Never Land

The overt cultural inheritances were so few- corned beef on St. Patrick’s Day, Swedish pancakes, a Swedish children’s song. It never occurred to me to pursue any kind of deeper connection, either through research or visiting those communities in the US, or to make pilgrimages to those motherlands.

Thirty years ago, a freshman in college, I felt my responsibility as a citizen was to study the marginalized histories of people in the United States. Following on an excellent high school history education that included Eyes on the Prize, The People’s History, I went straight into African-American studies. I studied the African diaspora throughout the Americas, and immersed myself in Black Feminist Theory, as well as Social Policy. At the time, the education was strongly anti-essentialist.

There was definitely an ethos that “white people need to do this work with other white people.” That “work” to me meant educating “my” people about racial bias and privilege, about not letting racism go unquestioned, and to always work on behalf of people who had less than I had. I never heard this charge of working with other white people as a call inner or outer to deeply explore my own roots.

And even though my Irish and Swedish great grandparents who came here were poor and then became poor working class, the story of the American dream, of their children, my grandparents, making it through college, owning houses, and making it to early retirement- that story of resilience and national identity and bootstraps and World War II was a stronger one.

I’ve lived all over the world. I went searching for spirituality in Asia and then in Brazil. Decades ago, you could hear me saying “I feel at home wherever I go.” I cared about my impact on the places I went, but I took care of that by learning the languages and imagining that I was more of a traveler than a tourist. I often felt that I could express the stirrings of my heart and my spiritual leanings in Sanskrit or Portuguese.

I heard Stephen mention that one of the best ways to make yourself known to your ancestors is to speak a language they can understand. I was arrested. I asked myself, “what language would that be?” I asked myself: “Do you have to be drawn to something to really learn it?” Because I had learned Sanskrit and Portuguese relatively easily based on how familiar it seemed and how badly I wanted to communicate with the people where I was. At that time, I didn’t even know there was such thing as an Irish language to learn.

When Stephen said “wouldn’t it be a thing to be together in Ireland?” I said “yes!” 

But I didn’t feel excited about going to Ireland, I felt daunted, without knowing exactly why. There seemed to be long, dark shadows there.

I did harbor a hope that I would be recognized and claimed, that the red hair that had non-Irish people constantly asking if I was Irish would be a signal or a beacon, that the Irish themselves would say “you look like my sister.” “You must be from here,” or maybe “welcome home?”

It was a joke among our traveling band that I wanted to be mistaken to be from there. I guess it’s understandable as a person who has never remotely blended in anywhere I have traveled. I wanted to feel surrounded as a majority.

A few months ago, we made a pilgrimage to Wales, England and Ireland. In Ireland, our small traveling band searched out stone circles, Sheila-na-gigs, and wells. We found some of those and stone walls and famine houses.

Stephen has said that the dying people he counseled were mostly filled with unspooling dread that they would be forgotten. So as a living person it’s our responsibility to claim the dead and remember them. 

He says there’s no such thing as the ancestors; there are only my ancestors or your ancestors.

So I did go to a land where some of my people came from, and I did ask questions about their names and speak them aloud, but I still don’t have ritual practice to connect to them. 

I live in the suburbs and work on screens. 

I have the fantasy of the times- a farm community where more of my life is with people, hands in the dirt, family meals, in nature, with intergenerational family care. 

Twenty five years ago, Stephen moved out of the big city to a farm. I’m on one side of the hill and he is on the other.

The Orphan Wisdom school has been called a study of the “unauthorized history of North America.”

This work hasn’t been elaborated as much publicly as Stephen’s work on death and elderhood, although it’s foundational to what he has been teaching and practicing for the last twenty three years.

We come together again- this time to contemplate this hill, to consider our relationship to dirt, to place, to ancestry and to culture. And to make culture in doing so. 

Have Courage!