Finding The Way Home

Within the sacred circle,

I open my arms wide, a child beckoning

foremothers and forefathers

"Embrace me. Take me home."

I speak into the void of memory

a plaintive cry, a small child lost in the train depot.

Standing at the crossroads---in the temple of Esu.

I close my eyes

and discover a great river.

I whisper praise songs to Oshun:

Iya Mi Ile Odo

My mother's house is the river.

I follow the river's eternal path, traversing its grassy shores

tracing a blood line through millennia

in search of familiar signs

The domed huts of the Western Bantu

The fortresses of Great Zimbabwe

The Fon, The Yoruba, The Ashante.

 I close my eyes, beckon the ancestors with my thoughts.

Dorthea Dooling described art as the “impossible possibility generated when nature, soul, and spirit are fused into a radiant, harmonious whole”. It is in the liminal spaces between our fixed notions of reality that dreaming, creative impulse, and communion with other-than-human powers occurs. The spaces that modernity has rendered unreal and inconsequential, the negative space inviting us to re-focus, to see alternate possibilities that our ancient ancestors knew to be vital to collective wellbeing.

My creative impulses were first activated through the medium of comics. In comics, the origin story is the essential tale—the mythic, defining moment in which protagonists come face-to-face with shadow-worlds, with mystery; the moment in which they are buried alive, facing death, touched by revelations from other-worldly entities, stand at the crossroads of crisis and apocalypse only to be reborn.

Having been touched by elemental forces of nature or the SUPERNATURAL—the hero gains access to powers, wisdom, and purpose. It’s noteworthy that in our Western lexicon, the nature that is visible and the invisible forces underlying the material world are divorced from one another and that the latter term “SUPERNATURAL”—a word that attempts to name the unseen—has been swept to the linguistic margins of culture—a small child directed away from the place where adults converse.

Origin stories are important, because they beckon us to look more closely at ourselves as part of a multiverse.

One of my favorite origin stories from the comics was that of Marvel’s Mighty Thor. Marvel’s version of Thor was a mash-up of sci-fi-fantasy and soap opera. In the first issue of the magazine, we meet Donald Blake, a mild-mannered doctor on vacation in Norway.

While there, he happens upon a group of extraterrestrial invaders. Alarmed, Blake hurries to alert the residents of a nearby village, but his chronically injured leg prevents him from shaking his alien pursuers.

He seeks shelter in a cave where he soon discovers “a gnarled wooden stick–like an ancient cane” which he tries to use as a lever to shift the heavy boulders blocking the only possible exit.

To no avail.

In frustration, he “strikes the useless cane against the boulders, and as he does so, is transformed in a flash of lightning into the Norse Thunder God, Thor. The wooden stick has turned into Thor’s mallet Mjolnir and on it is an inscription:

“Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor.”

Thor sends the aliens packing and soon learns that striking his hammer on the ground, transforms him back into Dr. Blake.

Blake carves the gnarled stick into a proper cane to replace the one he lost while fleeing the aliens and heads back to his home in New York.

From there, the series follows traditional superhero tropes for quite a few issues but slowly, authors Jack Kirby and Stan Lee introduce more of the Norse pantheon and settings: Asgard, Odin, Loki–actual Norse tales are cleverly woven into the new cosmic mythology of the comic. But with that comes a logical inconsistency in the tapestry of their hip, 60s myth-making. If, in the context of the Marvel universe, the Norse gods are real, then how could Doctor Blake be Thor?

The answer to this question was finally answered in issue 159, when Thor himself, torn between his mortal desires and his responsibilities as prince of Asgard, urgently poses that very question to his father, Odin.

In a story that still sends shivers of delight through my inner fanboy, Odin recounts to Thor an unremembered time in the Thunder God’s youth when the kingdom of Asgard was beset by war with a neighboring kingdom of Frost Giants. After a conflict that spanned millennia, a fragile peace had been forged.

Enter Loki, Thor’s wicked half-brother. Jealous of his sibling’s power and renown, the trickster god deceives Thor into believing that the Frost Giants have broken the armistice and are plotting an attack on Asgard! Thor, heedless of the warnings of comrades and determined to prove himself, crosses the border into the land of the giants and launches a solo preemptive attack.

When Odin hears of this, it takes quite a bit of maneuvering to rescue his son and restore the fragile détente.

