It feels like I'm being asked to remember . . .
Tea and Ancestry
I've always been interested in my own ancestry and one of my uncles keeps a detailed family tree that includes things like occupations, birth places and so on. My ancestors come from France, England, Wales and Norway. On the English side my roots can be traced back to the 1100's and there are several colourful stories about my relations, like the man who was trampled to death at a king's coronation, and "the Spider Man" who hand wrote 2 comprehensive tomes about the spiders of Great Britain. His wife hand illustrated them in pen and ink and then added colour with watercolour paints to many of them. We're talking 100's of drawings. All done to scale. While raising 11 children. I had one relative who was on one of the first Antarctic explorer sailing vessels. His prize possession was the beak of an albatross. There were many tradesmen and many farmers. There still are. Less is known about the women as their occupations weren't recorded until very recently. It's likely that many had the multi-faceted skill sets that they needed to be responsible for households, economics, gardens, social lives, spiritual lives, the children and the well-being of their husbands.
Those are the stories and pieces of information I do know. And then there are those that are so far back into time, that no one knows them. Partly because, in the family tree, after about 4 or 5 generations back, no women are listed at all, just "male heirs."
Since working more closely with the local Lekwungen indigenous people of the southern tip of Vancouver Island and becoming more aware of the 1000's of years of history embedded in one place, I've become more interested in an even deeper ancestry of my own. I am curious about my own indigenous roots. How far back do I have to go to pre-colonized Europe? I try to dig pre-Celtic as the Celts were likely the first colonizers of much of Europe. It's a tough, imprecise art to research it, but I have found, for example that the area that my English relations come from was once inhabited by the Iceni people, and my current French relatives live in the area once inhabited by the Pictones "the painted men" (apparently covered in blue woad tattoos). The Bituriges Cubi the "kings of life" (possibly referring to their druidic practices) lived nearby and could also be part of my personal heritage. One side of my Norwegian family comes from north of the Arctic Circle, so it's almost certain I have Sámi roots as well.
Primarily though I have to use a different kind of knowing than that of searching for apparent facts. Richard Rohr says that to have a wholistic understanding there are 3 ways to know things: sensual, scientific and mystical. He says, to paraphrase, that without the integration of all of these, we end up misled and misaligned, and that the lack of this integration is what is behind the converging crises predicament which we find ourselves dealing with on this planet right now.
So I have been paying a different type of attention to find my deeper roots and my deeper role. I notice that Nordic art thrills me and I wear a replica of a Viking ring now. France feels familiar to me in a way that makes me homesick when I'm not there even though I've never lived there longer than a few months. European archeology museums seemed filled with objects that I feel like I should have and use: a leather water pouch, intricately woven linens, carved wooden boats, stone or iron tools.
It's not only the objects that interest me, but the potential tasks, skills and practices my ancestors would have had for both day to day living and to support their cultural connections, and their connection to something mysterious and larger than they were able to intellectually or sensually understand.
That's where the mystical shows up to round things out, and to integrate experience into a more comprehensive whole. And that's where Tea Leaf Reading comes in for me. There's something about it that is familiar to me. Something so profoundly easy about it, it's as if it's been done for generations in my family. It's as if I didn't learn to do it so much as remember how to do it. I have no way of knowing for certain intellectually whether or not that's true, but it rings of Truth to me. It feels like a practice that has kept the hearts and souls of those who came before me alive and well. It feels like my ancestors are reaching into current and future generations offering guidance and understanding through this practice. It feels like I'm being asked to remember.
Tea and Ancestry
I've always been interested in my own ancestry and one of my uncles keeps a detailed family tree that includes things like occupations, birth places and so on. My ancestors come from France, England, Wales and Norway. On the English side my roots can be traced back to the 1100's and there are several colourful stories about my relations, like the man who was trampled to death at a king's coronation, and "the Spider Man" who hand wrote 2 comprehensive tomes about the spiders of Great Britain. His wife hand illustrated them in pen and ink and then added colour with watercolour paints to many of them. We're talking 100's of drawings. All done to scale. While raising 11 children. I had one relative who was on one of the first Antarctic explorer sailing vessels. His prize possession was the beak of an albatross. There were many tradesmen and many farmers. There still are. Less is known about the women as their occupations weren't recorded until very recently. It's likely that many had the multi-faceted skill sets that they needed to be responsible for households, economics, gardens, social lives, spiritual lives, the children and the well-being of their husbands.
Those are the stories and pieces of information I do know. And then there are those that are so far back into time, that no one knows them. Partly because, in the family tree, after about 4 or 5 generations back, no women are listed at all, just "male heirs."
Since working more closely with the local Lekwungen indigenous people of the southern tip of Vancouver Island and becoming more aware of the 1000's of years of history embedded in one place, I've become more interested in an even deeper ancestry of my own. I am curious about my own indigenous roots. How far back do I have to go to pre-colonized Europe? I try to dig pre-Celtic as the Celts were likely the first colonizers of much of Europe. It's a tough, imprecise art to research it, but I have found, for example that the area that my English relations come from was once inhabited by the Iceni people, and my current French relatives live in the area once inhabited by the Pictones "the painted men" (apparently covered in blue woad tattoos). The Bituriges Cubi the "kings of life" (possibly referring to their druidic practices) lived nearby and could also be part of my personal heritage. One side of my Norwegian family comes from north of the Arctic Circle, so it's almost certain I have Sámi roots as well.
Primarily though I have to use a different kind of knowing than that of searching for apparent facts. Richard Rohr says that to have a wholistic understanding there are 3 ways to know things: sensual, scientific and mystical. He says, to paraphrase, that without the integration of all of these, we end up misled and misaligned, and that the lack of this integration is what is behind the converging crises predicament which we find ourselves dealing with on this planet right now.
So I have been paying a different type of attention to find my deeper roots and my deeper role. I notice that Nordic art thrills me and I wear a replica of a Viking ring now. France feels familiar to me in a way that makes me homesick when I'm not there even though I've never lived there longer than a few months. European archeology museums seemed filled with objects that I feel like I should have and use: a leather water pouch, intricately woven linens, carved wooden boats, stone or iron tools.
It's not only the objects that interest me, but the potential tasks, skills and practices my ancestors would have had for both day to day living and to support their cultural connections, and their connection to something mysterious and larger than they were able to intellectually or sensually understand.
That's where the mystical shows up to round things out, and to integrate experience into a more comprehensive whole. And that's where Tea Leaf Reading comes in for me. There's something about it that is familiar to me. Something so profoundly easy about it, it's as if it's been done for generations in my family. It's as if I didn't learn to do it so much as remember how to do it. I have no way of knowing for certain intellectually whether or not that's true, but it rings of Truth to me. It feels like a practice that has kept the hearts and souls of those who came before me alive and well. It feels like my ancestors are reaching into current and future generations offering guidance and understanding through this practice. It feels like I'm being asked to remember.
