Ancestors, Future Ones and Somatic-Soul Journey
From David Whyte “Yorkshire”
. . .
In the dark November
onset of the winter
in which I was born,
I was set down in the folds of that land
as if I belonged there,
and in that first night under the evening shadow
of the moors and most likely
with the wind in the west, as it would be for most of my growing life,
I was breathing in the tang and troubles of that immense
and shadowing sky
As I was breathing the shadows
Of my mother’s body,
Learning who and what was close
And how I could belong.
What great and abstract power
Lent me to those
Particularities
I cannot know
But body
And soul were made for that belonging. . .
—--------------------------------------------------------------------
What if our bones are like landscapes - terrains of ancient stories - etched by sun, storms, love, illness, with blessings/curses for the future tucked into our helixed filaments unfolding a ceremony in Deep Time, where past, present and future meet.
What if our viscera - vibrating, like dark matter, with shadow and cosmic prayer - are imprinted by eons of experience: a sonographic blueprint for our soul-body’s belonging?
We are constellated into enfleshed life as a particular spark of ancient-present soul matter entangling with future possibilities. We are not just flukes of chance.
What if our Soma-Soul is always in Ceremony with Deep Time - with Ancestors and Future ones?
And how do we consciously, fully participate in that Ceremony? How do we remember to hear the ancestral voices like whale songs from the depths or see stories holographically like fire cycles in tree bark? Or let ourselves quake at the invisible portals where the strange time that myth and sacred mystery breathes?
The cosmos calls us to dance. If we let ourselves, we will be lured into new constellations of belonging. Yet, we are never fully separated from that spiraling that made us. As the poem continues, Whyte is ultimately claimed by another land-place, as if he could not belong in just one initial way to this world.
Mystery plays on the bone flute of our soul whittled from all that makes us; If we are lucky and courageous enough, we become music both wholly new and yet unfathomably familiar, from which the future of our life and the worlds unfold.
Most of our “Western” psyches were woven, in part, from the hope of Modernism that we could simply be here, ex-nihilo in the present moment - forgetting or denying the pain, grief or shame from being carried outside of time over oceans, from the intimacy of dales, springs, steppes, savannahs and dialects, wars and prisons. In that forgetting, many of us have also forgotten the deep and particular sinewy connection to belonging - the unique and collective sensual wisdoms crafted from the entwinement of bodies and land and families. We can sense we carry untapped wisdom, grief, anxiety, brave and foolish love, primordial knowing stowed into our cells.
For those of us who have followed the mysterious call of something we might call Soul into the depths of individuation and becoming, we might have caught ourselves knowing for ourselves or hearing from others . . . stories that reverberate with ancestral energies.
“I have this sense that this shadow energy is ancestral in the lineage of men of my family . . .”
“It’s as if my hands know something, there is some wisdom, some magic, they hold there about how to do this . . .”
“I have always felt some fear of that dark, feminine energy. It feels dangerous yet somehow alluring and familiar. This trepidation about it feels so much older, bigger than me.”
“I struggle to live the gifts of my ancestral relationship with Land, as I know it is fraught with the history of colonization and displacement on this continent.”
“In my grandmother’s womb, cells also bundled up into large fibroids. As I listen to the messages from my womb and fibroids: “your desire is bound up in these fibroids, you must birth this desire”, I wonder if this is an ancestral sensitivity that my grandmother carried as well? I wonder what is mine to know about that - or shift, also on their behalf?
What if in living our soul journeys, we uncover, like ancient archeological sites within and between our sinew, the ancestral lines that helped shape our enfleshed soul beings - our gifts, sensitivities, patterns of protection, even similar wounding dynamics or events?
How do we incorporate this ancestral dimension in becoming the mysterious wise, visionary creatures the earth longs for - that future ones, human and other than human long for, as well as our ancestors?
It’s as ancient as human culture to connect with ancestors through time and space, but many of us have lost touch with meaningful ways to engage this Deep Time dimensionality. We are recrafting practices as we are being called back into that quality of perceptive participation. As we do so, we might ask a few questions:
What if we are called not simply to heal our individual selves from ancestral affliction? What if we need, in the most thoughtful and potent ways possible, to engage the very ones who know something of this lineage - as if they are real - and as if they, too, are caught outside of time, locked in the past, unable to contribute fully to the present?
