I’m sending this to you with love and prayers that your skies are clear, waters clean, and that you feel the presence of the ancestors gathered around.
One of my earliest memories was going inside the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest. For those who don’t know, the Major Oak is 1000-year-old tree that legend says Robin Hood and his merry men hid and slept in. It has a large cavity in the trunk and when I was little people were allowed to go inside of it. There is a photo of me around 4 years old wearing my favorite gold colored dress (it glistened in the sunlight) in front of the Major Oak. I clearly remember how much fun it was to go in and shout because it would echo back – voices from another world in a dark womb.
I am a bridge between one world and another in several ways. I am a Brit living in the US, I have spent decades being a go-between between funders and non-profits, I connect between the physical world and non-physical reality and now quite aptly, I live in a house on the edge of the forest.
I live with one foot on the ground and one foot way out in the ether. It can be in turns melodious and exquisite and disquieting and rough. Yet this is how I was constructed and experience the world, as I am sure may be the same for you.
I just returned from a 3-week journey back to the UK for my parent’s 80th birthday party, a walking holiday in Yorkshire, an afternoon with a dear friend under a giant elm on the banks of the Thames, a trip to Avebury in Wiltshire and a retreat with Martin Shaw at the West Country School of Myth in Devon. It was a rich time and the journey was full of echoes for me. Echoes of youth, adolescence, childhood. Echoes of the ancestors, eras, and constellations.
It bought up questions about the biology of place.
I have been in the US for more than 30 years now and have fallen in love with the lush land here – the waterfalls, the lakes, the maples, and my home on the edge of the woods. And as I write, I’m hearing the goggle of great blue herons in the creek below and the cackles and caws of the ravens in the forest around me.
And yet to go home was guttural.
I was among my tribe, my people, and it was a deeply odd experience to be among them and for them not to recognize me as one of their own – they thought I was American.
But my body and spirit recognized home in a way that is hard to articulate.
I had a couple of free days before my retreat began so I decided to go and visit Avebury – home of the largest megalithic stone circle in the world – it’s around 4500 years old. I had visited once before in 2015 but was with my teenage daughter and could only stay for a few hours. It's a series of sacred places including the stone circle (actually circles because it contains circles within the circle), a grass covered pyramid, a five chambered long barrow and two other hills, one with a circle atop. It is a constellation.
This time I stayed overnight and took the time to walk between the sacred sites. Originally, they were connected by two long avenues with standing stones along the route. I walked from the end point of one avenue at Windmill Hill, to the circle and then along the next avenue past the pyramid (Silsbury Hill) to the hilltop stone circle known as The Sanctuary. In doing this – and walking over 6 miles – I was struck by the vast scale of the place and how incredible a site, and sight, it must have been.
When I first walked into the circle I felt my body relax, shoulders drop, and I heard ‘you’re home’ in my being. Now, just to be clear, I hadn’t heard of Avebury until a few years ago and have no familial connection in this lifetime. But some other dimension of myself recognized it. My being knew this place and I relished in sinking into the energies there.
Another remarkable part of the journey for me was around my body’s response to dairy. In the US, I have become quite allergic to dairy and have had to use an inhaler after ingesting milk or cream. In the UK, I was gobbling up ice cream and clotted cream and adding milk to my tea with abandon. So, it made it a true vacation for me. I’ve been exploring what the difference might be – chemical processing, genetics of the dairy herd, or possibly the environment. But the difference was truly startling. My body knew home.
When I go to Europe, I often experience a heaviness that is hard to describe.
It feels like the air is dense or heavy. I felt it very strongly when I visited Seville several years ago. As the plane took off, I felt like a weight was being lifted off me that I hadn’t realized was there. I also felt a wave of grief and started to cry. I was clear that it wasn’t my grief but ancestor grief. Seville was the center of the inquisition so it’s not particularly surprising.
On this journey home, I felt the same heaviness. It didn’t feel bad, nor necessarily grief, but it just felt dense – like there are a lot of souls floating through the ether, a lot of whispers around and through me, a lot of history vibrating in the ground below me through layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of ancestors in sacred and human form.
When I returned to my home on this side of the Atlantic and dropped into meditation, I could just feel a spaciousness and expansiveness open up.
I was sharing this with some friends who are all sensitive folk and a couple of them were raised in Germany. One said that she felt the same heaviness in Germany, another that she didn’t feel it there but did in New York State and would feel a lightening when she crossed the Massachusetts border, another that he felt it in the US South.
So, it seems like our bodies and spirits each vibrate with different places in different ways.
Years ago, I went to an event where the person said that the doctor who first postulated the germ theory was thrown out of the British Medical Association and died in a poorhouse. Fifty years later, they invented the microscope.
I’m looking forward to the microscope of the future that helps illuminate the energetic bounds between body and place, mycelial network and fruiting body.
But for now, I hear the whispers through my being. Whispers come through to be heard.
But, what of echoes?
Echoes are a sound we emit bouncing back after reverberating off the walls of a container. How delicious that I got to experience that within an ancient sacred tree.
What sound do I want to emit, to reverberate into a sacred world and to hear back?
Holding a sacred container, together with the ancestors and sacred beings, for others so that their echo between this world and that can be discerned - that is my gift to share in this lifetime.
If this musing resonates with you, you may enjoy this beautiful poem by Audre Lorde. It begins “For those of us who live at the shoreline…”
Also, I just read this essay about the connection between place and ancestors in The Sun.