The Rush | Ancestral Undercurrents
I’m in a rush.
I can feel it sweeping through, between, under and around me.
I can feel it collecting me and all that I can gather and scatter in a precious moment I fear might be my last. There seems to be no immediate threat, yet the rush whirs in my ears and under my skin.
It reminds me of the feeling when your flight is preparing for takeoff and you know you’re moving with force. Yet, you can’t really perceive just how much power you’re being lifted with.
It’s loud and it’s compelling. It has to be. You’re going somewhere and the rush is sending you there.
What do we do when we want to slow down, observe more and react less? When we don’t want to meet crisis with crisis? What do we do when the vortex of culture, history, metabolism and family have other ideas? When the rush is bubbling in ways we can barely sense, let alone control?
Telling the rush to take it easy is like telling a tide to delay.
I suggest we pay attention to the rush and get to know it.
Let’s create a time and place where it can be welcome, where it can move and swing.
There is no point trying to trap it, deny it or shame it. The rush has brought us here and we still have places to go.
Let’s ask the rush to help us understand its quickening, its power, its refusal to be quiet and calm.
Let’s press our ear up close and listen to the echo it’s singing us into.
Listening to the Rush
Often, when people arrive to meet with me in my therapy practice, they are also in a rush. I’m sure you know something of this feeling, given we are all living within late stage neo-liberal capitalism, inter-generational dislocations and horrors, global ecological devastation and widening inequalities.
Once these issues arrive in individual bodies to therapy, they have other names like, ‘dysregulation’, ‘anxiety’ and ‘trauma’. Collectively and individually we are urgently attempting to understand, address and transform the states of suffering we find ourselves in. Yet, so many of us have such little knowledge of how our suffering has been and is generated. When we have a poverty in our understanding of the context of suffering, we have a poverty of response. We have trillionaires.
This got me thinking that it might be worth spending some time paying attention to the way in which the intimate disturbances we sense and grapple with in our cells and selves are entwined within deeper timelines and relationships. I thought I could offer a reflective inquiry on this theme by considering my own ancestral weaves and root systems.
Woman with basket | Shetland Islands
Basket Making
As I research my lineages, I find myself weeping over pictures of ‘kishie’ baskets traditionally woven in the Shetland Islands. I look at pictures of this type of basket behind museum glass, carried by women, carried by Shetland Ponies and in various stages of development and use. I search for people from whom I might learn from in my local community to begin to make a basket like this.
I’ve recently received a set of hand woven baskets and the gift touched me deeply. Something about receiving this offering has made grieving and connecting with the loss of my own ancestral cultural practices more possible. Sometimes, you don’t know you’ve lost or never known something until you’re holding it in your hands.
My weeping comes to an edge when I begin to witness photos of family groups and kin in the Shetland Islands who are weaving baskets together. The edge is a rush of panic. I avert my eyes.
Noticing that I turn myself away from witnessing this aspect of my ancestral histories, I get curious about my grief, my fears and my avoidance.
Why when I look at an individual basket do I experience grief, but when I look at the basket makers, I start to experience panic?
How and why did I learn that I use avoidance to meet panic?
What is ‘avoid’?
Emptiness, absence, void.
Unnamed, Denied and Disowned Fears
Basket making might seem a strange thing to notice grief and fear around, but perhaps you have your own experiences where your feelings didn’t seem to match the events.
Listening to what is happening under the surface of things is one way I know to deepen my understanding of a mystery like this. I find a way to feel into the undercurrents by paying attention to cultural and collective patterns. If I look for others I can see are experiencing strange responses to seemingly mundane things, I begin to notice I am not alone in experiencing fear and using survival instincts and strategies when confronted with historical realities.
For example, Australian politician Bob Katter recently made a threat of violence to a reporter when he was asked about his ancestral lineages. In claiming a sense of belonging of Australia, Bob appears to deny his ancestors with veracity. Strange? In many ways, yes.
When some of us are afraid, we instinctually fight, some of us run and/or we dissociate. Often, we gravitate towards and create a habitual groove with an instinct that served us best in our families of origin and childhoods. Sometimes these strategies help us survive and sometimes they jeopardise ours and others survival. Bob’s intense response to a question about his ancestral heritage made me curious about what he fears. It also made me worried that when we don’t face those fears with maturity we can replicate and repeat the harms our fears arose from.
