A Brief Reflection On Legacy

For most of my adult life, I have sought to cast off the collective trauma and shadow of my ancestry. I have denied my belonging to the long chain of ancestors who have been, to varying degrees, complicit or directly in stewardship of systems of oppression. Self-identifying as a queer person was one such way of distancing myself from the unbearable legacy of whiteness and dominator culture.

But as I’ve done the healing work within myself to decondition these trauma responses and my aversion to taking responsibility for them, I have been more and more inclined to redeem and reclaim the gifts and ancestral memory that lives within my DNA. The man in this photograph, Edward Stone Gleason, is my grandfather. I called him Baba. Some day, I would like my children to call me by that name, one that I gave to him at an early age, perhaps a testament to the cross-cultural naming conventions we apply for our elders and care givers.

My grandfather was a theologian, Christian mystic, and writer from whom I have inherited my love of words, my connection to the Logos, and my love of God. I was a practicing atheist for much of my teen and early adult years until I discovered a God beyond name during my first psilocybin experience. I now call this God by the name: Creator Mother Father God. This unbounded and indescribable being holds the totality of Love and Intelligence of this Universe and defies all of the categorical qualities that humans have placed upon them across history. This being is the perfect harmony between immanent and transcendent reality, expressed in human form through the union of Mother and the Father archetypes, bridging the love for what is and the love for what might be through an unbroken wholeness. In this way, my love of God is the same yet distinct from the love of God I inherited.

As my beloved soul friend Josie says, “the bones are good.” Despite the collective trauma that we have all inherited from our ancestors, our very existence is an expression of Life’s longing to gift us the gift of being. I once wrote in a text titled, An Invocation of Ensoulment, the following:

“Wrapped in the lavish or threadbare cloak of your ancestors’ struggle for survival, knit even unconsciously with prayers that you be given the gift of birth, will you strip naked before God with artful humility?”

I strip naked from the inherited traumas and shortsighted ignorances of my ancestors and our species, reclaiming and redeeming the prayer for Life that exists beneath all forms of human conditioning as the base reality of our organismic wisdom. I rededicate the learnings and wisdom embedded in those traumas in service of the rebirth of our human culture, towards a planetary neo-indigeneity that brings us back to Life. Nothing is lost, everything is redeemed, when we choose to become the ancestors who return home to wholeness.