ancestors in our body

It has been a moment since I have written you… I have missed you. The autumn has been a long, rich darkening season of rain, heavy chocolate humus on the redwood forest floor, dense mosses shocked to plush emerald life by storms… salmon thrashing in the creek… and so many internal shadows coming out into the light. An initiation. Into… knowing our true essence as Love? living more fully? surrendering to the mystery? Time will tell…

The other day a wise woman guided me to meditate on the truth that I am never alone… to look inside my body and feel the divine cosmic everything that is always there.

I sat. Breathed.

After a spell of silent listening, sitting up on the floor, knees out, palms up, surrendered… I felt how I am a mountain… a solid form of presence and power. I felt the ancient worn granite bodies of the Adirondacks who raised me, where my ancestors roamed for generations, where Haudenosaunee and Abenaki roamed longer. The glacial lakes and salty Atlantic and Pacific have shaped and infused life into my hands, arms, feet, forehead. I felt wells of cool, still water down around my lower back, deep inside my pelvis, holding me down to earth. My skin and bones remember mountains and oceans from other lands, too, much farther back in time… a circle of women on black sands flickers in, gathered on a stormy Northern coast...

I felt too cold. I was in my teacher’s cabin, under the coastal redwoods in a valley misted and anchored by an icy and laughing creek, tucked below the horizontal rays of mid-day November sun. Damp chill almost solstice cold in my bones almost sent me in panic… I am afraid of being cold. I hate being cold.

I looked inward, deeper… and breathed into my lower belly, and felt my womb kindle and glow, an ember, molten lava, radiating gentle, deep heat through my bones… sending up a steady current of flame, feeding a blooming rose of fire at my heart, she bloomed, and kept blooming... an enchanted rose. The heart fire, rising up from her anchor in the lower fire, the ming men.

Then I turned to the forest - and I was shot through with love and longing. The forest is so close-in, it is my beloved, my first friend, ever since I was a little girl with the balsam and birches and cedars and crow-tended pines, and much, much longer than that, the sugar maples that the natives taught my ancestors to tap, maybe ancient Białowieża woods and Celtic groves. The richness and life of the forest arched through my body, the redwood trees surging up the center of my spine, pulling me skyward with dizzy intensity, keeping my head aloft, while sending roots deep through my tail. I felt the growing and reaching of living green, wrapping my ribs around my torso, vines expanding through my vessels and fascia, unfurling their shapes. I am the forest, too.

My belly found earth, alive, slow compost, tangled humus, dense, warm and soft, full of mystery and depth and life, an engine of depletion and abundance, of complexity and feeling and devastation and possibility. The earth in the topsoil of my cozy, ever-changing, hyper-sensitive viscera. Memories in my guts, of drought, wildfires, sowing and tending and nourishment and gentle rains. Home.

My blood was the deepest paradox. My yoga teacher says that the blood is fire… but from Chinese medicine I know it to be rivers, watery, yin. What I felt in my body was how it is both. It is a wet, hot, tumbling river of fire, dynamic, electrical, crystalline… alchemizing, moistening, soothing, softening… flooding my fields of flesh with its nourishing spark of life. Blood is both fire and water at once.

That no one, with all their AI and nano-chips and digital frequencies, can possibly separate us from our source in nature, elements, life. Because we *are* that. After this meditation, the idea of engineering ourselves apart from nature feels absurd. We can forget who and what we are… we can become lost from our mother, and get confused, and malnourished and sick… but that does not change our essence in the slightest. We can only be drawn back to nature, in the end.

And there it was… not alone, never alone. Infinite, timeless. We are the ancient forests and mountains and myriad of warm-blooded relatives. We are the wind, the worms, the snakes, the birds… the oceans, the minerals.

Chinese medicine has an ancient and nuanced teaching about all of this, where we embody the elements and forces of nature, and they move and live inside our vessel in specific, nuanced ways, according to cosmic laws of harmony and balance. The entire system of healing and prescription and diagnosis is based on this. Vedic philosophy describes the microcosm of our bodies mirroring the macrocosm of the universe. Logically and scientifically, we also understand that our bodies are built of the same molecules of carbon and salts and waters of the physical material earth, and that we compost back into earth when we depart.

Anyone can also understand this through inner listening- meditating with close attention on the sensations of our physical body - and by immersing ourselves in nature. Breathe into the embers and sink into the aquifers of your roots, somewhere in the cave of your pelvic bowl. Tend an open fire. Look for the forest in your form, with crows that dive and coast below the canopy. I’ll meet you there.

For the past decade I have been learning to reach out into the ethers to connect to my ancestors. Even as I was able to tune in and feel their belonging, love and guidance… I somehow also feel odd about it… like maybe they shouldn’t be gods, outside myself, remote, on clouds and stars… if everything true and good and ancient and “out there” is also in our bodies… shouldn’t they be closer in?

Of course, our ancestors are in our bodies. This is no revelation - we all know this. Our bloodline… “you have your grandmother’s eyes.” The unique stripes and crystals of our irises and shape of our squint and variation of the curves of bones and microscopic texture of skin are all personally gifted and designed by our ancestors, who made them out of dirt and sea and sky. Our infinite line of creative lovers kept spiraling themselves outward, becoming bigger, more of themselves, beyond death, across space and time, into our own form. They are alive still, looking feeling speaking through us. Try it, if you haven’t before… try to go inside and find your ancestors there… see who speaks, where they live in your body, what they have to say.

Chinese medicine has our ancestors living in our kidneys, through the “Jing”, the most essential life force, endowed by our parents at conception and during gestation… our “ancestral” Qi, perhaps stored in the ming men, or the root chakra, kidney area. It is cold rainy winter here in Northern California, and the damp chill gets into the bones. To steady and conserve these original gifts from those who came before… wrap your Kidneys with me, drink warm liquids, stay relaxed and cozy. I spoke to this, on IG:

And now for apothecary & clinic news among the roots and chrysanthemums.

Our Embody Chinese Medicine class has been sitting at the feet of our ancestor the California bay laurel tree, aka Pepperwood, aka Umbellularia californica… in an old grove in Point Reyes, listening… learning about bay medicine through teachings and books and direct experience… then returning to gather bay nuts, process them together, making edible treats for the holidays, touching back to a traditional indigenous food. We have two classes left, and will part ways just before the darkest night. If you’re interested in the spring round of Embody Chinese Medicine, I’ll be opening registration in January.

I’ve been wild crafting, brewing and bottling lots of medicine here for you at Abalone Apothecary…

• Bear Blood strengthening protective honey syrup

• Love your Lungs & Clear Head for respiratory infections & seasonal malaise…

• desert-wildcrafted Skin Serum for any irritated angry infected skin thing…

• Resilience tincture to keep you healthy while you travel…

• Sleep Sweet drops to drop you into dream…

• Joint & Nerve formula for injury, ache or arthritis…

• tea blends for digestion, uplifting, relaxing, skin, postpartum…

plus some new medicinal creations that are brewing, by moonlight, as I write to you here. I would love to put together a custom and yummy winter wellness bundle for your household, so you’ve got what you need when you need it, to tend yourselves and your loved ones with potent, effective and life-affirming natural medicines. Please reach out if you get winter-sick… I got you, the herbs do too. I can send remedies by post if you’re not local.

Always dreamy to connect with you here. I promise, lightly, not to let so much time go by before the next one… I have so much more to tell you!

but for now, I’m sending love and woodfire blessings for your darkest nights.

Alison