Columbus Monthly / March 2011 / Stories that carry a medicine

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Stories that carry a medicine

Ever since she died some eight years ago, I’ve been feeling the presence of my mother. I’m not particularly spiritual. I don’t have the gift of second sight. Neither do I own a Ouija board. But sometimes I’ll feel a slight, strange tingling in my head. If I were traditionally religious, I would pray and ask the saints to intervene. But since I’m a pagan by imagination, and a rational atheist by temperament, recently I created my own altar for my mother, much along the lines of Afro-Atlantic altars I saw when I traveled through Cuba some years back.

Mine is on a wooden shelf and has a sepia photo of my mother as a child, a small cloisonné box she owned, a candle to symbolize the flame of her soul and brilliance, a coiled copper necklace she made and perhaps wore and a piece of origami my son Josh created. In most of my life, I’m a rationalist. But, here, on an evening, I’ll light a candle and conjure my mother.

I guess you could call this ancestor worship. Certainly, it makes sense that I’m seeking out her wisdom. She was smarter than almost anyone I knew. But I’m also practicing; one day, I’ll be an ancestor. But before that, I have to be an elder. Will I be up to the task? Will I be wise? And will my kids even care?

I’m not that interested in genealogy per se. But we all stand on the shoulders of our ancestors. Our first touch of love comes from them. Or, sadly, the first fist of rage.

In life, our mothers and fathers reign supreme for a time, like titans from Greek mythology, their behaviors often inexplicable and contradictory. And then before long they’re gone.

Even if our ancestors are vague and shadowy, like the great-grandmother and great-uncles in faded black and white photos, we still often know stories about them. Or fragments of stories. Like how they arrived here and what dreams they nurtured. Like how they dealt with adversity. The stories carry a medicine.

The ancestor I think of most after my mother is her father, who came here after leaving the Ukraine at age 16, a Jewish kid fleeing anti-Semitism and probable death in the czar’s army. My grandfather’s name was Harry Dreizen and, urged by a respected Christian teacher, he walked across part of Eastern Europe with a group of wayfaring friends. Eventually, he took a boat from Germany to America with dreams of becoming a doctor. I wish I’d met him. But he died young, before I was born.

If your ancestors are so abusive that you turn away in revulsion, you still can claim “clan” ancestors, says the mythologist Michael Meade. You can adopt the poet Rumi, the freedom fighter Sojourner Truth, the soldier Che Guevara or the civil rights visionary Martin Luther King Jr. You can go to a friend’s ancestral tree. This is legitimate.

Why think about ancestors? For one thing, they connect us to ancient knowledge. That’s what’s important. But there’s something else more mysterious. An old belief says that the ancestors are in communication with us. They are watching our actions. And even though that sounds supernatural, I feel it with certainty. We are all headed to the ancestral realm. And ancient belief says the ancestral ground is the spawning place for new souls.

The songs we sing, the inner genius we unfurl, the anger we feel, the troubles we endure, the diseases that assail us, the love we hold closely, the questions we ask ourselves at 3 am—all of this was passed down from our forebears. It’s in the marrow of those who came before us. Or, in the language of science, it’s encoded in our DNA.

An altar, of course, is an artistic statement. You can hang mandalas or position talismans and amulets. You can add drawings, jewelry, sculptures and paintings. But I like to keep things simple.

My ancestral altar is a place where my psyche lines up with my mother’s and my grandfather’s. It’s a place to go when I feel confusion. It’s a place to go when I want to recall joyous times.

“We remember the [ancestors],” says the writer Alice Walker, “because it is an easy thing to forget: that we are not the first to suffer, rebel, fight, love, and die.”

Jory Farr can be reached at joryfarr@gmail.com.