Where are your roots?” Aunty Rhonda
In June 2023, at a ReKindling Kinnection Retreat with Aunty Rhonda, a Birpai Elder and her daughter Arly, (@ Country-Led Immersions) Aunty Rhonda held my feet and asked ‘where are your roots, girl?’ And I cried…. (I highly recommend their retreats!!!)
I realised I didn’t know where my roots were, all 4 of my kids had left home in February that year and I didn’t know what my role or purpose was if I wasn’t being Mum. I was at a significant mid-life transition and I was feeling groundless…where were my roots?
This question, “where are your roots?” continued to resonate deeply with me in the next few months….I wintered in Tassie at Cradle Mountain in July that year and I was drawn to a tree with crazy roots stretching into the lake…. My art journal of that time is filled with questions, “are my roots here? Can I belong here? This is the place where I most feel at home? Where I feel like I belong?” Seeds of roots, home and belonging were planted…. as I lived into those questions…
What shape waits in the seed of you to grow and stretch into the future sky?” – David Whyte in What To Remember When Waking
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
I deeply immersed myself in Deep Ecology and in the Work That Reconnects and after attending a Deep Ecology Weekend with John Seed in August 2023 I had a dream of uprooting and transplanting a grown tree into more fertile ground…..it was as if everything I had been studying and learning was transplanted into the bigger field of Deep Ecology… a call for humans to remember the deep interrelationship with the more than human world, something almost all cultures around the world believe in that has been forgotten only in recent times by Western Culture.
By refreshing our sense of belonging in the world, we widen the web of relationships that nourishes us and protects us from burnout.”
― Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone, Active Hope the first book I read based on deep ecology
In Internal Family Systems we reflect on Ancestral Lineage, both the painful wounds and the gifts we inherit and I realised almost all of my ancestors have been migrants, with survival stories of being shipwrecked off the NZ coast, of being convicts, of arriving in Australia trying to adapt to this new country, and more recently of uprooting and moving interstate. I deeply resonated with the whales migrating each year, this is in my DNA, to not have roots or to call many places home, migrating.
In October 2023 I travelled to WA to visit the one place that had held 3 generations of my Mum’s family, in Pingrup, a tiny farming community, and I was surprised that as much as I resonate with my scottish great grandmother I didn’t feel any roots to that farmland at all, I didn’t feel that I belonged there. There were stories of this area being a burial site for First Nations people and I was deeply aware of the harm that my ancestors would have caused by choosing to farm land without acknowledging the Traditional custodians of the land. I still deeply feel the pain of this and the need to return land to traditional custodians and to learn from First Nations people how best to care for this country. This is an ancestral wound that needs to be healed.
My scottish great grandmother was a dress maker in Scotland and she would tell people’s fortunes at the weekend markets. She was known to be deeply ‘superstitious’ and to do rituals around the land she lived on, she also loved daily ocean swimming when she moved to the coast. These ancestral roots were resonating, this connection with land, with ritual, with intuition…
In the SoulCraft Intensive with Animus Valley and in other conversations last year I began to realise how my ancestors did know how to connect with land/with earth in their own ways, in Pingrup we visited a stand of trees planted by my pop 50 years ago to rehabilitate the land and there are stories of my Dad hugging trees in the 1970’s so much that a mentor said he needed to find a girlfriend fast!
Still I was seeking to understand my roots. Where do I belong and where do I get my deep love of nature from, my desire to listen deeply to nature and to tune in to nature’s wisdom…. It was a real growing and healing process, filled with synchronicities, for all my parts to realise Lutruwita / Tasmania is my soul home and this is where I belong, this is where I will put down roots (read more here).
And then with the urge to understand more about my Celtic ancestral roots somehow magically I came across this book Sacred Earth Sacred Soul: a Celtic guide to listening to our souls and saving the world by John Philip Newell and so many jigsaw puzzle pieces fell into place…….aaaah these are my spiritual / philosophical roots…..such a deep relief and a deep grounding in my body!
this book is about reawakening to what we know in the depths of our being, that the earth is sacred and that this sacredness is at the heart of every human-being and life-form. To awaken again to this deep knowing is to be transformed in the ways we choose to live and relate and act.” – John Philip Newell Sacred Earth Sacred Soul
The Celtic spiritual tradition is similar to the beliefs and traditions I have studied with the Buddhist philosophy of Interbeing / Interconnectedness (Deep Ecology) and what I have learned about the First Nations way of being in right relationship with country and the Shamanic way of healing in nature but here finally I could claim that they were also in my ancestral roots, it was such a relief and as Newell writes, we recognize something is true when something within us already knows it to be true.
The Celtic Tradition…it is a way of seeing that is based on what the soul already deeply knows, that both the earth and every human being are sacred… In the Celtic tradition it was said that we suffer from soul forgetfulness. We have forgotten who we are and have fallen out of true relationship with the earth and with one another. – John Philip Newell Sacred Earth Sacred Soul
In Celtic Wisdom the sacred is as present on earth as it is in heaven, …as human as it is divine, as physical as it is spiritual. The sacred can be breathed in tasted, touched, heard and seen as much in the body of the earth and the body of another living being….It is the true essence of all life. …The Celts considered the forests and mountains to be their temples….and viewed the feminine as sacred. – John Philip Newell Sacred Earth Sacred Soul
The Celtic Way is such a simple and wise tradition, that we need to remember our Soul and remember the sacred essence within all living beings, and the sacred true interrelationship with all beings…The Celtic tradition was to worship the feminine as sacred…..and they treated the mountains and forests as their temple. I feel like I know this in my bones and I feel very grateful to my Celtic Ancestors for knowing this and deeply sad at how this simple wise knowledge was forgotten by so many of my ancestors AND so relieved this can be remembered and brought to the healing of this earth along with all the other earth-based spiritual practicies and philosophies across this world.
So let me ask you the deep curious question: ‘where are your roots?’ And how might they help you to understand your ancestral wounded parts and your ancestral gifts? This is great to explore in IFS therapy….a personal journey I have been on for a while now!
Every breath is a sacrament, an affirmation of our connection with all other living things, a renewal of our link with our ancestors and a contribution to generations yet to come. Our breath is a part of life’s breath, the ocean of air that envelopes the earth.”
― David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature
Given that the human soul is the very core of our human nature, we might note that, when we are guided by soul, we are guided by nature. Both soul and greater nature do guide us in our individual development, whether or not we ask for this guidance.”
― Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World
Nature, too, supports our personal blossoming (if we have any quiet exposure to her) through her spontaneities, through her beauty, power, and mirroring, through her dazzling variety of species and habitats, and by way of the wind, Moon, Sun, stars, and galaxies.”
― Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World