What if we approach what we might see as blessings and curses of our particular and cultural inheritance as less a morality tale or a problem we must solve from a distance, but a story that might be heard intimately with those who lived it, with the ears of mystery? What if amidst the anguish in our ancestral landscape, these lives are threaded with something of the very paradox that is ours to live and which might embolden us for the thick and complex multi-dimensional world we are in?
How might it look to begin to live this Deep Time-space ceremony, together, rooted in the natural world? How might it support our living a multi-dimensional present with the others, whose soul journeys are already from those ancestral connections, entangled with ours?
Time slows down in relation to gravity, say theoretical physicists. So, we go with gravity, and drop our embodied souls deep into the gravitational field of earth and other humans. Drop down into village even if temporary . . . into a ceremonial vessel . . . into land . . . and with tender awareness, into our physical bodies.
We remember how shifting consciousness is as old as human experience. In well supported practices we create thresholds and clear invitations to the ancestral realm. With well tended dreamwork and thoughtful collective or self-designed ceremonies, we begin to hear and see over the days Ancestors, known or unknown, of our genetic line or perhaps archetypal, mythic lineage. The other than human wild(ish) world invokes our deep imaginal memory . . . rivers, trees, hollows, plains. We begin to feel the ripple of ancestral connection through the extended skin of our being. The world begins to shift . . prayers extend backwards and forwards, hardened perspectives, even among generations, soften and alchemize, the land and our bodies are transformed by the thrum of a village alive with holy Deep Time ceremony.
Some would say that the dead cannot become ancestors unless they are remembered. What I have seen over the years as the dead are remembered, is incredible. Powerful reconciliations, multiple generations transformed by a conversation, by a meeting, by a story. What was once only seen as only the pain of the past, or one’s own particular soul wound, is transmuted by the healing that comes from understanding, connection, empathy and ultimately by seeing how that very sensitivity might be the essence of our gift. And thus we are released and enriched for our soul journeys, recognizing how we belong in time, not just space to this world. There’s no special medium or someone we would call a shaman. The deep time realms are there, available, especially when we invoke them even in a temporary village “program” that’s held in a strong way.
Reading between the lines of the stories in our bones and hearts, we can feel where the page perhaps was turn out, and we never knew we carried with us such gifts, or we find that ancestors who were written off, or unknown, have qualities that we didn’t know we carried or that guide us in some other way.
I sense the ancestors - like the more than creatures here on the land - say “Yes! Please attend to us. We have stories to tell that are locked in the past, but spill out pain or serve healing and transformation, the coming present of the world.”
Without this work, I sense we cannot actually be whole, on many levels. We cannot actually be in present time.
In preparation for the journey of soul, we resource ourselves in the deepest wholeness of our belonging to this world and we hone ourselves as vessels of healing love for all the wounding we endured of our innate sensitivities. We become capable of holding ourselves in the vicissitudes of this wild life of love, hurt and beauty. Then, one day mystery and our souls call us further . . . and we walk fiercely and vulnerably into the dark night to surrender the known world up for the mysterious gift of our being, offering ourselves to the alchemizing of what was perceived to be poison to become medicine to live by that paradox that calls us. We feel the pulse of mysterious energies from the shadows, moved to dance and sing from mythic imagination that compel us, resonate with synchronicity.
When we offer ourselves up to being shapeshifted by that vision of soul necessary to our living it, we know we are in service of something much deeper, some source of our being. We know that to be HERE is to be in relationship with tangles of trees and bugs and mushrooms and humans - and our ancestors. We are not just autonomous creatures on the skin of the earth, but permeable hosts of billions of bacteria, cycles of water and air, breathing earth, which in turn hosts us and makes our lives possible. We are embedded in cosmic community in all directions and times.
We belong to whale, to star, to the women who tend the sacred waters in the Sinai desert . . . the ones who carried seed and were outcast and the humans whose capacity for righteous violence or shameful abandoning might live in us, in some way that might be transformed by our soulful attention. Whatever strange time myth lives in, we find ourselves broken open to that, too, and vow to live in that holy place unendingly open to mystery, in the midst of the heartbreak of being human.
