Ancestor Writing Circles

Stories can change our lives.

To be a keeper and teller of stories is considered a sacred “job” in cultures that recognize a closeness with nature.

It is a job with repercussions on the long memory of self, family, culture, planet, and cosmos. Every telling gives the storyteller an opportunity to reenter the living stream of memory: to re-story in deep collaboration with our ancestors.

Awakening ancestral consciousness means continuing to come into awareness of how we are interacting with—and part of—this living stream. We are not the boxed-off, rational entities that civilized modernity tells us we are. Our ancestors have come before. We have come before. We have always been a part of nature. Our ancestors have always been a part of us.

I invite you to join me in a process of recovering our natural connection with the ancestors of our world. I invite you to explore telling stories in relationship with the ancestors. I invite you to explore that deeper level of engagement with memory, story, language, creativity, and art that is in service to our human and nonhuman ancestors—our human and nonhuman worlds.

These writing circles are for you:

• if you have been wanting to attune to the ancestors

• if you have stories from your family, lineage, or culture asking to be received and told

• if you would like to approach writing as a ritual

• if you have wondered how an ancestral perspective might change your patterns of relationship, health, financial flow, and connection to the mystery

• if you would like a community to connect with as your stories emerge

With deep respect and an open heart, each month I will guide you into a place of listening, receiving, and mutual support. All ages, beliefs, genders, genres welcome.

The circle will meet in person at a private residence in San Francisco. You can also participate online via Zoom (please pre-register by noon of the day). Suggested donation: sliding scale $15-30 pre-register, $25-40 doors.

WHEN

• Sunday, December 3, 3-5pm PST

• 2018 dates TBA

REGISTER HERE: https://goo.gl/forms/OMB37Hx98cy7QAVL2

Email ancestorwritingcircles@gmail.com with questions.

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From the notebooks >> Jun 23, 2013 : Most impossible to talk about

What seems most impossible to talk about is exactly what I must talk about. 

"Sun" - Zita Vilutyte

The writer part of me has frozen into something someone else wanted it to be. That part must die. What would it be like to be in this world again wearing the skin of a newborn? This time, not born out of ashes like a phoenix, but made anew bone by bone, blood cell by blood cell. 

I’ve been writing for other people for too long. If I must, let me write for those ones now: those from the green world out there, and their eyes full of red tenderness. 

They are reaching their arms to us. I may not know how to, but I can hold their hands. That is my lesson, my gift. 

How do I speak of all that has happened in the last few days? All too well I know of the reluctance to set it down in writing. That it sets down. What of the tender sapling growing under my eyes? What of the stars that have begun grieving with me, and through their grieving want the world to know how much they miss us. 

I wanted also to write about 'gift' and 'purpose' and being seen—thank you for seeing, ancestors. Thank you for sending someone to see. Thank you for keeping watch. 

Perhaps if I write all that I write from now on, addressed to you. But you don’t want me to write addresses only to you. Others who are lost need to find their home. 

In a dream, a blizzard, and a home. 

If this I write has meaning for you, raise your hand. 

I may doubt myself. It is time to stop doubting. I have been seen. I remember. This remembering, this certainty that I already knew what you were speaking to me through him. That I had already said much of the same: then I forgot. 

How did I forget? This remembering is so precious. If all of us were truly seen and welcomed. If all of us had someone to remind us. And we do. We have each other. We must remember for each other, and we must remind each other. This walking with the beauty of the gift remembered in our hearts— 

And in gratitude, I offer you this formless writing: 

That I could not write what I was supposed to be writing because where is the emotion in it: the skin of the earth pulled off and into the ripped earth we pour our tears. 

That I can pour my tears into ritual, pour the black gold of my heart, my eyes into ritual. 

That through the cold of my fingertips I feel no ‘you’ in me yet to invite—and yet it is inconceivable to do this alone. Even on the Muni train on which I sit and cry like the sky has ripped, the earth is there to hold the sky. You are with me. 

Your human selves are not enough. I need that which is non-human in you. That which drinks the heart of things and offers its own blood weeping to the thirsty heart. 

We are all so thirsty. We have been so thirsty. This thirst walks sleepless between us as we lay down at night, mewling silently to be seen. Have we begun to see? And the teeth of our ancestors on edge: imagine their thirst. 

Now that I have found this to say—there is nothing more impossible, and nothing else that must be said more in this vivid now. I am like a dog having found a bowlful of water, tongue hanging loose, dripping water. 

Oh ancestors and spirits! let me sing for you now. This is what your ears have been aching to hear. And the sky thunder of my heart right now can barely even form words. 

Something is still stealing words. With stolen words, I’ll build you a sleeping room, spirit room, spirit bed. I will make a hand fan out of stolen words. I will ask the bird for a song, and the shrub for a whisper, and I will sing. 

You know I will get tired. But in the story, at least, I’m never tired. Let me make that story for you then. A story that is flimsy, that is not shy but is flimsy—because she is made of weeping songs. 

Each song I pick up and hold against my breasts—each song I sing to, crooning. 

Let them sleep their ever-watchful sleep. In sleep they mutter, in sleep they see. They are our eyes, our mouths, our nourishment, our relations. All our relations. 

-o-

A door just opened and you walked in. Thank you for walking in. 


-----------------------------------


The poem above—if I may call it that—speaks to some of the emotion held in me in this now. There is a clarity, a light that has begun to shine clearly on the path—it is as if I was waiting for someone to see so that I could believe—give myself permission to believe—without any further doubts and demurrals—in myself and in the other world. 

