Sun warmed rocks and bark slide against soft skin. Friction with the Earth tugging on the old world until it falls away. A relationship that polishes. The coming out seems endlesss. The snake sheds their skin and the same being emerges, new and old, sustaining the memory of what was in a fresh embodiment of what is.
I have been hunting the threads of ancestral memory throughout the Americas for many years now. My parents are becoming curiouser and curiouser asking “how do you become an elder?” They hear my stories and imagine who I am talking with, what I am in service to and surely they see me changing. I am relating with elders who have dedicated themselves to remembering the prayers of their ancestors and sharing them in ways that help others remember the prayers of their ancestors.
The slow grind of regaining our ancestral memory is not a process for the faint of heart. My teachers in the Andes guide us toward remembrance so that we can rebuild the nation of the Mother, the nation that remembers how to honor the origin of life and the abundant sensual pleasures birthed by it. Recuperating ancestral memory so that we can build cross cultural, interspecies and interdimensional alliance. This requires a definition of pleasure that embraces the friction of difference. An understanding that playing the game means losing our skin and smiling to it. Again and again.
From my current point of view, which I will inevitably shed, I see eldership as the effect of lifeslong dedication to polishing our awareness against birth, death, rebirth and manifestation- learning to stay turned on amidst the cycles of forgetting and remembering.
As I look to the elders, I see how the complexity of ancestral remembrance requires nothing less than eventually everything you have, gratefully given.
I am sloughing the skin of my time in California as I write this. Tender, as I prepare to venture out from the territory and the communities who have so lovingly been my home for thirteen years. The grace with which California catches and releases me has been remarkable. I received an unimaginable healing in these Ohlone, Paiute and Nisenan lands- communing with all the life in the mountains and waters. I received the calling from my ancestors to be an ancestor, to dedicate myself to the lifeslong road of eldership.
This going feels distinct. Before, I went to work and study for a month or three, knowing roughly when I would return, letting my earthly possessions rest in the home of a friend. This time there is a larger skin being shed. Me and my car, full of the stuff I could not let go of, are driving to my folks’ house in Michigan before I go on pilgrimage with the Abuela Ana María Hoyos of Colombia Donatella Moltisanti of Sicily.
A journey made primarily to listen. To hear what the territory of Rome is calling for, to receive her story. We will present ourselves to the guardians who still keep watch and make the offerings that correspond to us. When I spoke to the Abuela yesterday, she told me that at least one of us must stay in our center at all times, with a heart full of love, knowing that it is our work to listen, introduce ourselves to the guardians, make offerings and ask for the liberation of humanity. ‘If not us, then who?’ she says.
We are beginning at the heart of the empire who attempted to extinguish the ancestral memory of my bloodline. Reconnecting with the ancestral memory of the Celts, the Druids, the Fae and the mystical traditions whose names have long been forgotten is a more strenuous lift than I imagined. I’ve spent the last two months feeling heavvvyy receiving what I now understand as the psychic surgery I needed to move deeper into my studies with my ancestors of blood. I am grateful that I can lean into the support of the Abuelas as I receive these transmissions.
The meticulous incision delivered by spirit has me inhaling and exhaling at a pace in sync with my cycles of creativity. I am breathing deeply now, leaning into the rub of aliveness against aliveness as our minds meet.
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Learn more about Origin, the upcoming pilgrimage with the Abuelas, here. We invite you to join us in Italy in September to grow our sensual connection with the elements and learn to wield eros in ways that honor the origin of life. Yes, sacred sexuality taught by the grandmothers! and our elemental ancestors, of course - the volcano, the sea, the oak tree... I will be bringing Our Anatomy Project into the mix through some embodied research as well.
Intimate connection with the more than human world brings a potency that heals the distortion in our sexuality created by colonialism- distortion that guides us to disconnect from the pleasures of our beautiful, erotic Earth.