Re-membering our Roots: a journey with plants and Ancestors

reaching for plant allies: Milk Thistle

Note * This piece is written from an Ashkenazi Jewish and Celtic Isles / settler colonial ancestral perspective , and is inherently Eurocentrically biased.

The wheel of the year turns, we bend toward darkness, and the cross quarter festival of Samhain nears. At this distinct midway point between the Equinox and the Solstice, we are pulled into a descent, a subterranean journey. The Otherworld and the Unseen are close at hand; the veil is thin. Feasts are set for the ancestors, there is a place for them at the table. In this spirit, I am inspired to share pieces of my journey and experience in the interweaving realms of Ancestral Lineage Repair and Plants.

Over the past many years, I have come to understand ancestral remembrance, reconciliation, and repair as integrally important to our health as individuals, families, communities, and societies. For me, it began as a vague curiosity. Its relevant to acknowledge my privilege of having access to historical records my settler colonial ancestry allows, which is not the case for many people. And still, it has been a painstakingly slow process, frustrating, at times seemingly fruitless, often leaving me feeling disoriented and confused. It has also radically shifted my sense of self, my place inside of the systems I am part of, and my understanding of how I can contribute and be useful.

There are some beliefs and assumptions implicit here that I’d like to name specifically:

1. Plants are sentient creatures, with their own wisdom and culture, and are capable of communication (albeit not in verbal language that most modern humans are familiar with).

2. Especially in the West, we are living with the impact of Intergenerational trauma **, which is nothing new but has just begun to be studied, empirically observed, and recognized more broadly.

3. Ancestors continue to exist beyond the death of their bodies. For that matter, infinite other entities exist in unseen realms, and their impacts ripple into the material world that may affect us in our human lives and bodies.

4. These specific assumptions come to me through the Ancestral Medicine community and courses, whose efforts make Ancestral Lineage Repair work more accessible to people all over the world, looking to destigmatize such topics as fringe or new-age, and aiming to integrate it more into mainstream channels as the foundational, basic, and necessary work it is:

a) “dying does not automatically make you wise and kind,” as I have heard Daniel Foor (founder) explain a number of times. The dead are not all equally well — some may be particularly vibrant, others may be disengaged, vacant, or “ghosty,” and some may be quite toxic and troubled.

b) The dead can change — they are not frozen in the state of wellness or trouble they were in when their bodies died.

From what I can tell, as one begins to sniff out the ancestor trail it can be quite common to encounter an amorphous wall of amnesia. Perhaps a byproduct of trauma, trouble, etc. along the line, this forgetting may be a coping mechanism, and it may show up in the process as a vague sense of disorientation, numbness, or vacancy — either intuited as a quality of the ancestors themselves, and/or in the felt experience of the person initiating the work on their lineage. Remembering, thus, is a kind of antidote to the forgetting, and inherently part of the process. And it is no easy feat. Rather than the hard thinking, mind concentration, trying to picture where you last saw your car keys kind of remembering, I understand this to be the opposite of dis-membering — a stitching things together again, a coming back to wholeness kind of re-membering.

I’ll share some specific examples from my life. A number of years ago, as I was just beginning to dig into my ancestral inquiry, I found my way to studying Herbal Medicine. It seemed like a pretty random choice at the time, mysterious in the ways I ended up there. I had no prior interest or experience in the field; if anything I was working with an assumption that I had a “black thumb,” incapable of keeping plants alive. Nevertheless, I followed the impulse and began studying at the California School of Herbal Studies in Southern Pomo territory, (Forestville, CA). I found myself in a small, forested valley with no cell reception, a large, meandering garden surrounded by trees, and a small barn converted into a classroom, full of plant enthusiasts with all kinds of know-how. I felt like an odd one out. I struggled in the first weeks and months of the program, wrestling with comparison and doubting my decision to dive into the world of plants. I encountered what felt like debilitating resistance. I lacked the enthusiasm of my peers, and at times felt like I didn’t want to do any of it. Attempting to engage with the projects and assignments, I felt sluggish, heavy, and slow, like I was slogging through deep mud, or trying to run through water. When tasked with making a tincture (which is a quite simple medicine preparation), I was overcome with immense overwhelm and resistance that made no sense.

Why and how and what was all of this about? Perhaps the truest answer to that question is “I don’t know.” There is inherent mystery in both the realms of ancestors and plants. It feels true that my resistance unearthed in my plant re-membering process is accompanied by a Mystery beyond the scope of my full understanding, which I believe is proper. What also feels true is that my grandmothers, those ancient, wise ones whose names are lost to time — those ones who tied rosemary sprigs into bundles, and spun stinging nettles into fibers, and tended wounds with yarrow — they were whispering in my ear and leading my disoriented steps back to the plants. Their influence, albeit subtle and vague in a way that didn’t consciously register for me at the time, was impacting my living, breathing, actions and choices. They brought my hands back to the soil, engaging some old knowing buried under centuries of amnesia. By some mystery and grace, I stayed the course, step after shaky step. Slowly, slowly, the plants began opening themselves to me, and I was able to open myself to the plants.

