ancestors

I've taken to calling my gnosis based, relationship based spiritual path ancestral animism, and my reasons for that are multiple.

What are the names of the spirits in your ancestral languages? What are the names of the spirits in the land where you live now? How does our relationship to place transform when we view it as relationship, necessitating respect and reciprocity?

These herbs were called Wuldortanas. Wuldor means glory, tanas is related to the word tanian, which means to decide by lots.

The second our lives become a ritual story — honing us, annealing us, moving us outside of the known and into the unknown — we have again agency, choice. This is where working with myth can support our journey, and understanding the ancient form of the most human stories can give our own strange, underworld travels a comprehensive shape.

Telling a story of empowerment around these embodied experiences has been essential to my work, and this passage about disability as a corollary for power affirms what I have been feeling and thinking for a long time.