What the Grandmothers Told Me
They call me the one in the boat who meets others on the threshold.
It’s because I like to go to the crossroads.
I have entered their realm to retrieve lost parts of my soul. It is the quest that has consumed me now for three years: revising a broken, ancient code. I, who thought I had lost something essential, journeyed to many distant lands, in search of, searching.
For so long, I had forgotten who I am.
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Divine child, where don’t you belong?
You — who was born in the roots of the tree of life. It is in the darkness and the dirt that things like you come alive.
It has taken me many years to incubate this lesson having spent so much time dismissing the messages that arrived. It’s easier to love the light. And back then I was foolish, naive, arrogant; driven by forces beyond my rational mind.
I was outside of myself, looking for answers. I did not yet know how to translate my map. Thus writing down the bones became a necessary act.
I am one who sees into the roots.
And those who see, find.
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The grandmothers have come to tell me we are all here to retrieve an essential memory. They have offered this story to me because women are the ones who hold the story of the world. It is women who carry the invisible stories forward, for they transmit the memory of the lineage all the way back.
The grandmothers speak:
The original togetherness is the future of all people.
It is in the seeing of all families that the map becomes accurate.
They talk now of the beginning: when the first tribes sat around the tree of life, telling stories with sticks. I can’t help but laugh.
Lore is, after all, what links us on a primal level.
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In the days of early Christian imperialism my own ancestral wilds were ravaged. The original families fragmented into warring factions and forgot their oaths. The Viking tribes from which I descended splintered. The Eastern-European witches were hunted. The kingdoms invaded. We became Them at some indecipherable crux in time. Some left others behind, taking the Northern Winds with them.
There was an understanding, and then there wasn’t.
Your people were sworn protectors, they whisper. Your holy task is to remember that. They remind me: my pain is part of that disconnect.
When I go to hunt the soul fragments I walk backwards up a ladder into the lives of those I’ve never met. There is less detail than you’d think and the names and dates I gather are not enough. Who did what?
It is because of them that I exist.
It is because of them that I have a story to tell at all.
Legacy is not static. It is always being writ.
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You are welcomed because you are not afraid to come with the wound of your lineage.
Like the Twisted Hairs, traveling storytellers of the first tribes here, I have gone from shore to shore, bringing strange news: the memories of where I came from and who I have been; what I have left behind and where I am headed. It is through these humble doorways of my questioning that I am granted entrance.
It is my stories that have given me shelter.
Through them, I find myself re-arranged, re-claimed, changed. It is the same thing, the grandmothers say. The story is what returns us to the remembrance of what was, what is, and what will forever exist in the blood of humans.
It is in you that the story lives.
It is through you that the story shifts.
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How else will we see ourselves?
Perhaps that is why I hunted so long for mine: without my story firmly in hand, I couldn’t heal fully. Without it, I would be no person at all. We all exist in a context. How ironic that it was only through the reaches of my search that I was returned to my roots.
Stories have always been one form of salvation.
When you change a broken story, when you face the wound of the family, you begin a new story for the children of the world.
We might not speak the same language. Yet through the medicine of our shared lived experience we are given the gift of seeing our complex truths mirrored in others. The grandmothers remind me that when the world comes together it is through the healing balm of storytelling.
We hear our hearts beat in the tales of others.
You forget. That is what is real.
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The grandmothers bless my hands. They bless my eyes. They bless the map of my life, written on my body.
Now I remember.
Now I remember.
Now I remember.
The memories returned to me have repaired a broken link: a primal longing for a home only my blood knows, beating with a rhythm centuries rich and deep.
Infused by the life force of other humans.
I am here to herald the truth of the grandmothers: that to (re)claim our story is to shift a collective trajectory generations in the making. We were all given sacred gifts in the beginning. Trace the roots back and you will find one essential story: that of life unfolding, growing, learning, returning. For under this tree we are all family, all connected.
In that memory there is wholeness.
To lose that story is to be lost forever.
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Katharine Hargreaves is a spiritual mentor, transformational facilitator, ceremonial guide, and initiated medicine womxn. Her first book, The Art of the Experiment, is a transformational manual for people who want to change their life but don’t know where to start. For more information on Katharine and how to work with her, visit her website.
