Last week my beloved aunt passed. Going home to be with my family was such a deep experience. We got to cry, laugh, share stories and just be together for 3 days in a way we don’t
under normal circumstances. Everyone is caught up in their life, in their day to day but here we all were, pausing for a moment, taking time to be together and honour the life of a remarkable woman.
Today’s “modern” life has us all isolated. Thinking that we have to manage alone, that we have to be able to be everything, do everything, do it well, and be happy about it. We feel like we failed when we don’t manage, that we are the ones with a problem for feeling overwhelmed and isolated. Humans did not develop like this. We lived in villages, in communities, where the load was shared. Where it was normal to do things together, to have support from our elders, and our siblings, and other women, to talk things through and ask for advise. Today the word community is associated with hippies, and people all living in one house, or off the grid “outsiders”.
On our return I stopped at the cemetery where our grandparents are buried. Sitting there at their grave, meditating, I got a deeper understanding of what it means to be walking our grandparents’ prayers. We as a family are the way we are very much because of a prayer our grand father had. Many years ago he bought some land in a little corner of earthly paradise so that his family had a place to be together. He didn’t get to experience this, he died early and
only got to meet half of his grandchildren. This is very much the case of planting a tree knowing you will never eat its fruit but you do it for the generations to come. We are now enjoying the benefits of this prayer and the actions taken towards it becoming reality.
Realising this makes me want to make life choices that will benefit my son and his future children and possibly grand children. Decisions we make today can have life changing effects in the future. Seeing my grand parents’ great grandchildren (there are 33 of them!) Sitting in a circle on the grass in the sun gave me so much joy and I know that this relationship they have is because of my grand parents’ action in buying this land where we all gather for a couple months every summer to be together.. Even though we all live separate lives in different corners of the world for 2-3 months we live in community, as it used to be. The kids run freely from house to house, the older kids watch out for the younger. The parents spend time talking, sharing, and doing things together.
I may have only one child but I know he has 32 cousins that he has a deep relationship with, a support network. From age 5 I have noticed that the kids really feel the difference between friends and family. All of them regardless if they are in their 20s or still preschoolers love being with their cousins. They play, they fight, they co-create, they feel the unconditional connection and the love.
This morning I was listening to music and this song came on called "Grandma, Grandpa" by Kenneth Little Hawk. The native Americans have a greater understanding of life and death, they don’t say good bye, the spirit of their loved ones guides them every day and is in everything they do, everything their elders taught them, everything they teach their kids and grandkids is a continual thread. The things they do they do it with the thought of how this action will affect the next seven generations.
Humanity as a whole has taken a few wrong turns in the last decades. Many are now returning to a simpler way of life, returning to the land, rejecting a lot of the choices previous generations made. But what I see now is that if we reject everything from the previous generations we lose a
lot of the lessons as well and we waste a lot of time trying to re-invent the wheel. It is important to listen to the stories, to see where their choices led them and use critical thinking to chose what we keep and what we let go of. But we cannot reject everything. Family wisdom is precious medicine and for sure the choices were made with the best intentions.
Hoping we can all find our community, our tribe, with whom we can share our every day, the mundane as well as the special occasions. Where we can live in communion, physically, mentally and spiritually.
image 1 : Her Journey by Gaia Orion
image 2: I am the daughter of a daughter by Julie Dillon
image 3: by Orestes Bouzon
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