Ancestor-Walking Beneath the Stars

Photo of the labyrinth I walked by Amy, 2015.

The best thing about a labyrinth is that it’s a physical meditation of your body in motion as you journey internally. You can walk the same labyrinth every day and feel like each day is a new journey. Sometimes I use the labyrinth as a means to petition my ancestors, and the seven-circuit labyrinth is my favorite.

I recently attended a candle-lit labyrinth on the beach, beneath a starry sky, organized by a woman I have had the great pleasure to study with and work with, Tracy Andryc, a Veriditas Certified Labyrinth Facilitator. I emerged from the woods after leading an Evening Devotional in the Ancestor Shrine and travelled across the sand, bringing my ancestors with me. I stepped into the labyrinth with a purpose.

As I put each foot in front of the other in the first circuit, I allowed myself to sink deeper into the earth. I sank down through the layer we trod on, through the layer the burrowing animals and insects live in, through the layer where the bones and ashes of our dead are buried. At this layer, I began to call to them.

In the second track I called to my grandparents, to the four who have crossed over, two of whom I knew, beloved to me. I thought they would live forever. Specifically, I called on my father’s father. I have one solid memory of him before his death when I was seven. And I called on my father’s mother, who died when he was a young boy. I focused my thoughts on them, and the other Rustons and Eatons in their lines.

In the third track I opened to my eight great-grandparents, to the Rustons and the Wickers, the Eatons and the Smiths.

Then I reached out to my sixteen 2x great-grandparents on the fourth turn, those who saw the Civil War and the beginning of the new century, the Rustons and Irelands, Wickers and Whitchers, the Eatons and Tenneys, Smiths and Dutchers.

In the shortest track of the labyrinth I called in my thirty-two 3x great-grandparents, those who forged new wildernesses in a newer land, the Rustons and Richardsons, Irelands and Lentons, Wickers and Lusks, Whitchers and Loziers, the Eatons and Treadwells, Tenneys and Targees, Smiths and Sears, Dutchers and Birds.

In the sixth circuit, I felt my sixty-four 4x great-grandparents join me, the spirit door wide open. The Rustons, Richardsons, Irelands, Lentons and Wilsons, Wickers and Morgans, Lusks, Whitchers/Whittiers and Kittredges, DeLoziers and Raymonds, the Eatons and Goulds, Treadwells, Tenneys, Targees and Smiths, Sears and Dubois’, Dutchers and Feagles, Birds and Marshes… and those lines unknown.

On the last path, I opened to all one-hundred and twenty-five of my 5x great-grandparents. The Rustons, Richardsons, Irelands, Lentons and Wrights, Wilsons, Wickers and Parkers, Morgans, Lusks, Whittiers and Dows, Kittredges and Baileys, DeLoziers and Erkells, Raymonds and Richmonds, the Eatons and Skiffs, Goulds and Arnolds, Treadwells, Tenneys and Darbys, Targees and Tourgees, Smiths, Sears and Andrews, Dubois’, Dutchers and Palmers, Feagles, Birds and Colemans, Marshes… and those lines unknown.

I was at a threshold, crossing over with two-hundred and fifty-four ancestors beside and behind me, the collective spirits of the first seven generations of my family tree. I made two hundred and fifty-five. I walked in ancestral fire. At the center there was a door. I am the door. In the center and called my father’s parents into the center of labyrinth.

They came immediately, young together in my vision, holding a baby made of light. I had meant to petition them to be with the family, to watch over my uncle, their son. I was prepared to sweat through the work and will them in from the ether, and I laughed to find them waiting. They were already holding him, watching over him, encircling him in love and healing light.

Ruth looked at me. Ruth, the grandmother whose line I take after genetically, the grandmother I never knew. Her face was warm and full of love and gratitude. Her eyes smiled. I saw myself, and my sister, my father and my uncle dancing in her face.

But when she smiled at me, I saw her. Only her. In the center of the labyrinth I felt the love of a woman I couldn’t know. Death is not the end.

Mark and Ruth smiled at me. The baby in their arms clapped his hands in something akin to original joy. I knew he was being watched over and I felt overwhelming peace and love fill my heart. I stepped out of the center and stared up into the sky, at the stars in the mountains, dusted across the black expanse and I cried, tears of joy and tears of release.

I walked out of the labyrinth lighter, crossing paths with other journeyers. With each step I took I thanked my ancestors for walking with me. And I know they are with me in all the moments of my life.

*

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”  ~Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

For more on Tracy Andryc's work, visit One Path Labyrinth here!

Those Who Walk Behind You

I do a lot of work with my ancestors, those known and unknown to me. Knowing genealogy is not a requirement to Ancestor work but it’s helpful as it allows you to go deeper. But there are numerical facts that will aid your perspective of where you stand in the ancestral tide. I like the water metaphor, of being an ocean that thousands of thousands of rivers flood into. Each one of those rivers branches backwards like a web, like neurons in your brain, like tree branches.

