a collection of whimsy

Ancestral Roots

It is often with very little time that people spend reflecting upon their ancestral roots, that they spend connecting with and getting to know those that they see looking back at them through the mirror. Generations worth of familial history is more often than not lost to time due to the carelessness of ancestors past for they thought it not important enough to save the memories.

To save the photos, the letters, the secret family recipes.

Or it is simply due to the fact that a family becomes broken, shattered. All of the missing pieces of the puzzle get scattered across the world, making the task of connecting this puzzle that much more difficult..where did my ancestors hail from? What family traditions were lost to immigration, to wars, to familial fallouts? Were we a family of witches, or were we a group of people bound to the christian religion? Did we used to dance and sing around a fire so joyously? Were family dinners met with peaceful banter or did parents of our grandparents shout and scream like mine?

Questions like this go unanswered simply because nobody knows the truth..yet, somehow, I still connect. To connect with ancestors in the Otherworld means to bring something back into the family line that was long ago lost because of some divine reason. Perhaps it was meant to teach us a lesson, or perhaps it was simply meant to be again found by a descendant strong enough to do so. To connect with ancestors in the Otherworld means to heal wounds calcified by time and finally allow those who had been trapped by pain and by grief the freedom to wander as they please, to find the peace within themselves that they wouldn't have been able to reach in life. I used to look in the mirror and see only me, see only all of the pain and grief and guilt and anger that I carried with me my entire life. I look in the mirror now and I see relief..I see my ancestors smiling back at me because I was able to find them even when they couldn't find themselves. I was able to heal.