Life Living Itself

In my early thirties I discovered the writings of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, author, story teller, and Jungian analyst.  Through her work I found echos of my childhood and developed an even stronger belief in me.  Clarissa presented stories, myths, and archetypes that supported and validated my truths from childhood, adolescence, and my early adult years.  Her writing reinforced my belief that living without fear, guilt, or shame is a desired place to be.  

She teaches that human life is closely bound to all life forms and the interdependence between species is necessary to our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well being.   The natural world is a great teacher and presents wonderful metaphors to humans.  Her books are full of stories, myths, and legends that she has collected from around the world.

Her works created in me both a desire and a pride in learning more of my family of origin.  As a teenager and a young adult I often dismissed and scoffed at the teachings and wisdom my elders shared.  It seemed trivial and not important to my well educated mind.  It took maturity to understand that those lessons held as much, and often more, wisdom than what I learned in the hollowed halls of academia.  

Sara was my great-grandmother.  She was a metis woman of mixed blood.  Her father was half Cherokee whose German father and Cherokee mother had come north to avoid the forced migration of the Cherokee to Oklahoma.  The Trail of Tears was an infamously forced relocation of the original people, now called Native Americans, from their homes in the southeastern part of the United States.  Sara's mother was part Sioux, a medicine woman skilled in the use of native plants in healing, and a midwife.  My grandmother, Eva, Sara's daughter, was the last child she as a midwife delivered.

Sara's parents carried European blood and they lived by the European name of Reed; were able to purchase farm land along the Mississippi river in western Illinois, and raised a family.  Surrounded by a culture that would not accept their heritage they learned to pass for white, but their lineage ran deep, and Sara, at her mother's hand, learned to practice the native way of healing and living in balance with nature.   

Discovering Clarissa's writings opened me to exploring and accepting my roots.  The secrecy that came with discovering my native ancestry and the lengths Sara's children went to hide this truth made knowing my lineage difficult.  The single most important thing that helped me know my paternal ancestry was Sara's stories.  She was 85 when I was born and she died shortly before my sixth birthday, but in those years with her she shared much with me of my ancestors  and her life experiences. Sara was a story keeper and a story teller and in doing so passed on her knowledge of her world to me.

From her stories and later from Clarissa's emphasis on myth, story, and legend I realized that Sara had left me with great awareness of where I came from.  My child memories were not distorted with prejudicial thought because my child's mind had absorbed her stories without encultureated ideas. 

Sara's stories were as clear and powerful as were the myths and legends in Clarissa's writings.  They took me beyond my immediate world and spoke to me through an archetypal language.  Sara's stories, and later Clarissa's, taught of the importance of learning where I came from and how this interacts with who I am now.  

Accepting who I am and where I come from gives me the knowledge of why I carry patterns of thinking and feeling encoded in my DNA.  From that knowledge comes the wisdom of how to honor my past without having to be trapped in it.  From this I can learn compassion of feeling and impeccability in thought which allows me to have conscious choice in my life.  Feelings often begin at an unconscious level that effects how I think, even when my mind does not grasp the origins of these thoughts.

Realizing that trace memories, feelings, and thoughts arise from the DNA that accompanied me from the moment of my conception encourages me to understand my ancestral patterns.  I believe these patterns are important to self understanding.  In some cultures indigenous people believe that humans are born with not only personal DNA, but also with strands of family, community, cultural, and universal DNA.  This molds and influences who we are and is then further formed by our life's experience.  Simply stated it is nature and nurture influences on our lives.

Clarissa's works coupled with knowing my ancestral history allowed me to move into a place of self acceptance, self forgiveness, and ultimately being able to change.  I had to accept my past, who and where I came from, how this unknowingly created unconscious feelings, how conscious choices them interacted with my body's memories from birth, and together how this created the palate of colors that made up my life.  Awareness, understanding, and acceptance of all of this allowed me to then make change in my life.  Stories, myths, and legends were important tools in learning to translate and then apply what I learned to me. I learned to blend, shade, and change the color palate of my life. 

The history of my ancestors coupled with the larger collective unconscious teaches me to see my life as a part of the totality of all.  I have personal, family, and community history and memories, but I also carry the collective memories of the universe encoded in my DNA.  In accepting this I understand that I am, as is everyone, a part of the collective unconscious.  It rises and falls with my thoughts, feelings, and actions.  By remembering and recalling this I remain mindful in life.  Mindfulness allows me to be humble as life lives itself and that this is a journey we all take at some time as we walk each other home.