            The most comforting part of the work I do is that I am never alone. The blood of all of those people lives within me. There are untold number of Those Who Came Before me and if a single one of them was removed from the equation, I would not be here. Every life matters, remarkable or not.

Everyone has two parents. It’s science. It’s biology. Every generation you walk backwards, that number doubles. Actually writing the numbers out was staggering to conceive. So here’s how I see it. Even if you don’t know names and dates, you can know that, at the very least you have:

• 2 parents. I am still blessed to have both of mine.
• 4 grandparents. In life I knew three of my biological ones, of whom one is still living. I was also blessed to have three step-grandparents, one of whom is still living.
• 8 great-grandparents 1x. I knew one of mine for seventeen years and miss her still. I have all 8 names of these ancestors.
• 16 great-grandparents 2x. I know all 16 names.
• 32 great-grandparents 3x. I know 31 names.
• 64 great-grandparents 4x. I know 32 names.
• 128 great-grandparents 5x. I know 39 names.
• 256 great-grandparents 6x. I know 55 names.
• 512 great-grandparents 7x. I know 82 names.
• 1,024 great-grandparents 8x. I know 120 names. I have discovered that one of my fantastic New England friends and I share ancestors in Thomas Whittier (1620-1696) and Ruth Green (1626-1710) at this tier [Ruston line].
• 2,048 great-grandparents 9x. I know 143 names.
• 4,096 great-grandparents 10x. I know 153 names. I recently discovered that another friend and I share ancestors in Thomas Canfield (1623-1689) and Phoebe Crane (1626-1690) [Riddle line].
• 8,192 great-grandparents 11x. I know 153 names of my ancestors. My Mayflower ancestors are in this generation.
• 16,384 great-grandparents 12x. I know 105 names.
• 32,768 great-grandparents 13x. I know 69 names.
• 65,536 great-grandparents 14x. I know 39 ancestral names.
• 131,072 great-grandparents 15x. I know 35 ancestral names, including Frideswide Lovel, another favorite ancestress name.
• 262,144 great-grandparents 16x. I know 27 names. This generation was born in the early to mid 1400s.

In case you can’t add that fast, in eighteen generations, at this point, there are a total of 521,586 people walking behind you. Amazing, right? Now I’m going to blow your mind.

• 524,288 great-grandparents 17x. I know 23 names.
• 1,048,576 great-grandparents 18x. I know 25 names.
• 2,097,152 great-grandparents 19x. I know 30 names.
• 4,194,304 great-grandparents 20x. I know 33 names, including one of my favorites, Millicent Ravenscroft.
• 8,388,608 great-grandparents 21x. I know 32 ancestral names.
• 16,777,216 great-grandparents 22x. I know 30 ancestral names.
• 33,554,432 great-grandparents 23x. I know 27 ancestral names, including King Edward I “Longshanks”.
• 67,108,864 great-grandparents 24x. I know 26 ancestral names.
• 134,217,728 great-grandparents 25x. I know 27 ancestral names.
• 268,435,456 great-grandparents 26x. I know 28 ancestral names.
• 536,870,912 great-grandparents 27x. I know 30 ancestral names. It’s 1100 C.E.
• 1,073,741,824 great-grandparents 28x. I know 36 ancestral names, including King Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa, Byzantine Emperor Isaac II Angelos, King Henry I, and Otes the Goldsmith.

            Just thirty generations back, the fact that I have one billion ancestors means that there are so many people walking this planet right now that I am related to, that you are related to. There are strangers on this earth who exist because some couple married and had children centuries ago. The patterns of life are amazing.

            At a total of 30 generations back from you, there are 2,147,480,946 ancestors behind you. That’s 2.1 billion. That’s approximate, as in my own research I have found the same ancestors showing up between multiple family lines, at differing generations. That’s two billion names, with many of them repeating. It’s impossible to think that wouldn’t happen, the further back you go.

I even have names that stretch back further, even to my 51x great-grandparent, Arnoaldus, a Bishop of Metz and a Roman Senator, who died in 611 CE. To which I include my disclaimer of, I can’t prove any of it is true but all of us amateur genealogists rely on what has been documented and what other people decided was true until we can prove it’s wrong.  In theory, at some point, things have to change direction, funneling down to the original ancestors, where the streams merge into fewer and fewer of those who spawned the first children we are all descended from, but I don't know where that tipping point is.  

All of these people were necessary to the creation of you. All of those people, lived their lives as we do, wondering what it was for, questioning what would become of the choices they made and the lives they were living. But in doing this work, the answer becomes clear.

The answer was you.

The Origins of Deity

On a mountain top in the Berkshires last week, we were hit with a hail storm beyond belief. One minute, the air was damp and thick with humidity. We were sweaty and dreaming of showers when the rain started.