I think it’s critical to our current individual and collective experience that we work to find ways we can turn towards our fears, meet them, respond to them and transmute them.
I can’t offer an answer for Bob Katter’s fears and responses, but I could ask myself what I’m afraid of and how I might respond to the confronting ancestral stories that are rippling through me.
Acknowledging and Naming the Fears
“The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe” Joanna Macy
Fear of feeling grief & loss
There is an enormous space between my ancestral waters of the North Sea and my homeland waters of the Brisbane River and Pacific Ocean. Perhaps I am afraid of truly seeing just what and how much has been lost between these seas. The way aunties, cousins, wind, seals, stone, peat, straw, boats and ponies are connected in ways I will never know. The loss of feeling of living and relating within ancestral land, language, crafts, culture and kinship groups. Perhaps I fear that seeing my separation from these experiences will confront me with the nature of my split-off self in a clearer and wider way. Perhaps I am afraid of the grief that arises on admitting to indelible loss, of my inabilities and failures to close the gap between the seas and re-connect.
Perhaps I am afraid of the deep grief within and between me and my ancestors that accompanies this separation.
Fear of feeling horror, terror & shame
Perhaps I am afraid of what might happen if I did cross the void. Afraid of seeing more of the horrors that my ancestors experienced and perpetrated. I think of the way men, women and children were sent into mine shafts to dig, extract and die. The way ‘progress’ swapped women and children for Shetland Ponies who were then objectified, exported and enslaved in mine shafts across Britain for over 150 years.
I think of the way Britain objectified, exported and extracted people from their Isles to enslave, objectify and extract from Indigenous peoples and their country that I now live within. I think of the way objectification, extraction and exportation are all still happening. I’m weeping again.
Perhaps I am afraid of the deep horrors, terrors and shame within and between me and my ancestors that accompanies these abuses.
Fearful Dilemma’s
Perhaps I am panicked by the dilemma that arises in longing to connect with lost ancestral ways and kin and my knowledge of the horrifying histories that inevitably comes with this.
Individual & Collective Dissociation
There is concept that permeates across the fields of psychotherapy, developmental neuroscience, attachment research, interpersonal neurobiology and trauma studies that asserts children have a survival need to establish connection with primary care-givers.
This is understood to be a compelling neurobiological function that is expressed through attachment seeking behaviours. We reach for, grasp and pull towards us hoped for nourishment from those older and wiser. We seek shelter, protection and guidance from those stronger and kind in a world where cycles of ease, challenge and threat unfold.
But when care-givers become a primary threat, children experience a survival dilemma. There is an intense, internal, rushing force towards care-givers for safety and an intense, internal, rushing force away from them for safety. In this context of opposing internal forces and survival dilemmas, dissociation can come to the rescue.
The concept and experience of dissociation involves changes in brain connectivity, particularly between areas responsible for memory, emotion and self-awareness. Memory gaps, contradictory behaviors, internal conflicts, and difficulty maintaining consistent relationships or function are some traits associated with the phenomena.
What if this was happening to us on a collective level? That the competing desires of longing to connect to long-lost kinship and disconnect from our painful pasts is contributing to a kind of cultural amnesia?
What if those of us with migration and colonial histories to Australia have inherited and continued inter-generational dissociation patterns designed to protect us from overwhelming fear, grief, loss, horror and shame?
What if collective dissociative states are numbing us to paying attention to and caring for important undercurrents of grief, fear, loss and love?
What do we continue to lose and harm if we are unable to listen to and flow with what our ancestral undercurrents need?
What if in our dissociation, we are blinded to what is really happening, where we are in the here and now and the actions we require to establish greater safety and care for ourselves, our kin and current homelands?
What if our dissociation prevents us from sensing and building the skills we need to do the urgent work to stop abuses our ancestors started and re-weave regenerative cultures?
What would thinking about our individual and collective experiences like this offer in terms of creative responses?
Dissociation, fear, instinctual responses, complex inter-generational extinctions, migrations, sufferings and grief aren’t something to ‘fix’. But they are something we could listen, tend to and learn from. Humans aren’t alone in these experiences and perhaps we could be curious about what we could learn from other species who have have accompanied us over waters, through wars, famines and fire.
