Questioning stressful stories gives your ancestors freedom too

We call it Halloween, but it’s also known as All Hallows Eve, or Samhain from it’s Celtic roots.

A time when the veil is thinned between the living and the dead, and we remember and honor those who came before us.

In the Celtic tradition, a huge feast was prepared on this night, and places set for the souls of those who have died. Spirits, fairies, contact with what is beyond.

My father’s family roots, the Bells, all came from Scots-Irish lands.

They knew these traditions and myths deeply.

Where I was last night, since people were disguised (also part of the ancient Celtic tradition, in case you didn’t want a spirit to recognize and haunt you) there was a sense of all the wilder personalities and characters of humankind appearing.

I chose to wear an elegant green pantsuit from the early 1960s my grandmother cherished. It had tiny rhinestones punched into the v-neck in three rows, and a huge wide green sash with rhinestones decorating the ends.

It felt perfect for me to honor my grandmother Eleanor. She immigrated as a Swede-Finn to New York City around 1915 at age five. She spoke no English.

She used to tell my sisters and I stories about learning about America, and a hard and funny moment when she tried to say “safety pin” but her accent using English was too strong, and no one could understand her.

She spoke about her four siblings often, and how she met my grandfather, and what it was like to be twenty years old in New York and single, in 1930.

I wish I could ask her so many more questions, now. I was too young to think of the questions back then.

She died in 1986.

But this is what I notice I am so grateful for today, on what is also known as All Souls Day, Samhain.

I am here in this body because of a life force that has moved through this world, in the forth of inception and birth, through other humans known as my ancestors.

Life is temporary for us all, and for them too.

They lived lives, some of them crossing huge wide oceans in boats to get to the same continent where I live now.

In questioning thoughts and stories, we constantly wonder “who would I be without this belief?”

Who would you be without your story?

But it does not mean that all is erased (even if it no longer exists) and annihilated.

I actually now remember and care more for this strange suit called a body, and all those who came before me who also had these suits and wore them here, for a temporary time.

I honor the life force that hums, and still hums now for these ancestors, through what is here now.

Today, I remember Port and Eleanor, Obetra and Burt. I remember my father Aldon. I remember my great grandparents Tom and Mary, Val and Grace, Frank and Bertha, and the two from Finland I can’t remember their names right now.

For me, the most precious thing really, outside of this movie of life, is the gratitude for the ones I can’t remember or never knew their names.

I imagine the time, the late 1800s, the mid 1800s, the 1700s. Flashes of pictures in the mind of what these times looked like, although we could never really be inside them except with this mind.

Without needing to know the details of the story, I know there was a story, and it was a story full of life–no matter how long or short that life–and it was full of suffering and difficulty, and also joy and happiness.

Even if any of these living beings did not feel the silent emptiness of peace within, or even when I have not in this lifetime, I see that all is carried along by an unknown mystery.

No matter what happened, I am now here.

Everyone of these humans held the “I am”.

Just like you.

“Ecstasy is the only thing God knows. God’s nature is eternal, conscious bliss. No mater what you’ve done, you’re not going to be the one thing that ruins it.” ~ Michael Singer

No one else can ruin it either.

If you think they can, continue to question that story.

Send it back today, to where it came from.

A mystery that can hold it all.