What happened next was amazing.

The hail began to fall, thudding against the roof of our three-sided rustic cabin. And then we were yelling to be heard over the sound of a million dime-sized pieces of ice falling like a sheet of winter onto our springtime. I can’t be sure how long the hail storm lasted. I was so awed by the magnitude of it as we sat in wonder and worry. It was easily thirty minutes, probably forty, and maybe more. Possibly still, it took less time than it seemed.

I have never seen hail last more than a minute or two. Time stilled as we watched it drop and crest like waves rolling off of the tarp, falling in mounds. My breath hung frosty in the air, which was cold. The ground was white. The animals of the woods were silent.

I had a moment of primal fear that the roof would not hold or that the worst was still to come beneath the pounding onslaught. I wondered what my ancestors might have thought the first time they experienced any weather of magnitude. Would they stare up and shout at the sky?

“Why are you doing this?!”

“What do you want from us?!”

Did they name the thing that accosted them? Did they pray to it and beg it to stop as if it had sentience? Did the forces of nature surprise and frighten them into unwanted submission? Did they make offerings to it of food, wealth, or dance? Did they mark the end of the storming with what they had been doing to entice it to their will? Did they ritualize that action as the thing that would end the storm, should it come again? Did they hold it as sacred?

Is that how deity began? By separating aspects of our natural world and giving them human faces? By not understanding that sometimes things happen. Not to us. We are part of what is happening. We are not the sun. We are not the center of our world. The earth is the center of our world, just as the sun is the center of the earth’s world. We are the current of time flowing over the earth. We will come and go as deities have come and go within our cultures.

I think about our ancestors and how the way they lived and their spiritual beliefs evolved over time. In my personal practice, much of my discovery has come from moments of need, of reaching out, of reading patterns in the cause and effect.

I sat in awe of the hail, of the forces of nature that came upon us suddenly in a storm of thunder and lightning. I was humbled by my unimportance beneath the storm. I thought of the things that make me fearful, of the shadows that loom over my head.

We survived the hail, and we rebuilt what it destroyed. In these rites of passage, we each hit our walls and we make choices. We survived the unending days of cold sleeting rain that followed. We gathered together and found laughter and joy in the struggle.

It’s like Brigadoon, I thought, slipping into the mist as winter settled over the mountain. I dreamt of Frost Giants and wooden halls thick with fire and warm drink. I dreamt of my ancestors from the frozen Northlands. And we all carried on, with one eye on the sky above us, lest it open itself again.

The German Guy

A photo by Thamizhpparithi Maari

Nine years ago, I began a journey of meditation and trance to learn how to connect to the ancestral bloodstream within me. I believe in genetic memory, in the echoes of the patterns of living we have built generation after generation. I believe you can tap into that and touch it, for I have.

Everything in life is ebb and flow. In and out, up and down, left and right, forwards and backwards. The most helpful tool in connecting to this energy for me was the labyrinth, followed closely by the spiral shell of the ammonite. Knowledge lives at the dark center of each. In order to attain it you have to go in. And you have to go furthest into the darkness in order to get out. That pattern is also true in life; in order to get past something, you have to push through it.

Though it took me years to perfect the application of the meditation, the form of it is simple enough. Meditate on the blood, flowing through your veins. Trace it’s route through your body as you breathe in and out. Sink into that rhythm. Follow the blood back to your parents’ blood, to their parents’ blood, which is where yours came from. Watch as the bloodstream divides. Follow the branches of blood backwards like waves, rippling away from shore, into the depths of generations. Each layer multiplies. Known or unknown, there are always two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. Lose yourself in the black inky depths of the ancestral ocean. And open. This blood meditation is one way to connect to the taproot of our ancestors in this physical lifetime.

When I was better practiced at my meditation, I received a visual that stayed with me long after. I saw a man with dark curly hair, stepping out of a large forest with four or five handmade brooms slung over his shoulders. He was wearing a simple shirt and loose pants with boots on his feet, all of an indeterminate time period. He was leaning against a rough lumber fence but he looked at me, looked me in the eye. The sensation that only happens in the physical world was there. He was looking at me.

I began to meditate at night on that image, willing it to me, calling him back. I opened myself up to receive any message he had to share, but what I got were more brief flashes of images that meant nothing to me. Eventually, I started to feel a presence in the house that brought with it the sweet smell of pipe smoke. In my gut, I knew it was him. Whether he was an actual ancestor, or a metaphor for that cultural bloodline, I didn’t know, but I started paying attention.

I thought that the male spirit I was entertaining was Polish or German, both of which I know are heritages that live in my blood. Later, when he spoke in my journeys, it was German, and we found ourselves at an impasse. I had sung enough songs in German to recognize a few words but that was the extent of my knowledge. Several of my houseguests eventually experienced physical contact with the spirit, accompanied by the smell of sweet pipe smoke and I used to joke that he must have thought I was dense, requiring him to seek help in getting my attention. We all called him The German Guy.

