TREE & BLOOD
by Iona Miller, (c)2016
by Iona Miller, (c)2016
THE TREE & THE BLOOD
"It is indeed a desirable thing to be well-descended,
but the glory belongs to our ancestors." --Plutarch
I Am the Threshold
In the beginning, there is you. We start our genealogical exploration beginning with ourselves as Ground Zero of the ancestral field. This is our first step across the Threshold of the genealogical journey into active engagement. Throughout the process, love remains the great Mystery.
We have to cover and recover our Tree -- the same ground -- as new information and details are made public all the time. The study of family lineages, triumphs and tragedies, takes on new meaning when we realize the infusion of history with our own family tree. We get a visceral response realizing the vast numbers, numerous romances, historical events, and sex acts that contribute to our emergence. Change one, and we aren't here.
There may be clues to our place in the family -- naturally from our surname, often from our given name, as well as the tales we hear on the knees of our family, each with their own overt and covert versions of our early history. Many adventurers, new world migrants, and pioneers had many chances to turn back, but they didn't. They kept going because they were holding on to something.
Now and Again
Those family names, separate from our social persona, may open a chink in the brick wall of our heritage, and provide a unique perception of our genesis. Also, we need to correct wildly mistaken results: for example, "son in law" was an old term for 'stepson'. There is no recipe for such useful descriptions, which must be extracted like alchemical gold from the lead of causal connections.
The shaman-therapist knows the power of names and naming. Each name has its own history and its own memory. It connects beings with their origins. A true name expresses, or is somehow identical with, its true nature. The name is not an approximation or idealization, but it is important to unpack in just what ways it is true than to simply announce it is so.
The notion that language, or some specific sacred language, refers to things by their true names is central to philosophical study as well as various traditions of magic, religious invocation and mysticism (mantras) since antiquity. Language influences emotions. Speech is eternal and meaning is its permanent aspect -- verbal testament to ultimate reality.
In the mid to late 18th century, homesickness was diagnosed as a fatal condition called nostalgia—from nostos, “homecoming,” and algia, “pain.” There was an outbreak of people who were experiencing a longing for home that was so intense it produced a melancholy and an exhaustion, but also sores, pustules, and fevers. People who suffered from it couldn’t eat. They’d end up fading away and dying.
Nowadays we think of homesickness as something kids have on sleepovers. It certainly hasn’t appeared on a death certificate since 1918. We used to have these words for the feeling of wanting to be home, the feeling of wanting to be in one place for a very long time, which have now disappeared. “Homefulness,” is the feeling you get when you turn the corner of your road or your airplane lands and you know you're near home...a combination of relief and belonging.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/12/the-book-of-human-emotions-language-feelings/420978/
The Druids, Celtic wizards whose name means "tree," worked their magic in oak groves. Perhaps some people are like designated 'Tree-herders' for their family. Untended, trees grow wild and dangerous -- profoundly unconscious. We risk forgetting our own name. But, life renews itself when we turn directly to the unconscious psyche and its wisdom.
We can "take back" the psychic and metaphorical nature of our true name. It changes what you care about. We learn to recognize ancestral energy, open to it, to its representations, to the body awareness, and field perception -- directly lived in one's skin.
Maybe, for certain purposes, we should care about people as the messy real-world things we all are, which are only approximately people. For example, we may unconsciously cast people from our real lives in the roles of our genealogical characters or issues around the passage of power and love.
But beware of literalization, fantasies, and idealization. With fantastical dogmatism, the world doesn’t really match your descriptions of it. If we lose track of that fact, we come to believe that our metaphysics are just true. Some develop a selective blindness to what is actually going on around them, in both intellectual and day-to-day life. Somehow we manage to see things and not see them.
Like Jung's report in MDR of his near-death experience, "I would know what had been before me, why I had come into being, and where my life was flowing. . .My life seemed to have been snipped out of a long chain of events, and many questions had remained unanswered. Why had it taken this course? Why had I brought these particular assumptions with me? What had I made of them? What will follow?"
