At Hallowtide our thoughts turn to the invisible world. We feel the dead draw near and light a candle, maybe say a prayer. We sense a glimmer of presence, a yearning for connection, a reaching from the other side. Or there may be a sign, a strange happenstance, a wild animal, finding something lost, or losing something ordinary.
“You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,” wrote Walt Whitman, “but I shall be good health to you nevertheless.”
Engaging with the world of ancestors can be healing instead of frightening. The ghoulishness of modern Halloween decorations need not be the defining image of encounters with the dead.
I have a practice of dropping in with the ancestors that has been serving me well for several years now, a method of conscious imagining that can only be called shamanic journeying. Sometimes I listen to a drum recording or a guided direction to get started. I sit by my hearth altar, next to a painting of a cottage in a forest, and go to visit an ancestor from so long ago she has no name. I think of her simply as the herb woman.
It is a strange thing to describe and do. Here is an account of a recent journey, beginning as so many have with an imagined visit to the enormous old oak tree in the park near my home.
* * *
I have not come to the great grandmother oak tree for a long time, but I have been feeling lost, spinning, the world is too much.
The old tree’s bark is rough against my hand, but the portal is open, a smooth mandorla scar that invites me to slip into the trunk. The tree is warm around me, the roots soft, and I drift down, unafraid. When I land I see my brown woolen cloak on the peg and fasten it around myself with the circle pin the herb woman gave me after she knew I would return.
It is misty, a fine drizzle of rain, and I put up the hood as I step out. I look toward the village but remember Bobcat’s instruction to stay by the river instead. A little ways on she bounds up the bank to join me, twitching her tail in welcome, never looking straight at me but always next to me. At the path we turn into the woods and walk until I see the cottage.
It is quiet, in disrepair, dried leaves piled on its thatched roof, no smoke from the chimney. Bobcat takes up her place at the door as sentinel. She never comes inside.
I push open the door to see the hearth dark and the corners draped with cobwebs. The herb woman is not here. She has not been here for some time. I go to the hearth and make a little pile of kindling from the dusty bundle on the hearthstone, then reach in my pocket for matches, but I have none. They are in the other world. Then my hand is holding an earthenware cup with a lid and inside is an ember wrapped in moss. Maybe I’ve brought it from my world, or maybe she left it for me. I lift the ember out with the metal spoon on the hearth and tuck it under the kindling, kneeling forward to cup my hands around my mouth and give it breath. It catches and I sit back on my heels. I must be younger in this world to be able to bend so.
I am lonely that the herb woman is not here. Maybe I was meant to come by way of the standing stones near the wall of ice, another way into the deep past I have also learned.
Then I remember she was not visible to me the first time I came, when I lay on the floor at a spiritual conference session and, following the instructions, asked for a guide to the ancestor realms. That’s when I walked to the outskirts of the town I imagined my maternal lineage was from and first saw the single cottage where the conjure-woman lived. The herb woman, the midwife, the witch. She was not visible to me yet but I stood at the entrance, saw the smoky peat fire, the bundles of dried herbs hanging above. It felt a little dangerous, an outlaw place, but I wasn’t afraid. I asked if I could come back, if she would help me. I felt a yes.
Now I come to the cottage again, and again she is gone. I take a bunch of dried mugwort from the herbs hanging in the rafters and add it to the fire. It crackles and catches and the room fills with the sharp smell of memory. She welcomed me when I was here at Samhain, years ago.
I close my eyes.
*
My boon companion Bobcat is joined by Deer, the first animal who visited me from the otherworld many years ago, and Owl, swooping low over me when we enter the forest.
I come to the cottage and knock on the door. The herb woman lets me in and tells me to hang my cloak. The cottage is full, the herb woman busy with her tasks and ministrations of mercy. There are many here today. Someone has died, someone is being born. There are sounds of morning and mourning, exclamations of retrieval and delight. I sit before the fire for a while and watch. I never know who can see me.
Then the herb woman comes to me and says, Let us go to the clearing in the forest and see what is happening in the spiral labyrinth. When we arrive there are many figures in the maze. She says, Your mother is turning and turning and sometimes goes back into the forest and sometimes comes back but she is still quite agitated, she can not find her way. I am sad to see my mother this way, but she had a very uneasy death.
I fall into a kind of trance, almost asleep. There is a bowl full of food, mash, and someone is trying to give me a spoonful of it. I don’t want to take it. They say it doesn’t matter, you are eating it anyway. I shake out of the vision and ask the herb woman what it is about. She says come back to the cottage now.
We go in and sit. She says, Here is a cup of broth for you to be nourished by to make you strong. The food that you eat is your ancestors. Their bodies become you and what you eat, and your body will become what your children eat. They wanted to give you some to make you understand this, but it is true whether you see it or not. We go back into the earth and the earth gives us our food. There is no other mystery than this. Your body now is calling you from the other world. It is time for you to go home to the living.