The divination by Malidoma came as a confirmation, but it is also the sense of homecoming, opening, surrender, grief, peace, communality, lineage, and urgency that I have felt again and again in the ritual space, during the Dagara rituals, that brings me here. 

To my surprise, I have also been experiencing a different sense of accountability; rather, a very clear bidding to be relationally accountable. There is an urgency that I need to make space for whatever next needs to unfold by clearing everything that is not needed, including my own egoic defense machinations. I am also being told through dream and intuition that I need to be discerning in the choices I make, in the paths I take. What I will choose will affect not only me. I will not be choosing only on my own behalf. 

The growing relationship with ancestors and spirits demands also that I listen and surrender more. There is a sweetness, a surrender, in this surrendering. I am so grateful to the Bay area for holding me amidst such plenitude of beauty—the beauty of Spring!— as I have been walking, listening and surrendering. 

I feel a tie, a bond, an accountability to this community (if it is possible to name and identify yet this community). I had started IAST with a wound in my heart, a wound around being in community—around trust and being seen—and noticed when I came back that this wound had healed during those five days. It was not something specific that led to it; there was something about all of us there in that land in that space/time—each one of us bearing such amazing, magnificent gifts. Each of us, each medicine. We were so fortunate. 

I am still practicing being able to hold in writing the mind, the heart, the spirit of the matter in all its complexity (and simplicity). And, as I say in the poem (if I may call it that), writing itself is dangerous; rendering something in writing can be so dangerous. But some of us choose to meet these dangers because someone else also chose, and in choosing, gifted us with the possibilities of imagination, flight, and becoming, and without possibilities we were nothing, we were here but the here was so still it had grown stale, and we did not remember. 

Remembering is making anew. Initiation is remembering, and remembering is an initiation too. 

The question, once we remember, is not the impossibility of how to survive in this world that does not acknowledge the other world. It is how to continue what we came on earth to do, and what does one do with this grief that only wants to sit by the ancestors, cry, and listen.

Perked up

Have not been very efficient about writing the last few days. Was working on a series of poems that grew stubborn but refused to grow otherwise. Does that happen to you? I tried to sneak up at the poem(s) from different directions, but it didn't budge, and I'd lately been making lame, half-hearted, pretend jabs. Which made me anxious about this whole darn writing thing and which, as you can imagine, did not help at all.

Today, one of the first poems in the series was workshopped and everybody agreed that it seemed to want to grow longer (ah, workshop phraseology). THAT was incredibly helpful. I am always ready to end a poem, get done with it, wrap it up, hurrying. I don't mind revising; taking out that first draft itself scares me a bit. Which is why it is nice to have people who urge me on, or people who are dissatisfied with the first draft. (Though what I read during the workshop today was the second draft: Lesley had kindly been dissatisfied with the first.)

What I think I want to do now is to scrap the series idea and house all my various themes into this one long poem. Because I like its form so far and in the other poems, I'd been struggling with form. Okay, enough! because it is not interesting for you, this abstract talk. But: oh potential long poem, I have to have enough patience with you and trust in you and hopefully enough urgers-on: you intimidate me so. And I must remember that being inefficient is not so bad sometimes.

She said it.

"So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering." -Brenda Ueland

A Manifesto on Poetry

I. Be pragmatic about the act of writing, so the writing itself may be unfettered.

II. There is bound to be an occasional sense of failure. Strike deals with it as often as you can. Never compromise.

III. Words and phrases will make themselves known to you while you are walking. Accept them.

IV. Interrogate every word that comes your way. What is its politics?

V. Never let a poem rest in a place of frozen meaning. Ensure that every poem is aware of at least some of its uncertainties.

VI. Have convictions.

VII. Leave gaps or interstices for something to flow out of the poem into the world, and vice versa.

VIII. Never let insecurity talk you into using fillers or more words than necessary. Write precisely.

IX. En-strange language, syntax, diction, rhythm so as to give pause.

X. Use forms memorably, or disform, or create significant forms.

XI. Craft the poem. Know your craft. Learn it then practise it.

XII. Engage urgently with the external and the internal.

XIII. Refuse paradigms if they are narrow and if you don’t like them. Unhinge them. Create your own.

XIV. Never disdain popular culture just because it is popular.

XV. Be aware of margins.

XVI. Believe in countercultures.

XVII. Write about relationships. Write about power.

XVIII. You will be tempted to write about suffering. Stand a part of yourself at a distance for perspective.

XIX. Cast off old ideas periodically. Be curious about new ones.

XX. Read nimbly.

XXI. Perform for an audience. Find ways for your work to perform. Speak it, or sing it.

XXII. Take risks. Make movies of your poems. Or write tunes or take photographs of them. Collaborate with someone. Be restless.

XXIII. Never rely entirely on someone else’s arsenal or strategies. Never have a fixed arsenal or fixed strategies. Try everything. Keep trying.

XXIV. Destroy the generic.

XXV. Be tentative about your first finished draft. Leash it to yourself for some time. Let it out only after you can account for it.

XXVI. Revise intelligently.

XXVII. Write every day.

XXVIII. Live voraciously, with discipline.

XXIX. Films, art, music and theory arc you to interesting places. Enjoy them.

XXX. Listen, or travel, or walk.

XXXI. Now and again, write silly poems. Cats make good subjects, if you happen to like them.

XXXII. Live ethically.

Reconfirmed that -

To write, we need solitude
and a hard jabby rock
on which to perch and stare
at snags and sedges.

They notice every droplet go by.


Notes at Boulder Creek, July 2007