Hi, this week I’m debuting my Blog for Your Life in Time, Signs, and Alchemy. So much to talk about! Since it’s a dizzying array of topics, what I’m going to do is to parse the topics, one by one, each week, reassembling the shards of time, our lives in it, and the artifacts we keep stored inside each of us. As we dig and excavate them, we begin gathering them into a collection, and we will begin to see familiar patterns and symbols recur—that’s when the fun begins!
I was always curious…wondering and asking how things worked, why people did the things they did, and asking if we humans always do those things. As I got older, I started reading about all the things that intrigued me, taking hours at the library pouring over history, archeology, and mythological legends. Through the years I began to see patterns emerge in all of those areas and I wondered why we humans seemed to repeat those patterns through millennia. Worse, why do we persist in repeating them?
I wish I could explain exactly why we don’t seem to learn from our errors, but we often don’t even think about them, about things we do, the choices we make. There are many factors influencing us every day that we aren’t even conscious of, but if we are a little curious about what some of these things are, then now is a good time to start looking at them. So, what are they? Well, they are things we do every day, choices we make, every day, even habits we have, all of these are routines and practices we seldom stop to question. But it may be time to start.
Each of us comes from a specific place, from different circumstances economically and culturally that we are born into—no baby is born as a ‘blank slate.’ As we grow, we pick up lessons and habits our parents pass on to us, and at some point, psychologists generally, (Piaget1, 1969) pose that, in our teens, we begin to actively make our own decisions. But chances are we make those decisions based on most of the things we learned from our parents and culture more than what we may have learned from school or even the media.
We already have so much of our identity from our heritage—at least from our parents and environment. But subconsciously we know that somehow, we seem to ‘feel’ or ‘know’ things we were never exposed to before—we seem to be attracted to certain aspects of history, we even dream to venture to those places—even if they are out of time.
Now, let’s take a look at, perhaps, why we get these feelings and how we can pursue finding out more about them.
So, let’s begin. If we’ve ever signed up to Ancestry.com we know they take a sample of our saliva to discern our DNA. Then they research the origins of where that DNA comes from, compare the DNA of people with similar DNA, and then piece together a broad picture of where our ancestors came from and DNA related kinsfolk along the way. The result is a report of the DNA family tree and their general origins. Most readers these days have subscribed to Ancestry.com. It’s a great way to pursue the process of finding out about your family’s origins. While you may find out a lot more than whatever was known previously about your family, the records help pinpoint the tracks of the family and the records from their respective countries. So, the next steps are to review those records, see if anyone else in the family also did an Ancestry.com search, and see if they have any additional data to what you have. Feel free to share what you know with other family members—after all, it’s all ‘in the family’.
After accumulating the combined data, ask relatives if they may have heard some stories, or some ‘legends’ attributed to the ancestors. Often a family member will say, “oh yea, I kind of remember my grandma talking about how her family was from Ireland and left ‘cause there was a famine”, or “It’s interesting that our great-great grandfather claimed his family came from a count in the Russian court”. If no one recalls anything specific that’s okay—you’re just starting your archeological search.
Next week we will begin to excavate more about what your ancestry and origins reveal and how it may have an effect on you in the present. After all, this is a journey that is a
return to the self that is your destiny—the destiny our ancestors would hope and want for you.
