The lineages healers have to contend with…. working with ancestors of purpose — Susan Raffo

Throughout the 1980s, during my 20s, I lived in England. Bristol, to be exact. I remember walking with a friend, someone about ten years older than me. It was a happy sunny day. I remember skipping down the sidewalk, a horizon of Victorian buildings and winding streets laid out in front of us as we strolled down the hill. I made some kind of exclamation, about how I couldn’t believe I was there and how funnily DIFFERENT everything was, even though we all spoke the same language and had some amount of shared history. My friend smiled at me, I would imagine somewhat indulgently. And then they said that one of the biggest differences between us is that in England, everyone is surrounded by the past and so it is harder to imagine something new and different. Whereas in the States (Turtle Island), the opposite is true. We are all high-focused on what is possible, on what comes next, and act as though history is not something we need to worry about.

That conversation has stayed with me, these forty-plus years later. If I were retaking that walk with my friend, I would agree with him…. to a point. Not all people in the States, I would probably whisper. Generally, it’s the people who can most afford to not notice how history is still here, defining the present. This only works for those who are…