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. . .
—--------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
Our viscera - vibrating, like dark matter, with mystery and cosmic prayer - are also imprinted by eons of life that shape us, 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.
What if our Soul-Soma is always in ceremony with Deep Time, Ancestors, Present and Future ones - whether or not we know it?
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 lost 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 - which 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. Many of us have lost touch with meaningful ways to engage this Deep Time dimensionality, but 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 own present time selves from ancestral afflictions? What if in the most thoughtful and potent ways possible, we need 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 when we do this alongside other humans in person, something in the present time begins to shift, in our somatic experience together?
What if we approach blessings and curses of our particular and cultural inheritance as stories that might be heard intimately alongside those who lived it, with the ears of mystery, rather than a morality tale or a problem to solve? What if 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 support our living a multi-dimensional present with others - humans and more than human beings - whose ancestral connections are inherently entangled with ours?
How might it look to begin to live this Deep Time-space ceremony amidst real humans on land in the more than human wild (ish) world?
Time slows down in relation to gravity theoretical physicists tell us. So, we go with gravity . . . and drop our embodied souls deep into the gravitational field of earth and other humans. Drop into village, even if temporary, and 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 (and sometimes boundaries) to the ancestral realm. With experienced dreamwork and thoughtful collective or self-designed ceremonies, we begin to hear and see over our days together, ancestors, known to us or unknown, of our genetic line or perhaps archetypal, mythic lineage. The more- than-human wild(ish) world evokes 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, 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 people and cultures would say that the dead cannot be ancestors unless they are remembered. What I have seen over the years as we invite remembering of the dead is incredible. Mystifying. What was perceived as inevitable disconnection or pain or simply one’s own particular wound, shifts. In mythic time, connection nourishes healing that avails us for true intimacy with ancestors a few generations past, or hundreds. We become capable of living the sensitivity at the very heart of our wound that might have been passed down and repeated in our own life. Potent gifts that were only ever realized in immature shades as selfish, violent, tight-lipped hardness come to be revealed and transformed at least in our lives, and sometimes in the past. Perhaps some ways of knowing ourselves, or embodying our mythopoetic truth and possibility cannot be accessed without this deep-time dimension of our somatic-soul being.
Powerful reconciliations unfold from a conversation while “fishing” on the land. A ceremonial garden tea with matriarchal grandmother and the wild ancient ancestors releases the essence of truths that had been locked up and are now transformed in the body of the present time human who lives this integrated whole, knowing the wild in her lineage where it could not be seen before. Council conversations with multiple generations and the humans whose lands were impacted by them reveal the gift/curse of righteous passion that courses through a lineage but also the possibility for understanding, for true seeing, and the strength to live a vision.
In the mysterious way of initiatory practices, qualities that were once seen only as repellent, or hidden in shadow, as impossibly other, are transmuted into gift. We are released from and enriched for our soul journeys, recognizing how we belong in time not just space. There’s no special “medium” who does the work. The deep time realms are already there and available, especially when we invoke them even in a temporary village “program” that’s held in a strong way.
Together, in ceremonial time, we find we can read “between the lines” of the stories in our bones and hearts, we can feel where the page was torn out . . . and therefore never knew we carried certain gifts or wounds, some physiological and mythical in our very organs. We might recognize ancestors who were written off, or unknown, have qualities that we didn’t know, and which guide us in some way.
We are also called to see how, like rocks and mountains, we are not static, but instead shaped from massive forces of upheaval, erosion, pressure through wombs and valleys and deaths. We carry the dust of stars once burning, while we spin ever faster (or is it slower, now) ;). We are being eroded by the sun as we speak, etched by grief and joy in a way that follows ancestral contours. We are not locked in an ex-nihilo, autonomous present that is separate from what makes us. Like it or not, we are called to learn the art seeing the past (and future) present like a time-lapse MRI, layer over layer together to see the whole.
When I ask the land of river flowing, trees swaying, ravens cawing if they would feel called to support this soul-rooted cultural regeneration tending of ancestral threads here in their midst, I hear a resounding and echoing,
“YES!! You can only be present with us if you know what you are made of, what has made you. Only then can you see us, fully, as well as the beings whose energies are missing from this place, and the life force still beaming through.”
