My ancestors are whispering loudly to me, ”It is time to gather and honor us”. Their voices seem to be coming from the leaves in their death dance, exuberant as they fall to the forest floor in red, yellow and orange. A wise old face winks at me through tree bark.
I send invitations to my friends: Gather memories of your ancestors! Don costumes! Cook fruits of the harvest! Light candles! Imagine ritual!
More leaves blast out of the trees in the strong winds. The ancient ones in my bones literally vibrate in my cells. I restlessly open old boxes and lift fragile photos of my ancestors out into the light. Staring into their faces… I hear music slip out of doors onto the street. Theater goers in long coats follow the melody into warmly lit halls. They settle in their seats pensively for the on rush of excitement as blackness descends and the curtain rises. In the light, my grandmother glows, her auburn hair flowing over silk and ribbons. Her breath gathers as a giant wave and then rings out across the far reaches of the hall, passionately articulating the stories of lovers, heroes, martyrs, saints and sinners. My bone memories float back to the moors, where an ancient grandmother leans into a fire and tells tales as the wind beats against the stone walls of her home place.
I carry the photos of my ancestors out to our Yurt in the woods and place them on an altar of sticks, stones, and bones. My grandmother an actress, my grandfather an artist, my father an archeologist and explorer. A distant relative, a diplomat in Marseille, who signed visas against orders, helped 3000 jews escape the Nazis. I place what images I have of them against the black velvet and take a deep breath.
My husband Stephen leans photos of his family against a book that has a drawing of his distant relative, a famous Rabbi from the Ukraine peering out from the cover.
We light more candles, bring the homemade bean soup and mulled wine to the table, and turn on the throaty mournful folk music of Eastern Europe. The Owls in the hills call down into the darkness around our homestead.
The night is warm. Too warm. The on-rush of fear and grief never far away as we acknowledge in hush whispers that climate change is rapidly heating the planet and we can only love the unusual sweet warm air in November, skin deep.
Guests arrive wearing hand made masks of creatures and old beings. They carry their photos to the altar, ringing the bell to announce that their ancestors have arrived. We hand out the warm mulled wine. The altar fills with black and white faces and offerings of potatoes, herbs, and a nest of wool with rose petals. A cowboy statue that was played with by a recently deceased father glints in the candle light.
We sit in a circle and take time in silence to find words to share with our ancestors and we write them on long, thin, white, pieces of paper. I have snipped a branch from the beech tree outside the door, the dried yellow leaves still rattling as we tie our notes and prayers to its twigs. We ring an old camel bell from Afghanistan and send out sound waves that sets us humming like bees as we walk out of the yurt to the fire my son has been tending.
We laugh as we navigate placing the branch into the fire. A little tree held up by metal tongs and tentative fingers. The branch burns slowly. The white papers wave wildly in resistance to the heat. And then suddenly burst into orange and blue flames sending our prayers upward into the darkness, the remains descending into ash.
“We are ancestoring… what we are doing is a verb” says Levi. Our heads bob a collective “Yes” in the glow of the fire. He tells us that he is wearing his grandfather’s hat and on his finger the ring of his other grandfather for the first time together on his body, tonight. I look around the circle and sense a vast tree like network emerging out of us into the stars, and then mirror like returning to the seed from which we all have originated. I wonder if we are returning to emptiness collectively sooner than we could have imagined, as the warm wind touches sparks my worst fears again.
Others share. Stephen sees a pebble in the water, the ripples going outward remembering his father’s escape from Moscow by train across Siberia to the mountains eventually arriving in Shanghai. Annie, pauses at her ancestral line remembering how her mother lost all of her family pictures in the recent fires in Paradise, California. Jeanie hears her grandfather whispering to her about how he escaped Russia to Argentina and became a farmer and joined a Jewish Theater. Daniel speaks of an Olympian grandfather who leapt over high hurtles to win the gold. Others who stay silent convey the rawness of remembering those who have recently passed.
There are still leaves in the tree near by rustling in readiness for their decent. We shuffle back quietly to the Yurt to partake in our feast of black bean soup, crusty bread, and pumpkin pie.