Our History
When I read about epigenetics, I felt a wave of relief in my body. Like a child being validated for their feelings instead of rushed out of them, or worse – ignored, denied, told that a parent was never out of control, that their pain or panic wasn’t real. I always had a sense that we carry the stories of our ancestors deep within our bones, but when science gave it a name, it became easier to refer to. I felt it in my own body and I sensed it in all the beautiful humans I got to work with when I was a social worker. It has to do with genes being turned on and off because of our experiences. We are made up of stories, and not just our own. This means that trauma can be passed down, but also joy, strength, resilience, love. It also means our bodies know our history even when we don’t. Just like the earth. Our bodies don’t just keep the score, they spin the stories, they hold the songs and they also have the power to sing them.
I was thinking about this when watching my newly walking chubby daughter toddle around in her yellow tutu in the heaves of our driveway on a rainy spring morning in the front yard of our house in Vermont. It was our first spring in that house, and we were creating the garden I had always dreamed of. I had moved to Vermont to go back to the land. We were planting our seeds, and I was thinking about my disdain for lawns. The way my body tenses up when I hear the leaf blowers and lawn mowers. I was longing for the wild. Maybe it was the sleep deprivation of having a small child but I wanted to know what the land was before all of these suburban plots of grass were so carefully tended.
I started going down a rabbit hole of daydreaming. Imagining the history of the earth from the earth, its-self perspective, and all the living and dead things not simply co-existing but in relation to one another. The decay of the old growth trees feeding the forest. The mother trees giving all the nourishment they have before they finally fall, and then giving more.
Even the weird miracle of gasoline. We use it as fuel to get where we are going. But what is it? Gasoline is made up of petroleum, of crude oil, which is made up of fossil fuels, which were formed from the buried remains of plants and animals that lived millions of years ago. It is made from the dead and decaying living things buried inside the earth for all that time without oxygen. It takes so much time and pressure, which we manipulate into something that will allow us to go as fast as we want to go – to all the places. Just rushing around on this planet that keeps giving and giving. Going faster and faster, when meanwhile there is a deeper time that is always with us.
As a child, I felt that deeper time in the ocean. Always the ocean. Being suspended or propelled by the living water, holding me like the womb of the earth it is. I was so far from my ocean at that time. I moved to the mountains because I thought I also had things to climb. Trees to hug. Moss to pet. But all the while the longing for the deep was inside of me. All the while the ocean plants and animals were dying and then falling to the bottom of the sea and then extraordinarily slowly becoming fossilized. Assembling into something else - those ocean bones doing the same thing that our bones are doing inside of our own bodies all the time.
And so the first part of the song was written after my first child was born. Remembering the untamed parts of myself. Maybe it was the visceral feeling of my body being able to do something – to grow a whole human and then keep that tiny human alive – that made me ache for the wildness while also feeling my connection to it, that I was not separate from it. And trying to make sense of what I would pass along to her, what story would live in her bones, wondering if I could be the bridge between my ancestors, her ancestors, the land and her children. But sometimes these things take time and so I sang the first part of this song to myself for many many years, like a prayer or a spell.
After my second daughter was born, I spent a week surrounded and fortified by visual artists and writers after earning an artist residency at the Vermont Studio Center. I would pump breast milk in the morning and go to my appointed studio to write during the day. I hung touch paintings I had done all over the walls. They were the result of a reiki and art therapy session after a deep meditation. The vision that came to me in that meditation was all the family members and artists and writers and musicians I’d admired, living and the dead, were all around me cheering me on as I sang my own songs. I couldn’t believe they were all there just because I called on them and they were saying with their eyes and their bodies and their hearts - “yes, yes, you can do this, you must do this! Thank you!” And it dawned on me in that moment that I was surprised that they were rooting for me, that they were thanking me for doing what I must. For answering the call of my life’s work, which is to love in my very unique way. Which is to sing.
One day I was able to leave my studio to work in a long-ago converted church. I sang the unfinished song of “our history,” and without writing it down, I began singing the last bit of the song. It finally came to me and through me. In that old abandoned church I was touching on the holiness of this life. It felt like unconditional love from a grandmother I never knew, who collapsed and died at a young age on the beach with her two boys. It felt like finally being brave enough to push past the threshold and cross the bridge, it felt like I was that bridge for her, between the great ocean out there and the land and the trees and the earth right here.
I could feel the trees and the mycorrhizae network connecting them all, and then the lumber and all the humans it took to labor and create this beautiful church – what we build. My holy throat vibrated with the words coming, not only from the darkness inside but also from the light.
It is a powerful gift to be a human on this earth, to be granted a lifetime, which could never be long enough for all this beauty. But not to worry. Our relationship to our body’s wisdom, is the relationship to the earth, is the relationship to all things living and dead, is the relationship to our history and our future.
We can heal the past and the future by being fully present - WE ARE the answered prayers if only we listen, if only we are brave enough to then love.
And so we carry the songs of our ancestors in our bodies. How will we honor their pain, their sacrifices, their love? How will we sing them and ourselves liberated? Can a song be a bridge? Can a person? I believe the answer is yes. And it was this song that taught that to me
Ocean Bones artwork by REGINA VIQUEIRA ROSSI
http://reggierossi.com/
Lyrics for Our History:
I want to know what this patch of grass was.
I wanna know what this patch of grass was
Before the fertilizer fell
Your plump fingers tug at the roots
You splash the puddles with your mud boots
In the heaves, the winter left behind
Maybe you’ll be afraid
You won’t know why
Of sirens singing in the streets
Those ladders coiled in your sweet body
They hold the secrets, spin the stories
Of how our history was made
I wanna know what this gasoline was
I wanna know what this gasoline was
When it lived at the bottom of the sea
With windows down we ride to the beach
Saltwater licks and kisses bare feet
In the waves that traveled a million miles just to crash
Maybe you’ll feel something
You won’t know why
A certain longing for the deep
Those ladders coiled in your sweet body
They hold the secrets, spin the stories
Of how our history is made
There’s a woman that you never met
She’s tucked down deep inside your bones
They break down and then they build again
Climb the ladder that your body knows
Now the sirens calling from the deep
And the ambulances on the street
And the street laid on the ground for you
And the ball of fire underneath
We’re always living with the dead, ya know
We’re always living with the dead you know