On a whim, at a wedding rehearsal party, I asked my mom what she knew about our German heritage. And my mom told me stories about her bootlegging German grandfather, where his house was when they went to visit him and what it looked like. She even remembered the song he used to sing to the sound of his windchimes:

                        How dry I am, how wet I’ll be,

                        If I don’t find, the bathroom key.*

In the back of my head, I heard the German Guy sigh. I don’t know who he is or if he, in that shape, means anything to my lineage. But I liken him to the visual representation of my German heritage, to all the Germans standing in my ancestral tree. To the known families of Art, Arth, Schmeelk, and Pils. To honor them, I leave an offering I saw in one of my meditations, of dark German ale with chunks of hard bread softening in the bottom and I thank them for their lives. And I thank them for mine.

*A brief web search led me to the information that this was a common folk rendition that was a runaway from a small lyric of the Irving Berlin song “The Near Future”, written in 1919, during Prohibition.

When We Fall

 “Your first parent was a star.”

from Weight by Jeanette Winterson

I do a nightly meditation to relieve my stress and remove the chaos of the day before I sleep. We all carry weights on our shoulders that no one else sees. We are each together in our unspoken burdens. Like our ancestors before us, we soldier forward, unknowingly adapting and evolving to bear the burden of time and knowledge, and we learn to shine brightly despite the residue it leaves behind.

We are each stars in our own dark night. We are each the thing we need to survive, our own bright knight, our own magical kiss to break the spell. We are the conduit between the past of our spirit world that lives in star energy and the past of our physical world that lives in the earth beneath us. Our bodies are the space where earth and sky meet.

I do this as a meditation, pulling energy up from the earth into me and calling energy down from the stars into me. I do this with the lesson of Tree, and I become rooted, hands dancing in the exhalation of breezes softly blowing. I use Tree because they breathe in seasons, slowly. In this meditation, the excess stress and worry drains back into the earth for transformation and transmutation.

I become the root in the earth and the tree staring into the night, and the star lighting up the sky. I am all these things and I am me. I stand on the bones of my ancestors and I look to their memory. And in the dance between yesterday and today I find myself in Now, even if just for a moment. And my world stills, as the world around me continues on. It becomes music, percussion, orchestration that is but does not distract. In this stillness, my weight disappears. I become light. I am light. I exist in the dark night and I am not tarnished. I shine in spite of. I am brilliant.

Yet even stars fall sometimes. We all fall sometimes.

The weight becomes unbearable and we spin out of control. We all have moments in our lives where our worlds lose their compass and we have no sense of direction. We just want to grab onto a buoy and hold on until the storm passes or the waters calm themselves. We need to hold onto something. Anything. We are leaden and forget we can fly. We forget we can shine a beacon so fierce that it will push the gloom away.

What was your darkest night? What, in your life, shook your world to its core so much so that all you wanted to do was to build your own cave, crawl under the covers and pretend nothing existed outside of them? And we have to let ourselves revel in the fall momentarily, to feel the impact it has on our bones and our tissue. To feel the change rippling from within us, moving with an outward trajectory. We have to feel the change before we can stand in it.

There are lessons lying in wait for us in all the events of our lives, if we can see them. Our ancestors who came before us forgot as well, when they fell. They also had moments of hardship where it didn’t seem like things could possibly get better and they sat in fear that they could, or would, get worse. Living and surviving are not easy, even though we have built comforts up around ourselves to pretend they are. We all have these moments because we have always had these moments. But now, in the spirit world, our ancestors remember what we forget in this one.

In shedding the physical they remember the lessons. I call in the wisdom of their bones as I pull energy up from the earth. I call in the guidance of the history of ancestors who are starlight above us. I pull it into me to feed the fire. With their strength, I burn as brightly as I can. I am the only flame I need against gloom and doubt.

Falling is clumsy and painful. Grace lies in how we pick ourselves up. In whether or not we can shake ourselves off and move forward despite the weight of it. And we can. For generations, we have. We must shine brightly, to show others that it is possible. To show others the way.

Who wants to stare up at a night sky devoid of stars?

*photo is courtesy of energytalkradio.wordpress.com

Plugging Into Nature

I have an Ancestor Altar on top of a small bookshelf in my office. I use it as a place to leave offerings and prayers, and for doing spirit work. I use the construction of an altar as a meditation on creating a sacred space. The meditative intention, layered over the last one builds a history of sacred purpose and sacred energy. Nature is my temple, and immersing myself in it connects me to divine energy. Magic is all around us.

