how to talk to your ancestors (when you're afraid to listen)

10/15/2024

step one: an invitation

AN INVITATION TO DANCE WITH MY DEAD,
TO ASK THEM A QUESTION, TO LISTEN,
AND BE PATIENT ENOUGH TO HEAR THEIR RESPONSE.

~~~

one: an invitation. (2024 / Digital collage)

~~~

On a call with Kadi this morning she asked how I am honoring the death of this season.
I gaze up to the yellowing leaves on the outer edges of a tree that,
bare earlier this year,
taught me about vulnerably and motherhood. 

How do I honor the dying? 

A timely prompt as we deepen into October,
as the leaves turn and the compost churns with fallen matter.
As spooky decorations spill out the neighbors yard.
As our ghosts gather. 

My mothers birthday is on Friday and my birth mom and I will celebrate it at Bones.
 

This year will be the sixth anniversary of her passing;
it feels like I am in a new age of grief. 

The waves come, the phases cycle through. 

But this feels like a new era,
born from a new distance. 

I am aging into an adult,
again,
away from the motherless child narrative.
I’m carefully rekindling relation with my birth mom, reconnecting with Atlanta:
her forests and rivers.
I’m retracing my steps and recovering parental figures, recognizing in my developed body blooming flowers—the perennial blossoms from the seeds their lessons brought me. 

Tonight, I construct an altar for my ancestors separate from my home altar,
the one that grounds me to this land.
This seasonal altar materializes my tie to spirits.
Constructed as the veil thickens—as the portal in the Jewish calendar closes—
I open myself to the ancestors who have passed,
who came before,
who I invite to dance with me now. 

~~~