“The Ancestors Tell Us.” First published in In Stillness, Wonalancet Press, 2021.

The Ancestors Tell Us

My ancestor tells me, “Find pools of silence.” My ancestor can hear the hawks as they wing their way across a singing blue sky. My ancestor lies on the bank of a river in a green, treeless place, and tips his head back into the water to listen for the salmon swimming upstream.

“Pay attention,” my ancestor tells me, sharp knife at her waist, arid land and iron sky vast around her. “Notice patterns,” she says, opening her hand to reveal a palmful of bird bones.

Attention, that gift of stillness and silence—or call it noticing. Call it listening.

This summer, our second summer of Covid, wildfires burn around the world. It was like a tornado, a voice says, the fire flattened the town in twenty-five minutes. The accompanying video glides through a monochrome landscape of debris and smoke-filled air. The only recognizable structures are charred trees—like sentinels, like frozen statues of trees from some distant past that wants to remember and glorify itself, not a past that allows itself to sink into the earth and become food for those who are to come.

A friend frets about a disease striking birds that congregate at feeders. Another friend sees a dehydrated squirrel, all skin and skeleton, dying in an empty stream bed in the parched West. The din of terrible news is unrelenting: virus variants sweep the globe; absurd political divisions; politicians and corporations with a death wish for us all; record financial gain for shameful hoarders of wealth, land, and power; wars that rage on even in the face of pandemic—and villages burning.

Where I live, drought for a second year in a row, and finally, thank heavens, rain. Particulate matter from wildfires drifts west to east across a whole continent and for days the sun is a hazy orange globe casting strange pink light. Sticky heat, too, and hail. I am careful with water. Later, I watch the mold grow.

Where I live, steady movement back and forth between the veil—beloved neighbors and cousins die, old and young; babies are born. We bake cakes for birthday parties and baby showers, cook meals for new parents and friends in new grief. We celebrate those who arrive, those we are lucky to live among, those who are leaving us for now.

Where I live, the garden: a generosity of wildflowers and plant medicine, and so many pollinators. Hummingbirds shimmer, their beaks deep in hollyhock, fuchsia, and honeysuckle. Hummingbird clearwing moths, too, and wasps and bees and butterflies with orange wings bright in the sunshine.

Where I live, in the earth beneath my feet, the bones and memories of ancestors of blood and of all the human ancestors of this place, those who have lived here since the last glacier receded, whose people may have been here long before that. And the other-than-humans: almost every living thing that has existed above the earth is in the earth now, in the soil—rocks and trees, the giant mammals who walked where I now walk, plants that have been here for eons, whose children grow beside me, and plants whose ancestors, like mine, traveled here from all the corners of Europe and farther east. Food for those who are to come.

My ancestors tell me, and I try to listen.

Now. Hawks wheel overhead. The earth, full, beneath me. Patterns.