As punishment for his pride and arrogance, Odin places a spell upon his favored son, turning him into a mortal with no memory of his godly existence. Thor becomes the frail Dr. Blake, a man with a chronic disability; a man who spends his life working with the sick and infirm.

As Dr. Donald Blake, the Thunder God is exiled on earth to toil until he learns humility.

Only then, does fate lead the doctor to the mysterious cave where he discovers the hammer and his immortality is restored.

Like most origin stories, Thor’s is one in which the protagonist’s true potential lies dormant until he crosses a mythic threshold of initiation where his worthiness and soul-readiness are tested and proven.

The story also reminds us of the role that elders and ancestors play in helping us discover unknown or forgotten truths. Like most of us, Thor believes he knows his own story. But when Odin unlocks hitherto hidden dimensions of knowledge, new awareness dawns. His memory restored, Thor is freed of the identity crisis that had limited his ability to navigate the contradictory parallel lives that he had been living.

Our hidden family stories help us understand the blessings and burdens that are the foundation of who we are and who we can become. Our ancestral stories can be a source of healing and empowerment.

In the early 90s, I was enrolled in a creative writing course at Seattle Central Community College. Early in the course we were asked to write sestinas, a complex French poetry form with six stanzas of six lines and a three line envoi or ending. The poems also contain six words that are repeated and rearranged throughout. Up to that point, I had never written formal poetry and was intimidated to paralysis by the assignment. The night before it was due, I finally pulled myself from lethargy. I thought of my maternal grandmother, Katie Hinton, the matriarch of my beautiful, brilliantly dysfunctional family. I don’t recall why she came to mind, but I jotted down a list of keywords inspired by memories of her, by mythography, and longing. I was surprised to discover a clear thread running through my list: Ancestry.

From there, the poem, Passages, gave birth to itself.

Or was nudged into being by the ancestral forces I referenced without quite comprehending:

The path to the village is paved with songs

Familiar as the laughter of children

Laced with the nostalgic scent of freedom.

The welcome whispers of ancestors

Lie like a bridge across the ocean of time

I hear my Grandmother's voice

A silverfish in the sea of memory, her voice

Hard and comforting as old blues songs

Remember, she used to say, ain’t no time

Like the present but of course, children

smirk at the hand-me-down wisdom of ancestors.

They can’t appreciate the cost of freedom

Paid for on the installment plan. Their freedom

Is shouted out in the commodified voice

Of rap lyricists. Do the ancestors

Groove to their new, urban freedom songs

Or do they weep for lost children

Who have abandoned the lessons of time?

Ain’t no time but the present time

Is that what Grandmother said? Freedom

Can make folks forgetful as children

Caught up in the moment—they cant’ hear the voice

Of the storm brewing. These ancient songs

I’m hearing now remind me how freedom

Looked when she was young. The ancestors

Smiled on us then, once upon a time

When Counts, Dukes, and Ladies sang our songs.

‘Fore hootchie was in vogue, Freedom

had a velvet smooth yes lord voice.

She had potential, ‘fore her unruly children

Ran her ragged the way children

Do when they don’t learn about ancestors.

“When this old head get cold” Grandmother’s voice

Keeping me steady, in step with time.

I stretch, swing, and stumble like Freedom

Only to be lifted by ancient songs

On the lips of children whose time

Our ancestors blessed with Freedom

Their futures, paved with redemption songs.

I’ve had a distant relationship with family for most of my life. I lost my father at age five and my mother in my twenties. Much earlier than most of my peers. These losses and other emotionally charged transitions put me at some remove from living kin and from my own life in ways that I would only come to understand when I began my first ventures into therapy in my forties. By then, I had spent a half a lifetime running from the past in an effort to distance myself from traumas that had taken up permanent residence in my body.

Despite my headlong flight from family, there was a longing, a quiet background melody, haunting and constant, an aching hollowness—a cavern in the center of my being where I was gathering tinder to build what I did not know was to become a sacred fire. A way to illuminate my personal underworld. A light to shine on the barely-visible familial patterns I had tried so hard to erase.

I was recently conversing with a friend about the transformative value of ritual and ceremony as sacred practices designed to foster community. Ritual draws us toward one another and traces the connective life-lines that bind us to nature. If we look back far enough, we all descend from people who believed the whole world was alive–who spoke to trees and rocks, and sky. How do we resuscitate our collective memory of the universe as a conscious-entity?