I sense that the ancestors, too, 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 kind of soul work, I sense we are not actually whole, on many levels. We are not actually in present time with the beings who know something is missing or present in ways we can’t acknowledge, steeling ourselves against the larger terrain of our psycho-spiritual-somatic reality.
In preparation for the journey of soul in general, we humans resource ourselves in the deepest wholeness of our belonging to this world and hone ourselves as vessels of healing love for all the wounding we endured of our innate sensitivities. When we become capable of holding ourselves in the vicissitudes of this wild life of love, hurt and beauty to be the most authentic, real expression of ourselves acceptable to our world . . Then, In what can be an exquisitely painful move, one day mystery and our souls call us further . . . and we must walk fiercely and vulnerably into the dark night to surrender the known self, the familiar world, for the mysterious gift of our mythic being. We offer ourselves to mythic time, coming close to energies that we needed protection from, or our psyches were not ready. We were the best versions of those ones, but a bit on the tepid side, careful to remain seen as “good” or “smart”. We respond to the pulse of mysterious energies from the shadows, dance and sing from mythic imagination that compels us and our lives resonate with synchronicity, and if we are lucky, we are guided by inner and outer wisdom that brings us into experiences that alchemize what was perceived to be poison to be medicine and we realize we are called to live by that particular paradox.
By the time we’ve been 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. 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. Integrating Deep Time, ancestral and future ones, in the journey allows us to recognize our holographic being embedded in cosmic community in all directions and times.
We belong to whale, to star, perhaps in some mysterious synchronicity, to the women who tend the sacred waters in the Sinai desert . . . and 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. We belong to the grandmothers whose wombs also carried desire locked up in metastasized tissue, and we know it is ours to live that mystery, in the larger trajectory of human culture.
Carried by tender, sturdy, rough hands that crafted tools and handwork passed down, we are embedded in holographic layers of time-space which cracks open to the strange time myth and the holy 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 in this unfolding universe.
Perhaps for the kind of courage we need now, we need to remember we belong, inherently, to the Deep-Time, and to the future. They are rooting for us. Perhaps not all, but more than we might know, loving us as best they can for every effort to free our human hearts for life.
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. . .
—--------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
Our viscera - vibrating, like dark matter, with mystery and cosmic prayer - are also imprinted by eons of life that shape us, 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.
What if our Soul-Soma is always in ceremony with Deep Time, Ancestors, Present and Future ones - whether or not we know it?
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 lost 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 - which 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. Many of us have lost touch with meaningful ways to engage this Deep Time dimensionality, but 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 own present time selves from ancestral afflictions? What if in the most thoughtful and potent ways possible, we need 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 when we do this alongside other humans in person, something in the present time begins to shift, in our somatic experience together?
What if we approach blessings and curses of our particular and cultural inheritance as stories that might be heard intimately alongside those who lived it, with the ears of mystery, rather than a morality tale or a problem to solve? What if 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 support our living a multi-dimensional present with others - humans and more than human beings - whose ancestral connections are inherently entangled with ours?
How might it look to begin to live this Deep Time-space ceremony amidst real humans on land in the more than human wild (ish) world?
Time slows down in relation to gravity theoretical physicists tell us. So, we go with gravity . . . and drop our embodied souls deep into the gravitational field of earth and other humans. Drop into village, even if temporary, and 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 (and sometimes boundaries) to the ancestral realm. With experienced dreamwork and thoughtful collective or self-designed ceremonies, we begin to hear and see over our days together, ancestors, known to us or unknown, of our genetic line or perhaps archetypal, mythic lineage. The more- than-human wild(ish) world evokes 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, 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 people and cultures would say that the dead cannot be ancestors unless they are remembered. What I have seen over the years as we invite remembering of the dead is incredible. Mystifying. What was perceived as inevitable disconnection or pain or simply one’s own particular wound, shifts. In mythic time, connection nourishes healing that avails us for true intimacy with ancestors a few generations past, or hundreds. We become capable of living the sensitivity at the very heart of our wound that might have been passed down and repeated in our own life. Potent gifts that were only ever realized in immature shades as selfish, violent, tight-lipped hardness come to be revealed and transformed at least in our lives, and sometimes in the past. Perhaps some ways of knowing ourselves, or embodying our mythopoetic truth and possibility cannot be accessed without this deep-time dimension of our somatic-soul being.