Laurie Adams Feb '24
From David Whyte “Yorkshire”
. . .
In the dark November
onset of the winter
in which I was born,
I was set down in the folds of that land
as if I belonged there,
and in that first night under the evening shadow
of the moors and most likely
with the wind in the west, as it would be for most of my growing life,
I was breathing in the tang and troubles of that immense
and shadowing sky
As I was breathing the shadows
Of my mother’s body,
Learning who and what was close
And how I could belong.
What great and abstract power
Lent me to those
Particularities
I cannot know
But body
And soul were made for that belonging. . .
—--------------------------------------------------------------------
What if our bones are like landscapes - terrains of ancient stories - etched by sun, storms, love, illness, with blessings/curses for the future tucked into our helixed filaments unfolding a ceremony in Deep Time, where past, present and future meet.
What if our viscera - vibrating, like dark matter, with shadow and cosmic prayer - are imprinted by eons of experience: a sonographic blueprint for our soul-body’s belonging?
We are constellated into enfleshed life as a particular spark of ancient-present soul matter entangling with future possibilities. We are not just flukes of chance.
What if our Soma-Soul is always in Ceremony with Deep Time - with Ancestors and Future ones?
And how do we consciously, fully participate in that Ceremony? How do we remember to hear the ancestral voices like whale songs from the depths or see stories holographically like fire cycles in tree bark? Or let ourselves quake at the invisible portals where the strange time that myth and sacred mystery breathes?
The cosmos calls us to dance. If we let ourselves, we will be lured into new constellations of belonging. Yet, we are never fully separated from that spiraling that made us. As the poem continues, Whyte is ultimately claimed by another land-place, as if he could not belong in just one initial way to this world.
Mystery plays on the bone flute of our soul whittled from all that makes us; If we are lucky and courageous enough, we become music both wholly new and yet unfathomably familiar, from which the future of our life and the worlds unfold.
Most of our “Western” psyches were woven, in part, from the hope of Modernism that we could simply be here, ex-nihilo in the present moment - forgetting or denying the pain, grief or shame from being carried outside of time over oceans, from the intimacy of dales, springs, steppes, savannahs and dialects, wars and prisons. In that forgetting, many of us have also forgotten the deep and particular sinewy connection to belonging - the unique and collective sensual wisdoms crafted from the entwinement of bodies and land and families. We can sense we carry untapped wisdom, grief, anxiety, brave and foolish love, primordial knowing stowed into our cells.
For those of us who have followed the mysterious call of something we might call Soul into the depths of individuation and becoming, we might have caught ourselves knowing for ourselves or hearing from others . . . stories that reverberate with ancestral energies.
“I have this sense that this shadow energy is ancestral in the lineage of men of my family . . .”
“It’s as if my hands know something, there is some wisdom, some magic, they hold there about how to do this . . .”
“I have always felt some fear of that dark, feminine energy. It feels dangerous yet somehow alluring and familiar. This trepidation about it feels so much older, bigger than me.”
“I struggle to live the gifts of my ancestral relationship with Land, as I know it is fraught with the history of colonization and displacement on this continent.”
“In my grandmother’s womb, cells also bundled up into large fibroids. As I listen to the messages from my womb and fibroids: “your desire is bound up in these fibroids, you must birth this desire”, I wonder if this is an ancestral sensitivity that my grandmother carried as well? I wonder what is mine to know about that - or shift, also on their behalf?
What if in living our soul journeys, we uncover, like ancient archeological sites within and between our sinew, the ancestral lines that helped shape our enfleshed soul beings - our gifts, sensitivities, patterns of protection, even similar wounding dynamics or events?
How do we incorporate this ancestral dimension in becoming the mysterious wise, visionary creatures the earth longs for - that future ones, human and other than human long for, as well as our ancestors?
It’s as ancient as human culture to connect with ancestors through time and space, but many of us have lost touch with meaningful ways to engage this Deep Time dimensionality. We are recrafting practices as we are being called back into that quality of perceptive participation. As we do so, we might ask a few questions:
What if we are called not simply to heal our individual selves from ancestral affliction? What if we need, in the most thoughtful and potent ways possible, to engage the very ones who know something of this lineage - as if they are real - and as if they, too, are caught outside of time, locked in the past, unable to contribute fully to the present?