Once a year I go on retreat to a festival in the mountains. For a week I unplug from the electrical appliances of the industrial world and I plug into the mountain, into the stone, into the air, the stars and into the water. It is a spiritual balm unlike any other and reminds me of yearly childhood camping trips with my family. We spent our summers discovering the landscape of the state we lived in: the Finger Lakes, the Catskills, the Adirondacks, the 1,000 Islands, various creeks and gorges, all of the old-time re-enactment villages, the underground caverns, etc.

One of the places we took frequent family trips to was Arrowhead Campground, remembered most fondly for the crazy year the inchworms were literally raining from the treetops. On one trip, my brother and I were exploring the woods and we found a giant pine tree that had fallen during the winter. We saw something when we climbed beneath it, that it was something more than just a dying thing. We spent two afternoons together fleshing out its skeleton with sticks and rocks and moss until it resembled the other thing we saw. We disappeared under that tree and we slipped into a crack in the earth.

That spot was special and we both sensed it. Normally we would have wanted to show it off and I didn’t understand then what kept us silent. We even managed to stay quiet as our parents passed right beside us, wondering aloud at what we were up to that they hadn’t seen us around. We were safe in the bubble of that beautiful, dying pine tree, in both this world and another.

Have you ever found a spot in nature that feels that way to you? A place you like to escape to, to unplug from the world? A place you only reveal to people you feel close to? I have dozens of spots like this. Everywhere I go there is a place that speaks to me, something that pulls at me. Some tree, or rock or clearing.

I believe that I am drawn to these spots because other good energy has been laid down there before me. It could be as simple as the echo of every person who has stopped there and been momentarily spellbound. It could be an ancient place people used to gather. It could be the oldest spot in the woods and it could be the youngest. I don’t think it matters so much why those spots call to me. I think what matters, is that I can sense it, that my heart is open enough to hear it.

These places feel as sacred as altars to me. When I find them in the natural world, its more sense than sight. That sense feels kind of fuzzy and unclear. But I am drawn to add to it, to leave offerings as if it were a holy shrine. I think about bringing the shrine to life like creating a painting, by adding color and texture to create clarity.

I soft focus my senses so that I am taking in everything without any one thing pulling my focus and I walk around the space, feeling out what spots sing to me. Where do I feel the wonder? Where does the energy seem to concentrate? How can I make that more obvious to other eyes?

I take objects from the space itself, sticks, stones, feathers, the odd bone, and move them to another spot in the space where it feels better to me, and I’m no longer surprised to see patterns emerge. The more pieces I move, the sharper into focus the good feeling becomes, until it hums. When my skin hums I know it is good. I have laid another layer of good energy down in that space. I have acknowledged it as sacred and left behind a bit of magic for someone else to discover.

Animal Allies: Hummingbird Messengers

Humans are part of the animal kingdom, which is part of the vast living world around us. In earth-centered circles, we often adopt animal totems as a means of aligning our energies with specifics elements; strength, courage, endurance, etc. The animal world is vast and varied and full of natural magic. It’s normal to feel drawn to different animals, each for special reasons, but most have a core group of animals they are drawn to repeatedly. I call them my animal allies, friends of nature that I feel an affinity for.

Animals are helpful guides in ancestor and spirit work. Where we have lost our connection to the natural world, they have not. They are a key to help cross the threshold, something known and familiar, and cultures throughout history have often associated specific animals with this task. I use them in visualizing exercises to help me widen my view of and understand my journeys with the spirit world.

There are different kinds of animal allies. There are ones that are mated to us, our co-walkers. Chances are you can think of one or two easily that you have been drawn to or had an unusual connection to. Our shadow allies are animals that stir great fear in us. By working with them magically, we can learn the way to work through that fear. These allies can be powerful magic.

And then there are the animal allies that serve as guides and mentors, guardians of portals that look into parts of the natural world normally hidden to us. We take their lessons based on indigenous mythology and animal behavior. They represent some part of me and the way that part of me relates to the world around me. The energy of those animals walk with me in my life and when I need guidance I turn to the spirit of my personal allies, of seal, lioness, owl and buffalo for strength.

Hummingbird Messengers

Spring has arrived and the animal world is reawakening. I await the first hummingbird sighting in the Northeast. The hummingbird is an animal only found in the Americas and the islands between them, so its mythology and folklore belongs to the New World. Hummingbirds are seen as messengers between the worlds, aiding shamans in their work to keep nature and spirit in balance.

My Grandmother was fond of hummingbirds, of both hummingbirds and owls. Feathered allies can easily cross from one world to the next, and for me, because of my emotional connection to my Grandma, hummingbirds are my close allies to the spirit world. Imagine the hummingbird, wings moving so fast that you can’t see them, can’t focus on them. Wings moving so fast that its body appears to hover in mid-air, as if still.

