I am in a therapy session, I am asked to connect to my "sacred ancestors" (which is a way of delineating those who have wisdom and love and can respond with compassion - not those who lived in sick or cruel ways and who were broken or lost.) I am directed to ask them for guidance with the sense of heart brokeness that I feel at this moment.
Very quickly I hear the words; "Well you start a new". I both sense that is not the right answer and that it is in fact part of my DNA. I had an ancestor that came over to escape conscription. I had ancestors that came over to escape a potato famine. I had wealth Scottish ancestors who came over to escape the disgrace of their father's shady business dealings, and even made a new family crest in an attempt to start over. So deep in my lineage is the response to danger and difficulty the impulse to go somewhere else and to start over. However, I am also aware (see previous post on settler ancestors) that they did this at the price of taking Native people's land, and of mistreating the land and African people's.
As I feel more deeply into this I see that generations of people - in all families not just mine - have lived lives of pain and suffering mixed with joy, hope and love. The human experience is a very mixed experience. It is never all one thing. It is never all joy and love, nor is it all pain and suffering (although sometimes if we focus narrowly it may seem that way.)
I notice the heartbreak I know of my mother's and her mother's and my paternal grandparents. I notice that all the depth of my heartbroken pain is not mine but partly their's carried in me. I stand with the heartbrokeness and do a practice I have been taught for intergenerational trauma, sending back healing energy: white light, wind, water, fire, what ever seems right back through the generations sending the burden and the healing back until it is dispersed, gone, no longer held in the current generation - no longer to be passed to the next generation.
My heartbrokeness feels less. Then I notice when it is unhealed, ungrieved, unreleased it is an anchor. There is no going forward, there is no moving to the next love and the next joy. There is simply staying rooted in the pain, the sense of unrepairable hurt and loss. I see now that I want to learn how to let as Joanna Macey says: "your heart to be broken open so their is room inside" Space for the next thing. I want to grieve in a way that honors that the love was great and also in some ways permanent.
As I notice all this I realize - it is not just my Mother and her mother's romantic heartbreaks....it is that every generation of my family that came over here, that immigrated here, (just as is true of your families immigrant generation - till at least there was planes) left behind previous living generations, they left behind the graves of their beloved dead, left behind the land that they had know intimately and the culture that was familiar. And some with a sense of adventure and embrace of the new did ok with moving from the heartbreak to the next love and the next joy. But many, I think particularly the women who are so imbedded in relationships, lived heartbroken. And this too is part of our settler heritage - an unhealed heartbrokeness.
How might we respond differently to climate chaos if we learned to go into our heartbreak not as an anchor but as a breaking open? How might we we respond differently if we began to heal the heartbreak of our ancestors of being without a homeland? Then might we seriously undertake the task Robin Well Kimmerer invites us too of becoming naturalized to the land?
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