She goes to the door with me and rests her forehead on mine. You will be safe, she says, and you will also be open to these truths, for they surround you. I want to give her a kiss but she puts her fingers on my lips and says, Save it for the living.
After I hear the door close softly behind me I go back through the forest toward the mighty oak tree. Deer and Owl stop at the edge of the forest and Bobcat comes with me out onto the path to the tree by the river. When I say thank you, she looks at me quietly and then turns away and vanishes.
*
I open my eyes. I am still alone in the cottage. But I understand the herb woman is still here, in the layers. They are all still here, my mother too. They are all everywhere.
It occurs to me that perhaps it is quiet here at the cottage because that lineage is healed and resting. I have done the work, told the story, let them have voice in my world.
Today this is my cottage to tend. To bring the fire, to light the hearth. To bring the stories, to light the memories.
I have been here so many times. It is my home in the otherworld. Another time I will come and the herb woman will greet me with her forehead to mine and her hand on her heart. Another time I will be the one to greet a young one who is here for the first time, and I will heat the cup of broth over the fire and invite her to sit and be welcome.
I return to the tree by the river. My body is tingling. I rise up through the trunk and step out into the park and come home to eat my breakfast.
* * *
The nature of this work is to trust your own intuition. Some will scoff and say, Well, you have only imagined it, and I say Yes! I HAVE imagined it. Imagination is a gift of magic. My ideas and stories are a gift. And so it is with this kind of work, when a suggestion flickers into my mind, to follow this way instead of that, to ask this question instead of that. It is an exercise in trusting the magic.
I have been doing ancestor journeywork in earnest since 2018, but it has been running in my blood all my life, ever since my mother first told me the family secret when I was nineteen years old and I felt that strange connection. A reaching over, I wrote in my journal. Visitations from the other world continued to be spontaneous until I undertook Daniel Foor’s methodical method of study in his Ancestral Medicine course in 2018-2019.
Learning somewhat reliable ways to journey only increased the magic of the connections when they came. I started with his book, but was so at sea with shamanic journeying I signed up for the course. It was a framework to enter the altogether strange and sometimes dangerous encounters with the other world, and I’m glad I took that step.
Another book that I have returned to often is This Ancient Heart, guided there by one of its editors, Caitlín Matthews. a wise elder in ancestor work and my longtime teacher in all things spiritually pagan. Caitlín’s essay, “Healing Ancestral Communion: Pilgrimage Beyond Time and Space,” gives another detailed method to ancestor journeywork, step by step guidance to what is so instinctual it almost beggars description. She has used a charming metaphor of getting control of the “horizontal hold” to describe learning to be well-grounded in the land where you live, and then using the “vertical hold” to access the cultural, ancestral and inspirational “rivers” that flow into us. As someone who remembers the early days of television this delighted me. Cultivating the “vertical hold” allows “ancestors of both blood and spirit [to] become even more aware of us and we of them.”
I highly recommend Linda Hogan’s beautifully written book of essays Dwellings, another early book of explorations for me. I am grateful to the writers who share indigenous knowledge of this sort of wisdom, as the records of my own people are so overlaid with the colonization of Christianity that they can only be imagined, a task which many have attempted. Her words about the ancestors are circulated widely on social media, but almost always without the first part. Once I transcribed that trance experience above of being offered a bowl of food in the spiral labyrinth, I was able to see that clearly I was influenced by this passage. The full quotation, which comes at the very end of the book, is:
It’s winter, and there is smoke from the fires the square, lighted windows of houses are fogging over. It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly, all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.
Lastly, I link to my own artist book, Bequeathe Love, my love letter to Walt Whitman and his pilgrim soul. He understood the truth of the earth from which we spring and to which we all return.
I bequeathe myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.
After my father died, I immersed in these stanzas from Leaves of Grass, memorized and chanted them under my breath, made art, took comfort. This also speaks to the value, even the necessity, of honoring our beloveds who have gone on ahead of us.
Exploring this kind of work has given me a foundational sense of well-being that is unlike any other “spiritual technology,” as Caitlín describes it. Good health indeed.
Simply attending to the signs of sky and earth connects us to them. Our ancestors are as old as the elements of the world around us, reaching back in time to the darkest cave and the brightest starry night shining over the first fire of the ones who began us. They are always with us, all the year round, in our blood, in the earth beneath our feet. In our stories. In the air we breathe. In our dreams, our hopes, our despairs, they are with us.
Thank you, I needed this post.
I breathed so deeply in relief when I read this, Cate. More than many other things I’ve written, I second guessed this one all the way. But I told myself if just one person finds something in reading it then it’s worth it. Thank *you.*
Just breathtakingly beautiful.
Sweet Bea, I am touched.
This has soothed my soul…deeply moving. I have saved it. Like Cate, I really needed this too! Thank you
This is such foundational work, Carolyn, and I think so many of us are hungry for it. I’m grateful for your comment.