Ever Flowing Ancestral Grief
My journey with ancestral grief began just before the passing of my last grandparent. I feel like my Nan, gifted me something with her passing. It began with fatigue and a feeling of my family, my ancestors and the land longing for me to have a family and live on the land. This is what all my ancestors have done including all my grandparents.
The fatigue felt like it was my ego trying to hold on to life as I knew it. But the grief that was welling up inside of me, this deep longing for a life partner, a baby and to live on the land began to take me deep into the realisation that I needed to change my life to make space for this. At the time I was working pretty much every day of the week. I had built a great life full of purpose work, community service and creative expression. But now, something else was beckoning for me, and it would begin to take me into the underworld, to the deepest state of depression and hopelessness I have felt in my short life.
Naturally, it would happen through the journey of the heart.
I fell in love with a mother and her four year old and for the first time I got to feel what it was like to care take a child and it was honestly the most purposeful I have felt.
When that relationship ended, I spiralled into depression. In some ways I gave up on life and my immune system died as well. I was starting to have a lot of days in bed with different sicknesses.
The strongest experience I remember was one of my last nights in the desert. I had just ran my last Earthdance and was so embraced by the community that it cracked my heart open. That night I lay under the stars in my swag in the red sands and felt an overwhelming sense of all the pain that my ancestors had felt. Of war, of displacement, of losing loved ones to the tyranny of colonisation. The medicine women and men killed and tortured.
I had the remembrance of a past life with my beloved. Of being pushed to the ground and stabbed in the back as they took my wife and child, my last gasping breaths seeing them taken. And here I was feeling the deep pain of that happening again, only a lot less dramatic, but the feeling just as strong.
I was in the depths of this unexplainable depression and grief for months. Then… I fell in love with another mother, with 7 kids and 2 grandkids. A medicine woman who has an intimate connection with grief and the underworld. I would lay awake deep into the night hearing her stories, feeling her pain and her strength.
When that ended, I hit the very bottom of my underworld journey. Every part of me wanted to part with life, I spiralled deep into hopelessness and grief, but somehow… it was in reaching that place, that I finally started to come out of the underworld. Finally I felt the full presence of my spirit. I felt my strength, my purpose and my life come back to me. I had to be dismembered to remember.
I acknowledge that everything comes in seasons. But that long inner winter, it was needed. My ancestors were calling me deeper into my life, my soul. I changed my life and the way I do life dramatically over that time. I moved to the country, built a dome, found myself a wolf dog companion, stopped working so much and made a whole lot of space for relationships. I now live without electricity and running water in the trees, cooking on the fire. I figured, I don’t have any control over finding a life partner or having a baby, that chooses me… but I can choose how I live my life.
Now when the waves of grief hit me, they take me deeper into my blood and bones. The cellular memory of my ancestors activates and I come to realise again and again, the pains of this life are felt intensely because they are the ripples of collective grief from my bloodline. If we can gather to share this grief and connect those threads, and weave them into a tapestry that shows us that we actually all share the same grief… then I think we can begin to heal. I don’t think it happens in isolation. I acknowledge the Original People of these lands hold the deepest of wisdom and ceremony for grieving and carry the pain that is alive in their life in real time. Not in the past.
May we listen and learn together. May we gather in circle to re-member.
