It hit, surprisingly, last night and since then, all through the moonlight, I've been grieving; grieving specifically for the loss of my ancestral lands that I never knew and the sense of having connections and vows with land that has been passed on to me through countless generations of forebears. I'm grieving not only for the feel of the soil crumbly in my hands or the smell of the winds as they spread secrets over the water but even more for the spirits of those ancestral lands who had to have experienced various kinds of violence, degradation and destruction during whatever uprooted my ancestors.
And I'm grieving for the spirits of the land where I now live. Although they have me, and I do my best to listen to, love and tend them, and I feel loved, welcomed and appreciated in return, I've been here, oh....25 years. And a few hundred years ago they had relationships of deep, skillful, generous and knowing reciprocity with an entire community of people who had been here for thousands of years! Can you imagine that! And the spirits of the land where I live remember well those others who were here for so long. They remember the songs and fires, the laughter and birthing and ceremonies, the hunting and feasting, the footsteps; they remember being honored, included and spoken with in great respect and emotional connection. They remember the texture and smell and radiance of those original people's skin...
I can hardly imagine the painful nature of that loss, on either end. Although I sense it, inchoately, and through the numbing aura of settler privilege through my viscera from my own ancestral losses.
As I join with others moving into more work with ancestral inheritance as well as tending the spirits of place, I always underline why I support a very daily spirit tending practice. It is not all simply to develop our soul-techno skills. It is more because through this dailiness I hope for us all to become aware on a very regular basis of the nature beings that are the spirits of place for us--the ones where we set foot everyday and take our breath and soak in the illumination of the sun's rays. We learn in tandem with each other all sorts of effective protocols for this and that's something I offer help with when desired. However, what I cannot do for anyone is BE the person who is daily greeting the spirits where you live. And only by being someone who does this can we come into a relationship that deeply feeds and nourishes the land where we live and that teaches and nourishes us; only by doing this on a daily basis can we approach the tiniest fragment of a beginning of once again inhabiting a world where many of the humans who live here once again listen to and nurture the beings of the land and know how to do that naturally and with beauty, so that we become fully human. Only by doing this everyday, developing intimate and discrete, knowing relationships with the local land spirits, opening portals of deep healing and expansive perceiving and sensing can we perchance become elders who pass this on so the relationships grow and deepen through our descendants. And only by doing this everyday can we sense the long, arcing curvatures of love growing within us and between us and the spirits of the Earth and with the future. There is so much reparation and reconciliation to be made as we move more deeply into this practice and way of being. We have only barely begun to love the Earth..... we have only barely begun to love... and know in our blood and bones what that is. We have only barely begun....... We have only......
(photo: regrowth of Hawthorne from old fallen tree next to clear creek from pristine mountain spring at my home in the Virginia Blue Ridge Mts. where the Tutelo and Monacan peoples hunted and gathered.)
Loving, Losing and Loving the Spirits of Place