Blazing a Trail like an Ancestor

The things that fill my house assume an ancestral air. I see them in a different light: cast in warm, fiery hues of burnt orange, saffron and gold. A bouquet of dried, coastal flowers, weathered books and a bowl of stones, shells, and bones. Singed with autumn. Seared with sunsets. Ablaze with endings and beginnings. 

Drawers, remnants, and artefacts speak. They hold histories, tell stories, and keep record of times past and memories forgotten. Of life, death and all the transitions between. Like rings on the girth of a tree, in increments beneath bark, it marks new growth.

I consider my ancestral assignment created during the course of the Indigenous Knowledge Leadership Programme with Return to Origin. Tree slices suspended from a wooden hanger with illustrations burnt into them. Silhouetted vignettes of moments before my time. Etched into wood across the growth lines of a fallen tree, are messages for those whose time extends from mine. 

The programme’s attentivity to community, history and belonging emboldened me to dig beneath the surfaces: to the roots and marrow of my relations with people, places and things. It reminded me of the value in stillness and the healing in listening.

I listened to my grandmother’s stories of the farm in the Karoo where she grew up. Through them I caught glimpses of great-grandparents, of uncles and aunts; taking flesh and form in my imagination. I discovered little quirks and peculiarities: ways of relating to the places they lived in and moved through, to others, and to themselves. It was all familiar. These stories were entangled with mine. I came to understand that the hearts and feet that danced and sang, the spines that carried so much, and the hands that planted and prayed, were my own.

Wafts of a familiar scent flit through memories and dreams: my ouma's drawer filled with antique sentimentals. In an instant, I am transported back to those warm afternoons, crouched down side by side on the wooden floors of my grandmother’s flat. My brother and I, whispering conspiratorially, picking up and dusting off everything we found. What a thrill it was: looking at, touching and smelling little foreign things we didn’t understand, but somehow sensed were special. As though we knew that each little trinket held stories of a time before ours; of people we knew, but never had met.

More than twenty years later, the scent takes me back and whispers as softly as a footstep on a mossy forest floor:

"Never lose your sense of wonder. Always sense and cherish the magic and mystery, not only in ventures far from home, in the distant and unknown, but in every nook and crevice of the mundane. In every fissure of the familiar."

Now, I contemplate what it means to live like an ancestor; how feeling like one informs the way I carry myself, how I relate to those around me, to my body and my home. In some ways, I have recreated that secret drawer that creaks of a time before mine. In the centre of my flat, a large, hand-made chest stands. Some of what it holds will outlive me, and to some child, someday, they may gesture to stories of us, offering glimpses into the lives we lead, what we value and what we leave behind.

To live like an ancestor is to tend to my inner and outer fires, to carry entangled, overlapping histories of pathways preceding and succeeding mine, and to find my footing on them. It is sowing seeds along the way. It is blazing a trail and clearing a path, and attending to what needs healing now, so that those who come after won’t have to. For they will have other battles to fight and other calls to heed. 

To my fires I must attend.
 

- Angelique Michaels, Project Facilitator, Return to Origin