The Longing for Roots

I have often struggled with what it means to be a third generation Californian living on stolen land.  I love California dearly, but I am also someone who has always longed for a deeper sense of roots.  

I found the siren song of ancestral roots early on in Celtic myths and European herbcraft.  This drew me to England and Scotland by the age of 17, and I have spent the rest of my life feeling as though I were of two places.  

This is not unique.  Indeed, it is an age old story, whom many experience with far more acute trauma and severance than I ever have.  

With the spiritual starvation of the West leading to cherry-picking, one-off workshops and manifest-everything mentality, we are left sifting through the latest best seller on how to find peace, forgetting that we have pathways to the sacred singing in our bones and murmuring from the weeds and wind. 

The sacred has always been connected to place.  It has always been in the water, in the hills, in that particular tree, in the song of that one bird, in your potted basil.  It is everywhere and nowhere.  It is place-specific and universal.  It travels with us, but it is also living and unto itself.  Otherwise, how would the desert sing so clearly to some, and not to others?  How would the unforgiving north speak volumes to you, even though you’ve lived in a fast, coastal city most of your life?  Sometimes our roots are in our ancestral homes, and sometimes the wise earth is much less linear. We find that we are of places far from the roads our ancestors walked. Spirit of place calls the body and soul. It is not always about a specific identity. We are all one species on the same earth, after all. Nonetheless, there is a cadence to the song of a particular river or cave, and these places claim us, whether we seek to be claimed or not.

I believe, as climate change continues to unfold its unpredictability on our modern lives, we will see more and more migration of peoples.  It is happening here in California, as the fires continue to dominate our autumns.  Migration is of course happening due to war, religious prosecution, economic decline, but all are becoming more and more related to climate crisis.  As we become displaced, or seek to make room for the displaced, how does one make reparations with sense of place?  We have never been separate from the Earth that whispers from every corner of our existence.   

I am fortunate, in the dry lands of California, to suffer from no more than longing for an ancestral home.  I sit with this longing and know at the same time, that humans have always been migrating, and that we will again.  We have always been, to some degree, on the move.  A few centuries in one place, then a war, a dark age, a famine and the people move, bringing with them myths, beliefs, and practices from one landscape into another.  Adapting, surviving.  Where is the difference between a melding of place and culture, and the capitalistic act of skimming the cream off the top of some ancient tradition and repackaging it for profit?  Is it that we are always striving towards something with roots and something that frees us of our roots at the same time?  I don’t know.

I find comfort in the way the sacred is handed down through the business of living.  In the simple tasks of cooking, brewing, medicine making, gardening.  Take these candles for instance.  In the meandering thread of my bloodlines, how many times has a beeswax candle been lit, been prayed over?  How many times have hands lovingly and dexterously crafted such a candle from the labors of the bees?  Here, too, without place, without a Wicca 101 book, or a manifestation mantra, here I can find the sacred.  Here I can find both the ancestors and the place I hold, bodily, between the love of two lands.  Between the longing for roots and the creation of roots.  Some subtle dance between being claimed by place and claiming the love of place within.  

Find the thing that is ancient in you, and continue to tend it.  It may be as simple as baking bread.