What if we approach what we might see as blessings and curses of our particular and cultural inheritance as less a morality tale or a problem we must solve from a distance, but a story that might be heard intimately with those who lived it, with the ears of mystery? What if amidst the anguish in our ancestral landscape, these lives are threaded with something of the very paradox that is ours to live and which might embolden us for the thick and complex multi-dimensional world we are in?
How might it look to begin to live this Deep Time-space ceremony, together, rooted in the natural world? How might it support our living a multi-dimensional present with the others, whose soul journeys are already from those ancestral connections, entangled with ours?
Time slows down in relation to gravity, say theoretical physicists. So, we go with gravity, and drop our embodied souls deep into the gravitational field of earth and other humans. Drop down into village even if temporary . . . into a ceremonial vessel . . . into land . . . and with tender awareness, into our physical bodies.
We remember how shifting consciousness is as old as human experience. In well supported practices we create thresholds and clear invitations to the ancestral realm. With well tended dreamwork and thoughtful collective or self-designed ceremonies, we begin to hear and see over the days Ancestors, known or unknown, of our genetic line or perhaps archetypal, mythic lineage. The other than human wild(ish) world invokes our deep imaginal memory . . . rivers, trees, hollows, plains. We begin to feel the ripple of ancestral connection through the extended skin of our being. The world begins to shift . . prayers extend backwards and forwards, hardened perspectives, even among generations, soften and alchemize, the land and our bodies are transformed by the thrum of a village alive with holy Deep Time ceremony.
Some would say that the dead cannot become ancestors unless they are remembered. What I have seen over the years as the dead are remembered, is incredible. Powerful reconciliations, multiple generations transformed by a conversation, by a meeting, by a story. What was once only seen as only the pain of the past, or one’s own particular soul wound, is transmuted by the healing that comes from understanding, connection, empathy and ultimately by seeing how that very sensitivity might be the essence of our gift. And thus we are released and enriched for our soul journeys, recognizing how we belong in time, not just space to this world. There’s no special medium or someone we would call a shaman. The deep time realms are there, available, especially when we invoke them even in a temporary village “program” that’s held in a strong way.
Reading between the lines of the stories in our bones and hearts, we can feel where the page perhaps was turn out, and we never knew we carried with us such gifts, or we find that ancestors who were written off, or unknown, have qualities that we didn’t know we carried or that guide us in some other way.
I sense the ancestors - like the more than creatures here on the land - say “Yes! Please attend to us. We have stories to tell that are locked in the past, but spill out pain or serve healing and transformation, the coming present of the world.”
Without this work, I sense we cannot actually be whole, on many levels. We cannot actually be in present time.
In preparation for the journey of soul, we resource ourselves in the deepest wholeness of our belonging to this world and we hone ourselves as vessels of healing love for all the wounding we endured of our innate sensitivities. We become capable of holding ourselves in the vicissitudes of this wild life of love, hurt and beauty. Then, one day mystery and our souls call us further . . . and we walk fiercely and vulnerably into the dark night to surrender the known world up for the mysterious gift of our being, offering ourselves to the alchemizing of what was perceived to be poison to become medicine to live by that paradox that calls us. We feel the pulse of mysterious energies from the shadows, moved to dance and sing from mythic imagination that compel us, resonate with synchronicity.
When we offer ourselves up to being shapeshifted by that vision of soul necessary to our living it, we know we are in service of something much deeper, some source of our being. We know that to be HERE is to be in relationship with tangles of trees and bugs and mushrooms and humans - and our ancestors. We are not just autonomous creatures on the skin of the earth, but permeable hosts of billions of bacteria, cycles of water and air, breathing earth, which in turn hosts us and makes our lives possible. We are embedded in cosmic community in all directions and times.
We belong to whale, to star, to the women who tend the sacred waters in the Sinai desert . . . the ones who carried seed and were outcast and the humans whose capacity for righteous violence or shameful abandoning might live in us, in some way that might be transformed by our soulful attention. Whatever strange time myth lives in, we find ourselves broken open to that, too, and vow to live in that holy place unendingly open to mystery, in the midst of the heartbreak of being human.
Laurie Adams Feb '24
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