Powerful reconciliations unfold from a conversation while “fishing” on the land. A ceremonial garden tea with matriarchal grandmother and the wild ancient ancestors releases the essence of truths that had been locked up and are now transformed in the body of the present time human who lives this integrated whole, knowing the wild in her lineage where it could not be seen before. Council conversations with multiple generations and the humans whose lands were impacted by them reveal the gift/curse of righteous passion that courses through a lineage but also the possibility for understanding, for true seeing, and the strength to live a vision.
In the mysterious way of initiatory practices, qualities that were once seen only as repellent, or hidden in shadow, as impossibly other, are transmuted into gift. We are released from and enriched for our soul journeys, recognizing how we belong in time not just space. There’s no special “medium” who does the work. The deep time realms are already there and available, especially when we invoke them even in a temporary village “program” that’s held in a strong way.
Together, in ceremonial time, we find we can read “between the lines” of the stories in our bones and hearts, we can feel where the page was torn out . . . and therefore never knew we carried certain gifts or wounds, some physiological and mythical in our very organs. We might recognize ancestors who were written off, or unknown, have qualities that we didn’t know, and which guide us in some way.
We are also called to see how, like rocks and mountains, we are not static, but instead shaped from massive forces of upheaval, erosion, pressure through wombs and valleys and deaths. We carry the dust of stars once burning, while we spin ever faster (or is it slower, now) ;). We are being eroded by the sun as we speak, etched by grief and joy in a way that follows ancestral contours. We are not locked in an ex-nihilo, autonomous present that is separate from what makes us. Like it or not, we are called to learn the art seeing the past (and future) present like a time-lapse MRI, layer over layer together to see the whole.
When I ask the land of river flowing, trees swaying, ravens cawing if they would feel called to support this soul-rooted cultural regeneration tending of ancestral threads here in their midst, I hear a resounding and echoing,
“YES!! You can only be present with us if you know what you are made of, what has made you. Only then can you see us, fully, as well as the beings whose energies are missing from this place, and the life force still beaming through.”
I sense that the ancestors, too, 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 kind of soul work, I sense we are not actually whole, on many levels. We are not actually in present time with the beings who know something is missing or present in ways we can’t acknowledge, steeling ourselves against the larger terrain of our psycho-spiritual-somatic reality.
In preparation for the journey of soul in general, we humans resource ourselves in the deepest wholeness of our belonging to this world and hone ourselves as vessels of healing love for all the wounding we endured of our innate sensitivities. When we become capable of holding ourselves in the vicissitudes of this wild life of love, hurt and beauty to be the most authentic, real expression of ourselves acceptable to our world . . Then, In what can be an exquisitely painful move, one day mystery and our souls call us further . . . and we must walk fiercely and vulnerably into the dark night to surrender the known self, the familiar world, for the mysterious gift of our mythic being. We offer ourselves to mythic time, coming close to energies that we needed protection from, or our psyches were not ready. We were the best versions of those ones, but a bit on the tepid side, careful to remain seen as “good” or “smart”. We respond to the pulse of mysterious energies from the shadows, dance and sing from mythic imagination that compels us and our lives resonate with synchronicity, and if we are lucky, we are guided by inner and outer wisdom that brings us into experiences that alchemize what was perceived to be poison to be medicine and we realize we are called to live by that particular paradox.
By the time we’ve been 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. 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. Integrating Deep Time, ancestral and future ones, in the journey allows us to recognize our holographic being embedded in cosmic community in all directions and times.
We belong to whale, to star, perhaps in some mysterious synchronicity, to the women who tend the sacred waters in the Sinai desert . . . and 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. We belong to the grandmothers whose wombs also carried desire locked up in metastasized tissue, and we know it is ours to live that mystery, in the larger trajectory of human culture.
Carried by tender, sturdy, rough hands that crafted tools and handwork passed down, we are embedded in holographic layers of time-space which cracks open to the strange time myth and the holy 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 in this unfolding universe.
Perhaps for the kind of courage we need now, we need to remember we belong, inherently, to the Deep-Time, and to the future. They are rooting for us. Perhaps not all, but more than we might know, loving us as best they can for every effort to free our human hearts for life.
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