to all the hungry ancestors,
I feel your hunger, your call a deep gurgling whine from the cavernous pit of my belly. The old fears live there, they bubble up from the stomach, they rise from their shadowed dwellings where they twist the knotted roots of an ancient tree. When I eat I am possessed, consuming my security rabidly and as quickly as possible. The primal anxiety surrounding the uncertainty of another meal makes its place in my mouth. I am the unquenchable hunger of my cat the week after I picked her up from the shelter when she spent all of her time loitering in the kitchen licking up crumbs. She weighed four pounds and you could see her tiny bones sticking out under her skin in the patches where she was missing fur. I am my grandma, excessively stocking up the pantry, surrounding myself with talismans made of tea and chocolate-covered almonds.
I believe our ancestors live in our bodies, that their traumas, their hunger, their thirst, live on in our instinctual urges, in our addictions, in how we seek our security. Epigenetic research shows that mass traumas such as war, poverty, and famine, affect our lineage for generations to come by transforming the DNA through methylation which causes gene mutations, likely the biological source for most hereditary disorders. In this way, I am the hunger of my ancestors who survived famine and poverty, their inherited fear of starvation weighs heavy in my body. I try to calm their despairing voices with safe foods, and comfort meals, and I’ll end up eating the same meal every day because of the emotional stability it gives me and them. But this alone will not abate our suffering, and if unchecked it quickly becomes an obsession, a performance of ritual eating that serves both as an escape and as a fruitless attempt at grounding.
“The natural, spiritual hunger, if it is not fed by the sacred, is trapped in the demonic”
-Marion Woodman from Addiction to Perfection
Maybe we can never truly escape our unhealed past, maybe we must always contend with the pain experienced by our ancestors that lurks in our own inner darkness and is woven into our very flesh. But it is that same suffering and the survival of our lineage through suffering that also connects us to the strength, power, and wisdom of our ancestors. Those genes that were transformed by the trauma of starvation, exist in us as adaptations, armor our ancestors forged for our survival. They are the fresh growth of the tree that generates a new shape to support the weaker limbs. In this way, the hunger inherited in our DNA drives us to seek the spiritual and emotional satiation that nourishes our ancestral body. It drives us to grow higher to touch the nourishing light of the sun, to pour water at our thirsty roots. The source of our discomfort can become a key to healing, but only if we can allow ourselves to get close to the discomfort enough to bring it to light.
The fact that this pain is not mine alone brings me peace. I share this pain with them and with the living generations of people who feel the hunger of their ancestors deep in their flesh. I make space for their pain and their hunger and allow myself to surrender to it with compassion. Experiencing it without trying always to fix or ignore it opens me up to feeling the strength and resilience that come from the same source. Under this Scorpio New Moon, I sit with that feeling of suffering, of lack, I acknowledge it, and let it be the thread that connects me to the ancestral power. Their cries are barbed with spokes that stick in my throat, their despair eats away at my body, and the flames of their desperation make me hollow. And within that desperation, I feel their arms surrounding me, I feel their warmth holding my heart, and I feel that I am not one but many.
I make offerings to them. I nourish my body for them. I have made myself capacious for them, I have expanded for them so they will fit into the home I have made for them in my body. And in the spaces I have opened, they pour milk into my vessel so that it reaches each limb, flows into my fingers, filling every knuckle. I sing and dance and make art for them so that they can satiate their hunger through my joy. They visit me in my dreams and give me a pen so that I can write for them so that their voices find life in my utterances. My utterances become offerings to them, I find the words taste like sweet berries, the letters that fill our stomach like grain. Water flows from the well of my heart. And the tree grows. And the roots begin to untangle themselves from the tight knots they have wound themselves in. And one day the branches will once again bear fruit that will finally feed our hungry soul.