This is the meditation of the hummingbird. It is so simple to me, moving between worlds without moving, at once blurred in motion and sedately still. It’s about learning to walk with one foot in spirit world and one in the breathing world. It’s about learning to trance in instead of trancing out, about journeying through another world while remaining aware and present of this one. May the return of the hummingbirds this spring stir feelings of rebirth and renewal.

Hummingbirds in Legend

• When Native American culture was being lost, the Ghost Shirt religion attempted to bring back their old ways through dancing and the leader of their dance was a hummingbird.
• There is a ritual among some Pueblo Indians for stillborn babies, or those who die within days of their birth. They hold prayer sticks with hummingbird feathers during the winter solstice sunrise to quicken re-birth.
• The Cochiti Pueblos have a legend about how Hummingbird thrived during a drought because a passageway to the Underworld remained open only for him to fly through, where he gathered honey. They believed he alone didn’t lose faith in Great Mother and so the way remained open for him to flourish.
• There is a taboo against harming hummingbirds among the Chayma people of Trinidad as they believe the birds are dead ancestors.
• A Mayan legend describes a hummingbird piercing the tongues of ancient kings, whose blood would be poured on sacred scrolls and burned. In the smoke, their divine ancestors would appear.
• The Aztecs used hummingbird feathers for decoration. They adorned their ceremonial cloaks with feathers, and the priests attached them to their staves, used to suck evil out of those cursed by sorcerers. Chieftains often wore hummingbird feather earrings.
• There is a warrior in Aztec mythology named Huitzilopochtli, “hummingbird from the left,” referring to the spirit world. He was the son of Coatlicul, who conceived him from a ball of feathers that fell from the sky. Huitzil was killed in battle and a green hummingbird appeared where he had fallen. The Aztecs believed that warriors who died in battle became hummingbirds.
• One of the Nazca lines in Peru depicts a hummingbird.
• In the Andes, the hummingbird is associated with resurrection because each night, in the cold, the hummingbird appears lifeless, but as the sun returns it stirs again, taking flight.

A Meditation to the Stars

With Solstice behind us, the days are lengthening and every night the sun sets a few minutes later in my office window. In the Northeast we are still in the grip of a cold and dark winter. We wrap ourselves in blankets to warm our bodies. We drink mugs of hot cocoa, cider, tea and coffee to warm our insides. We light candles to warm our homes and blaze against the darkened nights.

In the flurry of winter, we look to the stars in the sky to remind us that there is always light to be found in the darkness. We remember, and know, that those stars still live in the sky above us, even when the sun obscures them from view. Light can always be found, if not outside of us, then within. We become the light in the dark.

            The earth beneath us is sleeping, even though we who walk upon it are in need of healing. The earth is in need of healing, too, still recovering from the flooding that ravaged our area in September. Normally, when we are in need, we pull our energy from the earth and the trees and plant life around us. We take only what we need and find ways to return in kind. Sometimes, the natural world’s needs matter more than our own and the caretaker must rest. Where do we turn for energy when the source we know is unavailable?

            In the stillness of a frozen world, I turn to the stars in the sky. Starlight is the ultimate ancestor fuel. It is history, a memory of light that began its journey across space and time in the past. The light we see in the sky, that moment of brilliance, has already ceased to shine by the time we view it. The star still shines, certainly, but that moment, that spark is long behind it and what we see is an echo. The light that permeates the dark is the Ancestor of the present moment, a conduit of luminous energy reaching out to us.

The closest star to our solar system, Proxima Centauri, is approximately four lightyears away, which means that the light we see from that star is four years old the moment we glimpse it. Polaris, the North Star, is 680 lightyears away so the light that twinkles down on us is 680 years old. That means the light originated approximately 9 generations ago.

Almost all of the stars that we see with our naked eye are a few hundred lightyears away, shining with light a few hundred years old, about four generations worth. It’s light that began its travel across the sky when my Great-great-grandparents walked the earth. It’s light born of their time, travelling across empty space to reach me in my time.

A scattering of the stars we can see are as much as 2,000 lightyears away. That’s approximately 25 generations old, our ancestors who walked the earth circa 12 C.E., before Vesuvius erupted and froze Pompeii under ash. What lands did your ancestors walk then? This light is only just now visible to our eyes, available for our use.

            I stand, slippered feet on wooden floorboards in my apartment. I feel the cold of the earth beneath my feet. I feel the chill seeping into my apartment. I take a deep breath and reach into the cold with my roots. I sink into the energy of the earth and feel it sleeping beneath me.

I become Tree, curling into earth. I feel my breath drawing in slow and deep, one breath, as if the entire season of winter is an inhale. I become an entire grove of trees breathing in unison and when we exhale, I know we will breathe out the warmth of spring.

            I am rooted in the earth, arms stretching up into the winter air. Above me thousands of stars twinkle in the night sky. Across the eons of time I sense energy, not heat, but power, source, strength. All of my arms sense it too and I am reaching past the boundaries of my edges to drink it in. I inhale deep and long. I hold the air in my heart, filling me and warming my core.

