Tag: Acadia

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Journey to Ancestral Lands: My Spiritual Connection

As earlier posts perhaps introduced you to aspects of my spiritual journey, I’ve also shared about Gary Alan Taylor @Holy Heretics and the writings, interviews and thoughts posted there. Great stuff!

This recent post really called to me: https://holyheretics.substack.com/p/the-secret-of-smithfield The Secret of Smithfield – the church of St. Bartholomew in London. Hidden away a bit but beautiful and drawing me in. We’re planning a trip to England this year, spending a short time in London before heading north to York and Lincoln, the Cotswalds and then home. I’m putting this one on my list as a place to visit away from the busy city.

Credit to Jiří Komůrka from his posting of this picture about 2024, found on Google when I went to look at images of St. Bart’s. Thank you, Jiri!

Thank you to Gary who shared about “morphic resonance” and I wrote him a note to share places that I’ve felt this way – Chartres Cathedral, the Basilica of St. Servatius, the prairies of South Dakota, standing on the lands, farms, cemeteries of my Ancestors, the Temple of Dendara in Egypt ….. and more. Places where peace came strongly, emotions welled, and even occasions (at St. Servatius and Chartres) where “synchronistic” choir or evenson happened in what seemed like events just for us. The prairies of South Dakota help to remove my “horizon deficit disorder” from living in tree-enveloped Michigan, so that on the prairies at night, I see the Milky Way without interference or horizon to horizon of the land, the coming of a huge thunderstorm or the gentle lilt of a meadowlark.

You’ve probably felt this too? Places that were so special that you keep wanting to go back or live there or just dwell, even for a moment, to calm your mind and heart into a reality beyond this one (is this reality or just something temporarily created …. I’m working on that one). Let me know in your comments – always good to connect with fellow travelers in this way.

The connection to places, lands that my ancestors lived on, farmed, died on was fed greatly by our trip to Nova Scotia in the fall of 2023. I haven’t yet made time to write about it as I’m still deeply moving through the emotions of being there, finding their former lands, learning about the horror of the Expulsion of them by the English – forcibly sending them away from their beloved Nouveau France or Acadia – to places that weren’t Catholic, didn’t speak French and did not welcome them. A people in exile, trauma and forced separation …. it is painful in ways I didn’t expect. I’ll write about it someday but for how, standing on their lands, the ancient cemeteries, the Dauphin River (now the Annapolis River) – I felt things in my body, my emotions, that I’d never felt before. More later …

But in the meantime, St. Bart’s calls … and I must go. Watch for my future post about the journey there, ok? And let me know the places that call you – ancestrally, spiritually, specially!

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The Sandhills Are Alive With Music!

“The hills are alive with the sound” of Sandhill cranes!!  It’s obviously fall … and I did the best that I could on the pictures as I had to grab my cell phone FAST to rush outside.  Wow … the sound was deafening and there were HUNDREDS of Sandhill cranes, all squawking at once, getting into formation.  There were multiple “V” patterns, and birds flying to catch up.  As I stood on the porch snapping what I could, I could hear more coming and more in a farm field nearby …. VERY loud but eerie, surreal, primordial …. special.

When I hear, see such wonderful creatures, I think about the migratory journey they have ahead as they eat up what corn, grains they can from the surrounding farm fields.  I’ve always loved these beautiful and large birds and wanted to study them when we realized that they were so numerous here in our new home.

Wondering what to write about today, as I wanted to keep Lineage Journeys readers up on more than just the upcoming conferences and events that I’m doing, the sandhills provided a great way to break from writing, researching and keeping up with the business end of the work.  I wanted therefore to share a great book I found that has tremendously beautiful photographs AND tells the story of the struggles that sandhill cranes have with habitat encroachment, pesticides, and more.  On Ancient Wings:  The Sandhill Cranes of North America by Michael Forsberg is the book that gave me a perspective that increased my joy of them all the more, as I’d like to see what I can do locally to help them.   The book is linked here and in the title above as I found the book on Amazon (there are other great field guide-type of books too!)  if you might be interested in learning.

The reason that I am thinking about this, writing about this?  Maybe because I’m a genealogist or because I’m such a nature-lover, these birds are a fascination to me.  As a genealogist, I wonder whether my ancestors had the opportunity to witness such a spectacle, if their farms had these graceful birds feeding there before setting off for the south.  My Québec ancestors were farmers almost entirely (some were woodworkers) so I think about what I just saw and how ancient these birds are (I think I read somewhere they they are millions of years old, from fossil evidence!), wondering if they were part of the lives of my people in Québec.  With the St. Lawrence and other waterways in the region that my families’ farms were located (most recently, my ancestors are from Maskinongé, Québec and around both Québec City, Montréal and back into Acadia), it is certainly likely.  What did they think?  Did they stop from their farming just as I stopped from my work to look UP?

As I think about and work to write the stories of my ancestors, I want to include content about their day-to-day lives like the sounds of the sandhill cranes or the weather patterns (like the very severe rains that we’ve been having this year!) that impacted their survival.  It’s not about the dates for me – births, marriages, deaths – but it’s about what they DID, who they were friends with, the music and foods that were important, and the struggles and joys they experienced.

I hope they experienced the sound I heard this morning – the sandhills’ music of life.