Horse Stories
I have a life-long bond with horses which started when I was a child living on a remote cattle station in far-north Queensland. I’ve always been cared for by creatures who don’t have human bodies and I’m curious about their stories as much as I am about our human ones. That curiosity led me to read while writing this piece some stories about ancestral flows of horses across the globe. It seems that horse evolution is one of the most complete fossil records we have, spanning approximately 55 million years. Apparently, horses first emerged in North America with Eohippus (now called Hyracotherium) and lived during the Eocene epoch. Over millions of years, horses underwent extensive changes including growing larger, developing longer legs for running and moving to single hoofs.
Then, in North America they experienced a collapse extinction event around 10,000-12,000 years ago, alongside other massive extinctions including as mammoths, giant ground sloths, saber-toothed cats, and many other megafauna. However, horses had already spread to other continents via land bridges millions of years earlier and populations in Asia and Europe survived. These populations were then later domesticated by humans around 3500-4000 BCE in the Eurasian steppes.
Horses eventually returned to North America, when Spanish colonists brought them across the seas in the early 1500s. Some horses escaped or were traded to Indigenous American peoples which enabled wild populations of horses to re-establish themselves across the Great Plains and western regions. These horses returned to the environment their ancestors had experienced extinction in, coming full circle and re-occupying their original ecological niche.
Strangely, on the day I was writing this (unbeknownst to him), my partner encountered Shetland ponies. Knowing about my kindred connection with these little survivalists, he sent me a picture of them. I have the sense that my animal ancestors might have been letting me know that we’re not on our own with our dislocations, multi-faceted histories and all has not been lost. This happenstance helped me research horse stories and connect with their incredible ancestral adaptions, survivals and ongoing expressions of care and relatedness with humans despite all they have endured. It makes me hope that perhaps together with our multi-species ancestors and kin we can find ways to return to a more grounded and respectful ecological niche.
Grief
“Grief is subversive, undermining our societies quiet agreement that we will behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviours of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul. Contrary to our fears, grief is suffused with life force”
(Francis Weller)
In my early life, I spent many days in remote places of far north Queensland, Australia. This continent, and part of the world, has been cared for by Indigenous peoples for over 60,000 years. My small child body, split off from my own ancestral lands and soaked in the superiority complex of whiteness, was embedded in waters and earth cared for by Mayi-Yapi people and other tribal groups of the Myabic gulf.
Mayi-Yapi country held my growing body, alongside unfathomable grief and harm, as the land and Indigenous people were subjected to the horrors of colonisation by my very recent ancestors. This is not an easy kind of thing to know and grief to be with. It’s not a cry in your kitchen once and then make the dinner type of grief. This is a soul-cracking grief. A life-altering grief. To watch the country which nurtures and cares for you, when you have lost your own, be devastated by your own kin.
Sometimes, people try to tell me my grief is guilt and I should give it up, let it go, it’s all in the past anyway. But I know it’s not. I feel the fears and griefs in my own and others bodies as we grapple with our daily lives. They are deeper than ‘anxiety’ and will require more than a diagnosis.
While I no longer live in the Gulf, nurturance from this country has rooted into my cellular structure. I feel it in my throat on especially windy days in South-East Queensland. I hear it when a crow greets me as I open a gate. I sense it as an undercurrent that reminds me to listen for what is not obvious or visible, what other creatures are doing, what words cannot say and what time is working without my knowledge or influence.
I’m inviting you here to an exploration of your own undercurrents, mis-matched feelings, deeper appreciation for your losses and what has sustained you through it all. We need companions for grief so we can let it move through us, collectively transmuting the legacies we have inherited. I don’t think we need to be afraid of grief if we can meet it together. It has undone me, made me walk bent and if you let it, you will find it flows a widened rupture of love right through you. That’s what has happened to me.
Echo
There is still so much more to explore and say. This long reflection is still just a fragment that has helped me explore my relationship to complicated grief, longings and emotional experiences around ancestral relationships. I’m hoping it might offer you something in your own explorations. There is so much more complexity to grapple with than I’ve detailed here at this time and mine is only one perspective. I hope you will explore many others.
I’m finishing with the sense that we are the echos our ancestors have sent into the present and how we reverberate in our life-times might just tend the griefs, responsibilities and ruptures they couldn’t in theirs. That we will also send an echo to and through our future kin. Let’s name, face and metabolise the fears, griefs and rush of our personal and collective pasts so we can find each other, connect and care in new ways, in new places and a new time, whenever and wherever that might be.
Let’s let the rush take us there.
From my Heart-Field to yours,
A herd of horses/ponies