As Samhain approaches I have been pondering on the nature of how we connect with “the ancestors”. Having done the Nat Geo, Genome project I am aware that I have some pretty varied ancient genetics, including the newest version of human to be discovered, the Denisovian, in fact more of this than the Neanderthal.
This information now consciously connects me with a broad sweep of the Earth’s land masses, and probably explains my curiosity in so many different ancient cultures since I was a child.
We are all a hotchpotch of genetic markers and at the root we are all connected, therefore our stories, wants and needs are too.

With so much angst and division in the world at the moment, which is fuelled mostly by fear; Fear of other religions; Bigotry of other ways of being; Fear of loosing oneself in a world that is no longer certain, where too many ideas overwhelm what our cultures have held dear for many generations; Fear of the out and out greed of the business minority that affects the animal, mineral and vegetable majority, to the point where we seemingly have no power or control; I feel the need to focus my Samhain ritual energy into a calling to the ancient ancestors across the thinning veil, asking them to help us learn how to bridge the gap of seeming opposites.
To understand how they managed to connect, live and even love between different species, let alone cultures!

I need to feel some hope as the world is a scary place right now. People seem to be in free fall heading into paranoid, fundamentalist fervors that are entrenching into hardcore and even violent opposition to ideas that do not match their own. That kind of fear threaten everyone’s safety and liberty. It is time for those of us, with enough presence of mind, to pull the parachute cord putting a brake on the free falling and find a way to calm the fears of loss of identity; Loss of meaning in one’s life as the world becomes too large and too diverse for a, still pretty much, tribal mind set to cope with.

It may sound like a “hippy dippy” thing to say, but I don’t care; Love, openness and tolerance are the keys to happiness and feeling safe. Without these things the human world is lost.
Righteous anger is good, but only if it is backed up by actions that can result in a harmonious outcome, where all parties can find some kind of peaceful accord. I am aware that this sounds naive, idealistic and probably impossible to achieve, but I think we have to try to look at the root causes of another person’s, or even our own, fears and try to allay them: First by acknowledging there are many view points of any situation and then by trying to see things from all sides, whether we understand their side or not. Even if we meet with hard, unreasonable resistance, we must keep trying with as much patience as we can muster, to battle ignorant or bigoted protestations with calm reason and factual evidence. Only if all the calm voices join in a chorus of harmonious song, can we calm the deafening, fear filled and discordant clammer that is all around us.

Let the ancient, ancients be our guides, the ones who walked across great landmasses and bridged huge watery divides to find other cultures and join together. They are the roots of all our genetic trees, the progenitors of all our stories, and they may have something to say about how we can re-find some kind of peace in a human world that is so at odds with itself and the Earth right now.

This is an interesting link that sparked some of the ideas above: Ā http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/new-evidence-ancient-humans-crossed-significant-sea-barrier-00948#.UmNpFhTl6_c.facebook