Five months into the program, this process was expedited. My maternal grandmother passed away, with whom I was very close. As I understand it, a portal opened, facilitated by death and the movement of grief. I found myself on the banks of a river, in so much pain from my loss, surrounded by mugwort. I spent many hours just sitting there, listening to the water, squeezing the mugwort with my hands and smelling my fingertips. Each inhale was like the tingling sensation when blood rushes into numb extremities. It is difficult to articulate — it was like mugwort was sitting there with me and my pain, patiently; they knew my heartbreak, and spoke the language of grief; their presence was like a wise teacher or elder, bolstering a sense of security and resilience even in the midst of such confusion and sadness. I felt a sudden and deep familiarity with this plant, who thus far I had only known through books, lectures, and seeing them alongside trails. There, mugwort stirred inside my bones, and with them the millennia of grandmothers who knew mugwort as medicine, recognized them dancing in wind, brewed them in strong teas, burned their leaves. I re-membered mugwort, and mugwort re-membered me.

majesty of mugwort

I sowed seeds in my own garden for the first time, I tended tiny sprouts, watered their roots, rejoiced in their growth, mourned their loss; and slowly, slowly, the heavy, lethargic resistance was pruned from me like withered stalks. In the pruning came insight into the roots of my resistance, the sluggishness, overwhelm, and apathy at the thought of making medicine from plants: it was the accumulated consequence of many generations worth of amnesia; before the amnesia, many generations of immense fear. And there at the very root — the terrible, searing trauma, those many generations and many hundreds of years of harm brought upon those women in Old Europe; the midwives, the wild ones, the witches. My forebearers. Those ones who spoke to the plants and made them medicine, carried oral traditions and secrets of healing and magic in their blood…the many who were hunted, betrayed, tortured, murdered, burned; and their sisters, daughters, mothers, aunties, and friends who lived with the fear that they would be next. “No, no, not safe” were the voices inside of my aversion and resistance. “Yarrow in your hand is enough to convict you as a heretic” they said. I felt the reverberating finger pointing in accusation: Witch! “Better drop it, better survive,” they said. And so it traveled, over millennia, through the blood and bones of my old people, and maybe yours; growing into amnesia, forgetting, numbness; passing through the bodies and wombs of all those grandmothers, a long journey. And here, showing up in my life, looking like resistance to making a tincture.

Plants are incredibly wise and resilient creatures. They have developed intricate mechanisms for adaptation and survival, whose chemical and biological byproducts have been extremely useful for human survival. Just the fact that you are alive is some kind of testament that your ancestors relied on plants for food, medicine, and survival for thousands of years. The plants know how to mend bones, heal wounds, nourish bodies, and a lot more. They also know how to transcend time and space, knit continuity and coherence back together, fortify boundaries and protection, revive memory, move grief, and a lot more. When we are able and willing to re-member the plants — tend them, praise them, love them, listen to them, sing to them, sit with them — the plants can re-member us, reweaving us back together with the wisdom, gifts, burdens, grief, and love of our ancestors.

Tips for the journey:

• If choosing to dig into Ancestral Lineage Repair work, anchor yourself with support - seeking out a practitioner of this work to ensure proper safety and boundaries is important. It is not prudent to willy nilly dive right into the heart of the trouble in your lineage. As I’ve come to understand it, it’s really important to set up a foundation of safety and protection to guide the process.

• Trees can be very supportive and anchoring to this kind of work, particularly a tree with a presence in your ancestry. Even if you don’t have a lot of information about your lineage, a basic internet search will likely identify a species of tree common to your ancestors, that may even be accessible to where you live now.

• If you are called to pre-patriarchal stories of Old Europe, I have found Our Lady of the Dark Country by Sylvia Linsteadt beautiful, heart breaking, and resonant with this work.

My hope is that some of these seeds may germinate in you, that their sprouting and rooting may resonate with the glorious network of plant beings surrounding you, wherever you are, and bring you to their feet, singing.

Notes:

* Intergenerational Trauma: The field of epigenetics is making strides in how we approach trauma in individuals, studying how environment and behavior can alter the genome, which is then passed down and inherited by descendants, without actual changes in DNA. It seems obvious that we inherit genetic characteristics from our parents, grandparents, etc. that translate into physical and temperamental traits. But it has become less obvious to us what else we inherit from our ancestors: their grief, their rage, their traumas. Perhaps a consequence to the rabid individualist values of Western society, we have moved away from understanding ourselves as intricately woven into ancestral systems.