What frameworks can we provide to revive in ourselves and our children a more expansive sense of reality?

Author and ritualist, Malidoma Patrice Some’ reflects on this in Ritual: Power, Healing and Community:

The young ones are the future of the old ones. To allow this future to happen, the old ones must work with the Otherworld. When an elder fails to perform his work with respect to the spiritual, the future of this elder is threatened, not the present. Where ritual is absent, the young ones are restless or violent, there are no real elders, and the grown-ups are bewildered.

Modernity has created realities that our ancient forebears could not have imagined, while ironically making it impossible for us to imagine or appreciate the wonders of the technologies that transcended geographical and cultural boundaries to form the foundational cosmology of every society on earth for millennia. Our ancient ancestors lived in a world where they could see the starlight in every rock and leaf, commune with other species, and converse with the dead. The echoes of the pre-modern world remain with us as vestigial memory, as fairy tales, and folkways that (according to my friend) many try to reclaim through commerce: cultural reclamation through the commercial appropriation of artifacts. The search for purpose, meaning, power, and healing distilled and diffused through the muddy lens of capitalism.

And yet, that longing to touch something authentic and true–something more alive–is real.

But we have to push ourselves to go deeper. Farther back. We need to close our eyes and swallow the red pill to discover what lies beyond the internet rabbit holes we spiral through.

Over the years, I have become increasingly fascinated with the history of the African diaspora. In the late 90s, while working in an afterschool program, I came across a collection of African American folktales entitled, The People Could Fly. The title story in the collection was about a unique group of enslaved Africans who had, prior to their kidnapping, been uniquely endowed with magical abilities. The story explained how these gifts had all but disappeared once they were groomed for never ending servitude. But now and again, the narrator of the story tells the reader, weary field hands would gaze up into the sky and see one of their own ascending:

“Go as you know how to go,” Toby, a wizened elder, tells Sarah, the heroine in the contemporary retelling of the classic story.

He raised his arms, holding them out to her. “Kum…yali, kum buba tambe,” and more magic words, said so quickly, they sounded like whispers and sighs.

The young woman lifted one foot on the air. Then the other. She flew clumsily at first, with the child now held tightly in her arms. Then she felt the magic, the African mystery. Say she rose just as free as a bird. As light as a feather. The Overseer rode after her hollerin. Sarah flew over the fences. She flew over the woods. Tall trees could not snag her […]She flew like an eagle until she was gone from sight.

I was more fascinated by this story than the children I shared it with. Weeks later, I still wondered what Sarah found when she touched ground in her colonized homeland? I imagined her and those like her retreating into unknown regions above the clouds to form new, sacred spaces where they might continue to commune with their gods in their native tongues, and revel in unique rhythms and cadences passed down since the beginning of time.

I imagined.

This imagining eventually became a short comic and later, a screenplay—both entitled, Agents of the Sky— the history of these mystical Africans told from the vantage point of one of their descendents living in 1930s America. It was the beginning of an effort to scratch an itch I had not known was there. A longing for repair; a longing to trace a path back to an empowering source. A longing for home.

“Those who have severed you from the past,” Emma, the protagonist in Agents of the Sky explains, “would have you stagger into the future like mutilated amnesiacs, perpetually lost with neither past nor future to claim as your own. You must bear witness. You must remember.”

As storyteller, performer, and teacher, I have been preoccupied with reclaiming the past—with trying to place myself into a timestream that seemed determined to wash away any trace of my existence. I have been obsessed with creating a future that includes me. As a creative, I have tried to restore a sense of equilibrium to my compromised spirit. Art has been a sanctuary, meditation temple, and time-machine.

In “reality”, I could never hear my people’s stories. Those of the long-since-transitioned were obliterated, while those of the recent dead were rendered irrelevant by the youth-focused, forward-looking “space age” into which I was born.

Or so I thought.

