Musings

This week has been a thoughtful week. I did not post a blog Friday because I was visiting my elderly aunt, who is almost 91 and rapidly declining mentally. This aunt is my mother’s last remaining sibling. Mom has been gone for over 30 years. My dad died in 2008 and my brother in 2013. I am the only one left of my original nuclear family. And I don’t remember much about our story.

There is no longer anyone to verify family stories and history. There is no longer anyone left who can laugh at family jokes and foibles. Except for this aunt, there is no one left who has known me all of my life. When she is gone, I will be the last connection to the generations before me. It fills me with a grief that is hard to name, but it is grief nonetheless.

I wish I had listened better to the stories of my ancestors. My white middle class family did not value ancestral roots. We moved a lot and had no home place to go back to.  Even though some family stories were shared, I felt disconnected from those stories and didn’t listen well or remember them. After all, I didn’t know those people or value their lives or struggles. I had my own life to live. Now I wish I had recorded the stories my dad told about his family, the stories that my grandmothers shared about coming to Texas.

Last night I was watching a documentary about indigenous peoples of Texas. They, too, have lost many of their ancestral stories as well as their ancestral lands. It struck me in a very visceral way that many of us have lost our connection to our Mother, the earth.

Many peoples have been dispossessed of their land and their roots, probably at the hands of some of my ancestors. Forced by the modern push for progress, many of us have lost our communities, our families, our stories. We are disconnected from our heritage, disconnected from relationships, and deeply disconnected from nature. We feel a deep longing for connection, but connection to what? We feel an unnamed grief that wells up inside of us when we see the land cleared, or when we lose a connection to our past.

This past year of isolation has called many of us to go inside of ourselves for connection to that deeper Source of wisdom. It has called us to be quiet, to find solace in silence and in nature. It has made us slow down and reflect on what is real and true. It has shown us how important it is to be connected.

I hope that as the world returns to what we called “normal,” we don’t forget the value of connection – to ourselves, to others, to our Mother Earth, and to the ancestors. I hope that we can acknowledge the grief and ache of loss, while opening to the achingly beautiful power of love. I hope that we can learn from the past, not forgetting the wrongs that were done to people and nature, but using those past lessons to move forward in a way that honors all of humankind and all of nature.

I hope that I, as the last of my own nuclear family, can make a small positive difference for the future of my grandchildren and the coming generations by being an example of connecting to that which was lost.