            As the human of me exhales, I drop the energy I don’t need down through my legs, through my feet, into the sleeping earth. I give back in gratitude for all I have been given. My human breath falls away to earth.

I am vulnerable, naked like the winter trees that lose their leaves. My feet are solid in the soil, roots curling through stone. I feel the stars swimming through the water of me. I am human. I am animal. I am nature.

All that I am stands strong, drinks in, refuels and falls away to earth. Everything but breath falls away to earth. The breath is the rhythm of the tides, the pulsing of light across empty space. The Ancestors are shining above me. Dawn approaches and they fade from sight but they are constant above. I drink what I need and let the rest fall through me into the earth. I am healed and I am healing. I am healer.

            The water in me mirrors and magnifies the brilliance of the stars above and a fire grows within, contained and white-hot. My waters are fire, warming me in veins through tissue and muscle. Edges flow and I feel full to the ends of my flesh. I am starlight shining in skin. I am the end of the timeline, the result of the past, burning through the present. I am breathing in seasons, like time, in and out, ebbing in the waters.

            Our Ancestors are more than our blood relatives. They live in every pocket of the natural world. I am because they were. I am because they will be. I am important because I am here. I am humbled because I do not matter, beyond the matter of this flesh. When I exhale the last time, my soul will cease its matter and will become star-dust, swimming through space to feed the needs of those who come after. We breathe in the wisdom of the ancestors of the past. They are in me and I am in them and in this life it is the only comfort I need.

Walking a Ritual with Beads

In areas where winter means snow and ice and cold, everything seems to quiet down in the natural world around us. It’s a meditation in itself to slow our own daily lives and match pace with the place we live, making it the perfect time of year to focus on connecting to a sleeping, resting world.

It’s easy in the height of verdant summer to feel the heat and passion of life. Often, winter can feel like a long walk over the bones of the dead in a cemetery, so quiet and still. It’s unnerving to some. Truth is, just as the stars live in the sky whether we can see them or not, we walk every day over the bones of our dead. The ancestors are always with us.

I carry that knowledge with me through the holidays, when living family gathers in a whirlwind of joy and love and remembrance. After the chaos it can be difficult to slip back into the quiet of day-to-day. When missing my family is still a bright pang, I turn to my ancestors, the family who walks with me, with each of us, wherever we go. I turn towards strengthening that connection, thinking that maybe in the stillness of a snowy afternoon they can hear my call more clearly.

As a child I loved the rosary. I did not actually use it as it was meant to be used for I did not understand its true intention. Instead I used them to repeat my prayers at night, speaking to the streetlamp outside my bedroom window in the dark, whispering furtively for answers, for guidance. I loved the feel of the beads beneath my fingertips. Each one was a separate prayer, or the same prayer repeated. It was a tangible journey, one foot in front of the other, each step imprinting the message in my heart.

Working with ancestors often feels like speaking to the air, to ether. In the beginning of my work I needed that connector, that thing that joined my prayer with action. I longed for the feel of beads beneath my fingertips, something physical to help separate me from my body and push me into higher consciousness.

I’ve written before about the wooden mala beads I made, one bead for each known ancestor going back seven generations. But what I wanted was a ritual I could work with my hands, something more sacred. Something that reminded me of incense and chanting and temple halls, something to help me find the sacred in a tree grove and the night sky.

Years ago, in an evening of women coming together and doing a piece of spiritual work, we each made a set of beads that spoke to us. We each created a personal set that met our requirements for a personal ritual. All were beautiful. All were sacred. All were different.

I grew up immersed in a natural world with four seasons and my magick moves the same way, like the breath of the trees. So my personal magick often incorporates those seasons. My rituals weave through them to help me reach a heightened consciousness. I used semi-precious gemstone beads to create a ritual my fingers could walk.

Seven fossil beads begin the chain, the layers of ancestors, seven through which to know myself.

Nine beads mark each season, nine to mark what is sacred, three times three, my father, my mother and me.

Moonstone, smooth as silk stands for spring, for heavenly bodies and hope, for the promise of flowers and warmer winds.

One of bone to remember the flesh.

Red Tiger Eye, flashing and radiant as the summer sun, the shimmer of hazy heat and the courage found in youthful hearts.

One of bone to remember the tissue.

Lapis Lazuli for autumn, for the density and depth of water and twilight, of mystery and mist and the power of the veil and what lies beyond.

One of bone to remember the heart.

Moss Agate for winter, for earth and ice and crystal together, caressing and holding and resting and charging.

One of bone to remember the soul.

Then Quartz at the peak, for sight, vision and meditation, for communication. For being and reaching. For here. For now. This is where I speak, where I pray, where I petition, where I sit in silent clarity open to answers and impressions and visitations.

