In my head and, at times out loud, I’ve been calling this trip I’ve been on in Ireland and Scotland an ancestral pilgrimage. While it has and is turning out to be so much more, the instigating spark first grew out of a journey of wanting to know who my people were, where were they from, and what they believed… before they became a colonizing presence in the United States, before they became ‘white’, before many of the broken systems of our world became our over-culture.
As a true ‘North American, mixing-pot mutt,’ I have many lines of lineage and ancestral culture I could explore but my Celtic Isles line has been the one calling to me first. So what a coincidence, or perhaps not, that about a month into my time in Scotland, I got an email from my mom saying our cousins, who have been doing genealogy research on the Byrne/ O’Byrne side of the family, discovered a third cousin in Ireland and he’d be happy to meet with me.
In a time when so many of us seem to be hungry for a connection to place, to people; for a deeper sense of belonging and family; I really lucked out and hit the jackpot.
This episode is the story of how it felt to meet these cousins and my musings around:
- why do we long to know more about our ancestors?
- was I always interested?
- why do we lose contact with these memories?
- what are the repercussions?
- What do we do with the wounds and traumas in the lineage?
- what was it like to encounter their memories again?
- did it change my life?
- what if we don’t know where we’re from or the threads are too interrupted to trace?
You’ll also hear me drop a seed of a potential offering and an invitation to hear from you about your experience, questions, challenges around this subject.
So here, on the dark night of a new moon, nearing the darkest day of the year, let’s gather around the fire to dream and hold tenderly our hearts and their hungers.
May we feel how deeply we belong and how many ancestors, alive and long gone, dreamed the preciousness of our lives into being, in the best way they knew how.
You can find Kate:
Website: www.wildsacredjourney.com
Email – kate@wildsacredjourney.com
Instagram: @wildsacredjourney_kp
And I hope you'll stick around for more conversations to access, repair, inspire, and evolve our humanity and serve the wild, tender aliveness of our personal and collective hearts.
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