"It is indeed a desirable thing to be well-descended,
but the glory belongs to our ancestors." --Plutarch
I Am the Threshold
In the beginning, there is you. We start our genealogical exploration beginning with ourselves as Ground Zero of the ancestral field. This is our first step across the Threshold of the genealogical journey into active engagement. Throughout the process, love remains the great Mystery.
We have to cover and recover our Tree -- the same ground -- as new information and details are made public all the time. The study of family lineages, triumphs and tragedies, takes on new meaning when we realize the infusion of history with our own family tree. We get a visceral response realizing the vast numbers, numerous romances, historical events, and sex acts that contribute to our emergence. Change one, and we aren't here.
There may be clues to our place in the family -- naturally from our surname, often from our given name, as well as the tales we hear on the knees of our family, each with their own overt and covert versions of our early history. Many adventurers, new world migrants, and pioneers had many chances to turn back, but they didn't. They kept going because they were holding on to something.
Now and Again
Those family names, separate from our social persona, may open a chink in the brick wall of our heritage, and provide a unique perception of our genesis. Also, we need to correct wildly mistaken results: for example, "son in law" was an old term for 'stepson'. There is no recipe for such useful descriptions, which must be extracted like alchemical gold from the lead of causal connections.
The shaman-therapist knows the power of names and naming. Each name has its own history and its own memory. It connects beings with their origins. A true name expresses, or is somehow identical with, its true nature. The name is not an approximation or idealization, but it is important to unpack in just what ways it is true than to simply announce it is so.
The notion that language, or some specific sacred language, refers to things by their true names is central to philosophical study as well as various traditions of magic, religious invocation and mysticism (mantras) since antiquity. Language influences emotions. Speech is eternal and meaning is its permanent aspect -- verbal testament to ultimate reality.
In the mid to late 18th century, homesickness was diagnosed as a fatal condition called nostalgia—from nostos, “homecoming,” and algia, “pain.” There was an outbreak of people who were experiencing a longing for home that was so intense it produced a melancholy and an exhaustion, but also sores, pustules, and fevers. People who suffered from it couldn’t eat. They’d end up fading away and dying.
Nowadays we think of homesickness as something kids have on sleepovers. It certainly hasn’t appeared on a death certificate since 1918. We used to have these words for the feeling of wanting to be home, the feeling of wanting to be in one place for a very long time, which have now disappeared. “Homefulness,” is the feeling you get when you turn the corner of your road or your airplane lands and you know you're near home...a combination of relief and belonging.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/12/the-book-of-human-emotions-language-feelings/420978/
The Druids, Celtic wizards whose name means "tree," worked their magic in oak groves. Perhaps some people are like designated 'Tree-herders' for their family. Untended, trees grow wild and dangerous -- profoundly unconscious. We risk forgetting our own name. But, life renews itself when we turn directly to the unconscious psyche and its wisdom.
We can "take back" the psychic and metaphorical nature of our true name. It changes what you care about. We learn to recognize ancestral energy, open to it, to its representations, to the body awareness, and field perception -- directly lived in one's skin.
Maybe, for certain purposes, we should care about people as the messy real-world things we all are, which are only approximately people. For example, we may unconsciously cast people from our real lives in the roles of our genealogical characters or issues around the passage of power and love.
But beware of literalization, fantasies, and idealization. With fantastical dogmatism, the world doesn’t really match your descriptions of it. If we lose track of that fact, we come to believe that our metaphysics are just true. Some develop a selective blindness to what is actually going on around them, in both intellectual and day-to-day life. Somehow we manage to see things and not see them.
Like Jung's report in MDR of his near-death experience, "I would know what had been before me, why I had come into being, and where my life was flowing. . .My life seemed to have been snipped out of a long chain of events, and many questions had remained unanswered. Why had it taken this course? Why had I brought these particular assumptions with me? What had I made of them? What will follow?"
(c)2013-2016; All Rights Reserved, Iona Miller, Sangreality Trust
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[email protected]
Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.