Resilience of Our Ancestors
This moment....
I offer this meditation to us today, in this post Election week in the United States of America, and in this global moment where it seems that democracy is going out of style. At our Gateway House Day of the Dead ceremony this past November 1st, I invited people to behold our ancestral family trees.
Pick up a leaf. Now imagine you’re standing before a tree, perhaps a beloved tree that you know, or a tree that appears to you, and journey down to the very origin, the very beginning, the first seed of your family line/lineage. The dream of the oak tree lives in the acorn. What is the very essence of your ancestral line? What energy and imprint did it begin and grow? Evolve into?
Now imagine the limbs of the first rungs and see your parents, and then your grandparents, and their grandparents, 10 generations, 1,022 ancestors in your family tree. Behold your ancestors before you. You are alive because they lived. Their genetic lifeblood flows through your veins, and is pumping in your heart. Consider that they lived through wars and famines and murders, the brutality of oppressive regimes, civil wars, disease and suffering — and joys and celebrations and creativity and potential as well.
Does one or a group of your ancestors have a message for you about your life to live forward now?
And when you find it, bring it into your heart. Put your hands on your heart and hold fast.
The beautiful catastrophe of being human....
Here we are, my beloveds, in our complicated, excruciating, unfathomable truth of what feels to be a critical, historic moment. I implore us to take heart. Throughout our lineages, the suffering and resilience of our ancestors has enabled us to live now. All they lived through, has brought us, you and I, into this very specific moment. We can source their resilience and wisdom.
My particular lineage has been characterized by addiction, anxiety, and I’m sure so much more. And yet, I know my ancestors also had a great capacity for resilience and vivacity. Taking heart in the absolute truth that life is for living in the face of this beautiful catastrophe of being human.
These are volatile times...
The thing about volatility is that it is always changing, with great alchemical forces at work, larger than our own egoic consciousness can perceive. Therefore what seems to be absolute today may evolve into a whole other reality from what appears now. Thus, the potential for exponential change is a possibility in circumstances that are volatile. Let us not be caught in the volatility in such a way that we perpetuate it.
The more I live in a reactive, fearful, polarized state within myself and within my relations, the more I perpetuate the extremity of the drama unfolding in our moment.
I call upon us to hold fast to the spirit of truth and love that is the divine dwelling within us all.
"Set [love] as a seal upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arm;
for love is as strong as death"
~Song of Solomon, 8:11