As I crest the ridge walking in my hilly neighborhood here in Wimberley, a gust of wind picks up, rushes through the treetops and makes wonderful oceanic sounds. Instantly this takes me back to a time many years ago when a dear friend called me up and told me that her grandfather had died.
She asked if I would come over and simply be with her. It was also windy then. As we sat together in her little cabin by the Fall River in Colorado, she said, “Someone once told me that the sound of the wind is the Voice of the Ancestors.”
This seemed more than a poetic statement to me, for somehow it felt deeply true. As I’ve discovered over the years, it’s deeper than I ever imagined. This goes beyond the apparent duality of the living and the dead… even deeper than your cellular wisdom.
The word “breath” ultimately means “spirit,” which is the essence of life. Over time it becomes clearer that the Ancestors are not only spirits of the dead.
You are related to everything. When you closely examine your own existence and your relation to the world you live in, you discover that you exist as part of a living Universe. No matter who you consider your Ancestors to be, or what you think and feel about them, you cannot encapsulate them any more than a grave can contain them.
Nobody really understands the mystery of death--form dissolving back into where it came from--only it’s probably nothing like what we may imagine. It’s truly a mystery.
The drifting essence of being comes and goes—like the wind. Rites of passage remind you that you are but an intersection. A nexus of the living and dead and things yet to be. Your own existence has ties everywhere—with family, species, ecosystem, planet, solar system, stars and Universe. For you are stardust.
And the multiple universes fold back into themselves to speak with the voice that is you.
