Your Body Is an Ancestor

Resharing an adapted version of the piece written for Braided Way in 2022 to honor those people and beings I have lost recently as we enter Samhain season. Images are from Ana Mendieta’s Siluetas.

The locust leaves lie like golden scales across the stones. I imagine, last night, a honey-colored snake winding along the path, parallel to the river, rubbing off the skin of the past year. A light rain frills the air, hung on wind, refusing to fall, swept forever sideways as if guided by another gravity. It is almost Samhain. A time when some believe that the dead are closest. Although ancestral celebrations punctuate the entire calendrical years, each tailored to different ecosystems and practices. The dead, outside of our idea of time as a linear progression, paradoxically mark the passing of time.

How do we honor our ancestors? What are the rituals and the spells necessary to mark this time? I want to offer that although rituals are powerful and spells can summon the unexpected, there is no need of special instruction or initiation. All you need is your hands, your eyes, and the constant infinity loop drawn between your lungs and the churning, sporulated air of the entire world.

Ancestor altars are powerful anchors in a home. I personally find them to be powerful places to plant my prayers. But you do not need to trace your bloodline back ten generations. Ancestry isn’t just a lineage. Or an external altar. It is also a nonlinear tangle of animacy with multiple points of entry. For me, ancestry extends beyond the human. It is rhizomatic, rooting into different species and deep time.

Your body is an ancestor. Your body is an altar to your ancestors. Every one of your cells holds an ancient and anarchic love story. Around 2.7 billion years ago free-living prokaryotes melted into one another to form the mitochondria and organelles of the cells that build our bodies today. All you need to do to honor your ancestors is to roll up like a pill bug, into the innate shape of safety: the fetal position. The curl of your body, then, is an altar not just to the womb that grew you, but to the retroviruses that, 200 million years ago taught mammals how to develop the protein syncytin that creates the synctrophoblast layer of the placenta. Breathe in, slowly, knowing that your breath loops you into the biome of your ecosystem. Every seven to ten years your cells will have turned over, rearticulated by your inhales and exhales, your appetites and proclivity for certain flavors. If you live in a valley, chances are the ancient glacial moraine, the fossils crushed underfoot, the spores from grandmotherly honey fungi, have all entered into and rebuilt the very molecular make up of your bones, your lungs, and even your eyes. Even your lungfuls of exhaust churn you into an ancestor altar for Mesozoic ferns pressurized into the fossil fuels. You are threaded through with fossils. Your microbiome is an ode to bacterial legacies you would not be able to trace with birth certificates and blood lineages. You are the ongoing-ness of the dead. The alembic where they are given breath again. Every decision, every idea, every poem you breathe and live is a resurrection of elements that date back to the birth of this universe itself.

Today I realize that due to the miracle of metabolic recycling, it is even possible that my body, somehow, holds the cells of my great-great grandmother. Or your great-great grandmother. Or that I am built from carbon that once intimately orchestrated the flight of a hummingbird or a pterodactyl. Your body is an ecosystem of ancestors. An outcome born not of a single human thread, but a web of relations that ripples outwards into the intimate ocean of deep time.

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I am overwhelmed with gratitude by how many of you have showed up here to support my work and widen my thinking. Right now you are literally keeping me alive and funding the out-of-pocket medical expenses that allow me to receive IV nutrition and connective tissue specialists.

I am grateful in a way that is wide and deep and low. I hope you can feel some sonorous note of it - the hum and grind of ice relaxing under the sun - in your body. I am sending the song of my thanks your way. I love you all so much.