I imagine I am like many middle-aged white women who have spent years finding my spiritual ancestors. I have read books and taken workshops and attended schools and participated in all manner of guided and copied and invented rituals. I meditate but am not a Buddhist, I do trance drumming but am not First Nations, I divine with thrown sticks but am not African, I see lights in the Sastun but am not Mayan. Where is my place and who are my people? Now I think sampling all these cultural versions of relationship with the Spirit world looks a bit like my cat Meisa trying on boxes. There seems to be something very intriguing and also not quite right about each one. How do I recognize my goodness of fit within all these ancestor ways?
What does seem to fit my spiritual roots are ways of the Oracle. I can look into the hidden present as revealed in tree bark faces along a forest path. I can receive revelation in the flight of birds and the shifts of the wind. The way a candle flame bends brings messages. I can receive answers to someone else's questions in my dreams. I have long maintained that we all can learn to receive meaning from every moment, but I am also beginning to understand that we each have a gift of spirit connection that not everyone may be able to access. Some people have inner sight while others hear voices; some folks can smell unhealthy energies while others are guided by lucid dreams. To my eye Meisa’s boxes all look and smell the same, but clearly she is receiving richer information from her ancestor way for locating just the right place to be.
I have recently discovered that a branch of my Father’s family lived in ancient Scotland; this happened at same time that a friend recommended Manda Scott's series of novels about Boudica, set in tribal Britain in AD 37. The first book opens with a map listing the tribes of Scotland: the Caledonii, the Vacomagi, the Taexali, and the Venicones—these latter people positioned in Ross, the highlands that hold some of my ancestor’s bones. It is intensely exciting to discover that in my decades long search for my ancestor’s way of speaking with the Spirit world, I am finding my place and my people.
