mud season, and more hope

[chelidon]

I just officially inaugurated Mud Season by spending two hours having to pull the FedEx truck up our hill with my tractor after he dropped something off at the house for me. The 18" of snow we got last weekend is melting, melting, melting away, and the road is a mix of ice, slush and gravel, quite slippery, and the poor guy didn't have a 4WD truck, and it was heavy-laden with booty (bad Chelidon), er, other people's stuff that I had not a thought of waylaying, though there was a really nice plasma welder in there that I could really use. Ahem. Actually, I pulled the truck out of the ruts he'd made, and sanded and plowed behind him so he could back up and get a running start, and he still got stuck right near the top of the hill, and with the snow banks still so high there was no way to get my tractor around him to pull him up from the top...Anyhow, after some work, we got him out. I bet he leaves my packages at the top of the hill by the mailbox until the road thaws, tho' ;>

The rest of this is a reply to a comment I wrote on one of yesterday's posts, about hope. mystfemme and I were chatting a bit about ancestors, and it reminded me of one of the reasons my ancestors, by their mere existance, give me hope.

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I remember someone once telling me that one of the reasons working with blood ancestors is so powerful is that they were the ones who survived, the ones who fought, and lived, long enough to pass on their body's gift of the life, the form which you now carry, or they at least survived to be remembered and carried in the memories and hearts of those who live. And the ancestors of inspiration are those whose words, songs, art, etc, lived on, those relative few whose works, deeds and creativity survived in some way across the miles and years to inspire us.

Now many, many of those whose works and memories are now completely vanished were totally worthy of being remembered, but the few whose memory survived also carry with them that particular power of survival, that force, that gift, and they did, they can pass it on to us. They pass it to us that we may act and live in ways which inspire our own descendants (whether of blood, memory or inspiration). "Inspire" comes from the Latin "inspirare," to breathe into, to pass the spark, to quicken the soul and the spirit towards being more fully human. My ancestors inspire me. They gift me with their spark, their irrepressible lust for life, the sure breath with which they inhaled, sang, cursed, and blessed.

And there is hope in that. Our ancestors survived, thrived and created through things and events we can barely imagine, scarcely comprehend. And if they did it, we can too.

Comments

[snakey.livejournal.com]

well, the blood ancestors were the ones who shagged heterosexually and thus reproduced.....frequently dying in unhygenic childbirth and surviving less time than the queer ones who potentially didn't.... ;)

[chelidon.livejournal.com]

It's true whatcha say. At the same time, a fair number of queer ancestors (of any gender) ended up having children because culturally they had to, even if their actual relationships were otherwise. And even if not, most of the queer ancestors had blood passed to us indirectly by siblings -- those are the ones I meant by those "...remembered and carried in the memories and hearts of those who live." And the ancestors of inspiration, of course. Many of those I count among that number for me did not, as far as anybody knows, have children for very good reasons ;>

But even the death in childbirth issue...while it certainly was one of the more common forms of death for young women, as my partner said when she called upon seven generations of her female ancestors by name for help in childbirth (36 hours of labor, yikes!), they were the ones that lived. Every woman back in an unbroken line back into history definitely lived at least long enough to successfully have the child that eventually gave birth to the next women in line, and so on.