And then back down the path, down the ritual, back down to the beads of fossil of ancestral generations holding me and guiding me and bringing me home.

The Spaces In-Between

At the height of summer the land around us is dense and thick with green leaves, blossoms, and ripening fruits and vegetables. Multiple scents swirl through the air vying for dominance as their pheromones call out to the animal world, which is active and in motion around us whether we choose to take notice of it or not. This season becomes a cycle of long hot days followed by brief cool nights. But even as the length of day changes, the constant remains that in-between night and day comes dawn and between day and night comes dusk.

In my spirituality I do a lot of work that some would call dark, concerning edgewalking, shadow work and shapeshifting. It involves exploring energetic boundaries and manipulating them, reshaping them as well as walking between worlds. It is dark work, in the sense that magic is both light and dark and I embrace both sides of it, not just the ones that feel safe. In order to do this kind of otherworld work you have to believe 100%- not 99.9%- that it’s possible. It requires faith and an acceptance in more than what you can see.

The labyrinth is a good metaphor for how I seem my work. You go inward, into the unknown and into the darkness to learn what lies at the center, at the core. And then you return from the darkness into the light, filled with the wisdom, illuminated. You have to go inward before you can go outward. What happens in between in and out? What happens at the center? This is where the magic lies.

In the physical labyrinth, we walk the spaces between the walls. To walk the labyrinth is to find yourself in-between. To shift edges, you find the space that lies between cells and expand or shrink it. To do healing, you find the space between the edge of the trauma and the edge of the healthy tissue/organ/thought. To reach trance you find the silence between the drum beats and you dive into it. You peer into it and you push.

My spirituality is how I worked towards changing the way I thought about myself and the world. First I had to dismember all of the reasons I felt I was not a good person and heal my core. You have to walk into the darkness to do this work. Then once I could stand firmly in my body, I looked at how the world was, how I related to it and then how it related to me.

Like Malidoma Patrice Somé, a spiritual teacher of the Dagara people of Africa, I had to unlearn the structure of my Western teachings in order to expand the way my brain was able to see the world. I would say that my work is about facing my fears as a means of healing to become a more solid version of myself, so that I may guide others on their paths of growth and evolution.

One of the tools I use to accomplish this work is a trance which can be done at dawn or dusk, at the in-between times of the day. These periods are of the transition, the shifting of light into darkness and occur during the point of grey haze of mid-time. This happens when the landscape seems to lose the intensity of color and everything begins to fuzz and blur. This is the magic time that connects the sun and moon, the day and night. As light and shadow can shift, something we can see, so can and does energy, though it is something we can’t see.

I do this gloaming trance as a means of connecting more deeply to nature, specifically the land around me. In the beginning, like with anything you don’t know how to do, it was more an exercise in sitting still and not letting the buzzing bugs pull me from meditation than it was in exploration. I could have given up when I decided it wasn’t working for me, but I thought of the Buddhist monks and the Catholic Nuns and their repetitive devotion and I pressed onward. Four years later, I can slip easily into and out of that space.

You have to practice anything you want to be good at.

I find a place at an edge of water, of woods, of fire. Somewhere visible the landscape changes. As the daylight fades (I prefer dusk trance), I let my eyes soften their focus until I can see everything, but no one thing is clear. And then I find another in-between space, like the shadow between two distant tree trunks. I find that shadow and I peer into it, deepening it. And then I follow the journey to where it takes me, not allowing anything to pull my focus from the exploration.

I came to myself from trance, this last holiday, under a dark moon in a field surrounded by woods and water. I felt myself become more part of the forest until I was no longer me, the human, visiting the trees. Rather, I became a creature of the woods. My energetic body stretched like roots and all at once I could feel the breeze brush against bark and the skitter of small critter paws scurrying across earth. Everything was glowing slightly luminescent.

When I began the trance, I was a woman sitting in a field. When I returned I was a human animal living on the earth with glowing fireflies, mosquito-eating bats, bat-evading gnats, hooting barred owls, fluttering dragonflies and damselflies, beautiful red-spotted purple butterflies, persistent hickory tussock moth caterpillars, the croaking frogs and cheeping peepers.

In that small space of land we have seen the large murder of crows that roost nearby dive-bombing hunters shooting at them, beavers building dams, scuttling skunks scavenging, baby raccoons kitten-walking into the elder bush, coy dogs hunting, catfish swimming, hummingbirds feeding and a great blue heron nesting and fishing. Every time I trance I am reminded of the surety of my humble place in this world. Each time it is a more comfortable truth.

I listened to the sounds of the crows conversing and calling and laughing as they roosted at dusk and roused their brethren at dawn. I listened to the sounds of the world waking and sleeping and waited for the moment between, as the crow cawed. I slipped in, knowing I would come out renewed.

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