The ancestors in our bones
and feeling them there
My ancestral work is not just looking back. It’s looking in, deeply: into my habits, my intuitions, my tracks, roots and aspirations. It’s seeing how past beings and those spatially distant rise in the body I inhabit today.
I’ve always thought it odd, given the classic image of a family tree, that mapped family trees often put the past at the top, where I’d see the leaves and new buds to be. The past for me, is like the soil and bedrock compressed over time, feeding and being fed by the roots that spread through it.
Shaking myself from the classic image of tree, I also enjoy the image of bone as a key ancestral link. My bones are made of the calcium, zinc and magnesium that is shared by other humans, beyond my familiy, by other mammals beyond human, elements that are found in shells that host the creatures living on the rock they will become in another millennia. We all have been and will become this rock that is the ground of our planet.
The other week I led a walk to Plover Scar light. You can see me on the left. You might see I’m wearing my best frock and pinny. This was to honour the last female lighthouse keeper, Beatrice Parkinson, who you can see on the right, in a still from the Pathe newsreel about her. I’ve lived out here for the past 14 years and have always been aware of Beatrice walking here before me. She is not a blood ancestor, but is a bone ancestor. Where she walked I’ve walked, literally (over the stones) and spiritually (as caretaker of this place).
There’s a real interest in ancestral work around at the moment. I wonder if it’s a response to the uncertainty in which we find ourselves: the shaky ground of climate injustice, the ocean crisis, unpredictable weather events, the growing disparaties between rich and poor, governmental rhetoric of extractive growth, the oppression of majority groups…
The current wave of racist-fuelled rioting across England displays to me the deep fear and vulnerability felt by people disconnected to the land, society and perhaps themselves. They riot to reclaim power.
I understand power as faith, not to a god or religion, but to a sense of place, a sense of wholeness, integrity, of one’s own being. An understanding of where I’ve come from (whether I relish all of it or not), the ethics I live by, a confidence in the choices I am able to make. I’ve found the more I’ve sat with my familial ancestors - their joys, triumphs, mistakes, and wrongdoings - the more I’ve been unable to enfold them into myself, the more I can then unfold from their influence to the influences of bone ancestors of non familial people and non human familials.
It’s this sacred element that is at the heart of ancestral play for me. The sacred nature of how things come into fruition from the multiple causes and conditions that have informed their seeding and growth. Sacredness is not limited to doctrine or divine beings. Sacredness is the web of life, of creativity, that we are a part of, that all our thoughts, speech and acts contribute to. Sacredness offers us as ancestors to others.
If you’re interested in exploring more of your own ancestral self, then I’m running, with Katherine Zeserson, an Ancestral Imaginarium over September - online, as a forum and zoom. Info here: https://sarahhymas.net/facilitator/imaginarium/ancestral-autumn/