Two years ago, I was introduced to Dr. Daniel Foor’s course in ancestral lineage healing program.. Dr. Foor’s methodology and practice is “drawn from our common cross-cultural human inheritance.” While none of the elements of this approach are unique, it does not source from any specific system. This method of ancestral healing is a five-step process that invites folks to cultivate active relationships with their blood lineages as a means of addressing intergenerational harms passed down epigenetically. The practice is based on four fundamental precepts:

1. Consciousness continues after death

2. Not all of the dead are equally well

3. The living and the dead can communicate

4. The living and the dead can strongly influence one another

While my thinking aligned with all of the precepts in theory, my efforts to embody the concepts was a sisyphean task. Each time I attempted to engage my “wise, well” ancestors, I ran into a wall of rationality that refused me access to intuitive ways of knowing. My ancestral invocations were drowned out by the background noise of skepticism and self-doubt. At an earlier time in my life, I had run into similar obstacles as a member of Buddah Jewel Monastery where, despite my commitment, I always found sitting meditation challenging.

Though I could hear echoes of Zen in the animism that informed my ancestor reverence, the rituals seemed to require an even greater shift in consciousness. A couple of months in, I gave up, unable to get past the discomfort of trying to cultivate a relationship with things that could not be seen, or heard, or touched. Entrenched as I was in rationality, there was no corner of me in which a sacred altar might be erected.

I was disturbed by how colonized my internal landscape had become. When and how had my liminal sense of reality been supplanted?

A year later, I was navigating a relationship with a different kind of unseen entity—prostate cancer. Over the course of many months as I digested the diagnosis, met with surgeons and oncologists to evaluate treatment options, and finally began treatment, I reflected on the story my body was telling. My Illness was a metaphor for loss, lack, excess, imbalance, and neglect. It was a frightening funhouse mirror reflection of my nominal relationship with nature and spirit. Cancer invited me to pull up a chair and take a moment to consider: poetry, love, and synchronicity; to notice small moments aligning like stars—magical constellations that could only be perceived if I looked up and in. If I took a breath and sidestepped clockwork-time.

I returned to the ancestral lineage healing course with a renewed desire to reawaken my intuition, to trust voices that weren’t in my head but that came from someplace other, someplace that honored practices that every culture on earth once knew and understood were as vital as food or water.

During my second round of ancestral lineage healing, I moved through the five-steps of the lineage repair process but in addition to ritual meditation, I wove arts into my ritual practice. I wrote poems to my ancestors, cultivated a garden to honor their connection to land, and directed butoh performances which explored similar themes. This creative approach added somatic layers to the healing process that made my ancestors sing! During this time, collage became a primary exploratory medium. Like the ancestral work, collage is a search for connection and discovery–gathering seemingly disparate images, bringing together those that seem to have something to say to one another; a process guided by whispers from the edges of consciousness. At the end of a collage meditation, the finished piece feel like an offering to and a message from my people; offerings constructed with the support of those whose memories, hopes, and dreams are still vibrantly encoded within me–alive and well and speaking in voices that require me to shift frequencies, to stop, sway, and pray; to look at the world through the backs of my eyes; to commune with my hands in the dirt; to hear leafsongs, and groove to the rapture of cicadas; to attend to what the bright, shiny-shinies of modernity have conditioned me to ignore.

The greatest gift of this work has been a revitalized sense of warmth and connection with living family; my brother, my son, nieces, and nephew all seem to be thriving as a result of my conversations with the dead.

My ancestral journey, first as student and then as practitioner-in-training, has felt a lot like Sarah’s return to Africa in The People Could Fly, an impossible flight made possible by the encouragement of mentors, trusted guides, and a willingness to surrender.

These ways of thinking/seeing/being remind me that I am not merely in the world but integral to it.

In rekindling relationships to ritual, we harmonize with the earth, sea, and sky that sustain us; we learn to observe, listen, respond to and honor life; we become one again with the complex web of starlight that connects all things and all time.

Ancestral healing acknowledges intergenerational wounds and provides another tool for addressing troubles that ripple through individuals and families across time. Ancestral healing is ancient technology remixed and reintroduced at a critical time in the evolution of our society. In this era of deep divisions and social upheaval, ancient ways of knowing remind us there are ways to mend what has been broken.

This mending involves what professor and clinical psychologist, Bayo Akomolafe, describes as “a cracking open of consciousness, an insurrection of thought”.

Emergent, expansive consciousness contradicts the binary, zero-sum equations of rationality in favor of a holistic reality that acknowledges the wisdom of the countless generations that preceded Descartes, Newton, Locke, and Hume. The path to the village is paved with songs. Whether in dreams, meditation, prayer—whether in solitude or within the warm fold of community, I encourage you to find the songs that lead you home…to Otherworlds.