I am taking an ancestral pilgrimage to the towns and regions of my great-grandparents to connect with the lands, cultures, traditions, and historical forces that shaped my ancestors. As a white-bodied person in the US, I have only oriented toward my ancestors through the lens of trauma and accountability and have lost connection to their diverse cultures, foodways and earth-honoring ways. I take this journey to stitch back together my ancestral stories and kinship networks within the context of culture and place, and will be traveling through Switzerland, Bavaria, Bohemia, Poland and Ukraine. Join me as I document the threads of culture, memory, resilience and lineage…
Coming Home
“I am convinced that pilgrimage is still a bona fide spirit-renewing ritual. But I also believe in pilgrimage as a powerful metaphor for any journey with the purpose of finding something that matters deeply to the traveler. With a deepening of focus, keen preparation, attention to the path below our feet, and respect for the…
Love for Ukraine
“This fierce summer took everything extra, made me ask myself every day: what’s important? Important: people. Important: connections. Important: moments of joy and shared sadness, or – more often – shared rage that incites new actions. It is important not to give up. Important: hope. Important: beauty of life, no matter how hard it is…
Dragons and Salt
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet I have been in the magical city…
Polish Roots and Relatives
‘No invader has ever conquered the heart of Poland, that spirit which is the inheritance of sons and daughters, the private passion of families and the ancient, unbreakable tie to all those who came before.’ – James A. Michener First, a brief and very simple history of Poland. Since its inception in 966, when Duke…
Auschwitz-Birkenau
“What is so dreadful is that to transform the traumatic we must re-enter it fully and allow the full weight of grief to pass through our hearts. It is not possible to digest atrocity without tasting it first, without assessing on our tongues the full bitterness of it.”― Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories: History, Culture and…
Deep Time Ancestors
Now is the time to clothe ourselves in our true authority. Act your age. Every particle in every atom of every cell in our body goes back to the primal flaring forth of space and time. In that sense you are as old as the universe, with an age of about 14 billion years. This…
Bohemian Spires and Thunderstorms
I will not die an unlived life.I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire.I choose to inhabit my days,to allow my living to open me,to make me less afraid, more accessible,to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise.I choose to risk my significance to live so that which came…
Bavarian Alps and the Art of Aloneness
“Yet this aloneness is anything but lonely. Solitude gradually clarifies the heart until a true tranquility is reached. The irony is that at the heart of that aloneness you feel intimately connected with the world.” – John O’Donohue The morning I was to leave Switzerland for the Bavarian Alps, I awoke from a dream in…
Swiss Hospitality
I was received in my Swiss homelands by participants of the two-year Timeless Wisdom Training that I am taking with Thomas Hübl to engage in healing our individual, collective and ancestral trauma. It has been amazing to feel the web of this global Sangha, connecting with me along the journey. I feel held. Teodora, a…
Making Offerings
I have arrived in Switzerland, the first stop on my ancestral pilgrimage. In the practice of reciprocity, asking permission and introducing myself to the spirits of this place, I started my journey with an offering. On my first day in Zurich, I walked to the Old Botanical Gardens, to find a quiet natural place so…
Searching for clues
Searching for clues. I’m working now with a Polish guide, Adam, and an Ukrainian guide Sophia, through Lvivtours, a genealogical tour service, who will search down local records, drive me to my ancestral villages, help me to find living relatives in Czech Republic, Poland and Ukraine, and connect me also with cultural, culinary, historical and…
Setting off
Setting out to deepen my kinship roots, I circle back to those who shaped me first. I bow to my two greatest teachers. My mother. My brother. Today, loving them gave me wings. Seeing them through eyes of awareness itself, I cracked open. To love what is. My bones sang as i allowed them to…