors of your bloodline, to Those Who Came Before. Open to the mothers birthing mothers and the fathers seeding fathers. Open to the ripple of life flowing backward in time, beyond memory and language, beyond names and civilization. Those of us taking breath, our ancestors were among those who discovered fire and moved from caves to build shelters. Honor the lines of mothers and fathers that trail behind you, supporting you. Remember those, without whom, you could not exist.

What is remembered, lives. What is remembered never truly dies.

In some of our lives we are gifted with family we create. Open to your adopted ancestors, to the bloodlines of those who, in this life, claim you as one of their own. To those who claim you as daughter and son, brother and sister, grandchild… to them you are blood and that love opens a door for you to claim the energy of their lineage. Remember the ancestors of your family, both biological and built.

What is remembered, lives. What is remembered never truly dies.

Open to the ancestors of your spirituality, to all the lips that have uttered the prayers you utter. To the hands that have worked the magic and faith you do. Remember those who braved a path and questioned what was known, who built the foundation for your practice. Remember those whose hearts were pulled in the same direction of belief. Remember those who died because of their faith. Remember all those who found the courage to belief what they did because it felt right.

What is remembered, lives. What is remembered never truly dies.

Open to the ancestors of the land you live on, the city you live in, the county you reside in. Open to the energy of those who toiled and built and settled. Open to the energy of all those who lived in your home before you. Who farmed the land beneath you before it was a home. Who hunted the land beneath you before it was cleared for farmland. Remember those who saw promise in a wild landscape. Remember the wild that came before us.

What is remembered, lives. What is remembered never truly dies.

Open to the ancestors of the lands your bloodline came from. Open to the energy paths of the migration trails the feet of Those Who Came Before tread. Follow the tendrils back across the waters, across the mountains, across the valleys and deserts. Those lives, those carbon footprints are energy sources for you. Remember that all our generations trace back to a single ancestor. Remember that all are relations. We are all brothers, sisters, and cousins. We are all streamers rolling out from that first big human bang. You are my cousin. Remember that.

What is remembered, lives. What is remembered never truly dies.

Working with My Ancestors

I have the names of my mother’s mothers and my father’s fathers, some skipping back a few generations and others stretching out into the early days of the Current Era. Like a personal totemic medicine wheel, there are four directions of ancestors that converge within me, in the lines of Art, Riddle, Ruston, and Eaton. They are the foundation I stand on, they and all of their ancestors standing behind them. I am the crest of the tip of a wave that has been travelling through centuries, to be here now.

This ancestor work is both firm and fluid. What was cannot change but what will be is always in motion. I have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, 32 great-great-great-grandparents, 64 great-great-great-great-grandparents, 128 great-great-great-great-great-grandparents, etc. Even without names, I know that they lived or I wouldn’t be here. I know they took breath and bore children or I wouldn’t exist.

We don’t completely understand the nature of the natural world; the ebb and flow of symbiotic life, the repeating patterns in how things grow. We’ve broken down the science and we can explain the architecture and form of it, but we understand it as much as we understand what pins a soul into the human body. In our world, we accept that the soul exists. We feel it when we are moved, when our emotions are stirred, like tides answering to the moon’s gravity.

Our souls exist. When a person dies, it leaves their body. To us forest walkers, when a favorite tree dies, we feel the loss of it’s spirit. Where does it go? No one knows what that energy source becomes. But energy is energy and maybe it all just becomes that. So when we enter the natural world and touch the earth and hug the trees, we sense that larger spirit of life, that oneness of everything that has ever lived.

We may birth forth from our mother’s wombs, freed from the cord that connects us, but our connection to the earth beneath us is eternal. Our shared ancestor crawled out from the primordial depths to evolve into bipedal animals. The earth itself is our mother. Our heart beats in tandem with her. Our blood pulses in rhythm to her tides. The waters of our body feel the same pull that she does to the moon.

There are many elemental forces. The basics of earth, air, fire, water, and the spirit beings that crossover and inhabit these entities in our world. All the living things like plants, trees, animals are useful sources of energy. They are all product of our living ancestor. We’re not meant to drain these sources of their life force. That is never the goal with true magic. But we connect into it, we open a doorway of understanding and we try to learn from each other. We seek not to conquer but to become one with. It is a mutual exchange of energy. A boost.

The ancestral energy is no different to me. It is the timeless echo of every living being whose footsteps once walked this earth, whose lungs drew breath and exhaled carbon dioxide into our atmosphere. For me, the ancestral energy is just as tangible as the earth energy, as if passages of time were layered atop each other like floors in a skyscraper and I am staring down from an aerial view at each of them at once. All life exists in that moment, beneath me, layers of sedimentary rock. When I connect into it, I can touch the still-living energy of those long dead. And in this work, time magnifies the stream, as well as diminishes. It magnifies the echo-of-life-that-was, so the dead feel part of your life still, and it diminishes our human grief at the loss of the physical presence. It’s why I differentiate between working with the Beloved Dead, those we knew in life, and the Ancestral Dead. I am walking with my ancestors and they are walking within me.

I don’t deify them. But I reach out into the energy around me, for there is some echo of their life that runs through the soil still. I can touch it. And certainly some of that energy touches me while I am at my work.

When my garden is less-than-thriving, I light candles on my ancestor altar. I make a petition to the centuries of farmers who worked the soil before me. I pull on that knowledge they held, swimming in my bloodstream, and will it into my fingertips. I make an offering to them from the first of the harvest in gratitude for their guidance in watching over my hands as they toiled, so that other life may be nourished in the reaping; not just my household.

When someone I love is giving birth, I light candles and ask for every woman before me who has pushed life out into the world to stand in that room and welcome the new life into the world. I ask them to watch over my family, and my nieces, as they grow and begin their own families. I remember the toil and struggle life is for everyone, and it humbles me.

When death comes to loved ones, I ask the Beloved Dead to stand with the family, to be of comfort to the bereaved and grieving. I ask the Ancestral Dead to open the way for the newly dead to cross over, and welcome them into the next stage of being.

When a new job is on the horizon, I ask for the support of all those who ventured into new territories, or changed careers in uncomfortable times. I remember them, whether I have names or not, and I know that I am hardly alone in the hope for good things to come my way.

And when times are hard, as times get, and I don’t know how they’ll get better, I pray to all of those who came before me and I beg them for strength. I pray to those who endured hard lives, who survived war and murder, to walk with me, to curb the feeling of loneliness that hardship can bring. I know I can do it, because they did. And I forgive myself in advance, in case I lose a little grace along the way.

To those who have gone before.

To those whose names live in our hearts and dance across our lips.

To those whose names have been forgotten, lost in the sea of time.

To those whose bones lay buried within and above the earth.

To those whose ashes have traveled on the winds.

We, the living, remember you.