Becoming a Good Ancestor
What does it mean to be a Good Ancestor?
We think of ancestors as those who have gone before — as the progenitors of the lives we live now. I prefer to think of ancestors in a continuum of time that includes both the past and the future. Because, we live in a continuum of generations. One generation builds on the next and on the next and so-on. In a very real way, we are the ancestors of the future. This is not a romantic notion. It’s a fact. Whether we are conscious of it or not, the lives we are now living are laying down cultural and ecological tracks that will define the lives of future generations. How will future generations look back on us? Will they say we were good?
When we ask what it means to be a good ancestor, we are asking how to be a person whose ways of knowing and living effectively participate in creating a future that could be called good by those looking back from that future. We are asking how to be the kind of person that future generations will smile back at with gratitude for the wisdom of our choices. We are asking to resuscitate qualities of intergenerational, ecological and mythic memory that have been buried in the forgetfulness of colonization, slavery, genocide, emmigration, assimilation and appropriation. And, we are asking how to effectively manage our humanness in relationship to each other, technology and nature.
The question asks us to reverse engineer life-centric worldviews that were and are embedded in all Original Cultures. What are the fundaments of a culture that can sustain harmonious reciprocity and complementarity within a human community and between humans and nature over an arc of 7, 20 or even hundreds of generations?
And, now that we live in a transglobal, technological civilization, our map must integrate capacity to steward not just the human relationship with nature, but the human-managed relationship between technology and our biosphere in ways that supports the perpetuation and wellbeing of humans and nature, for the very existence of future human generations lies in the balance.
Additionally, being a good ancestor implies the capacity to navigate discontinuity. Since discontinuities are inevitable, a good ancestor must carry with them the stories and seeds that can reboot culture when things go dark.
How can I be a Good Ancestor?
To be a “good ancestor” is a sort of meta-purpose. We don’t wake up one morning saying, “I want to be a good ancestor.” We wake slowly to the implications of our actions and to the immense, transpersonal project of sublimating personal choices, actions and desires in service to a project that transcends one’s own lifetime. We wake to the vacuity of living only for the benefit “I, me and mine.” Instead, we learn to contain both Me and We in the sense of self. We find deeper pleasure and meaning in tending the both-and through our choices and narratives.
To be a good ancestor means holding the wellbeing of future generations as an ongoing, living question. What is for the greater good? What do I need to let go of or restrain in order to create greater potential harmony? What do I need to create to guarantee greater possibility for others? What stories help empower and inspire participation, co-creation, gratitude, magic, belonging and safety? What pathways restore the experience of the sacred connection with the natural world?
A good ancestor remembers her or his place in the Circle of Life. Humans are part of a Circle and members of a Web, not the top of any pyramid. As members of that Circle, our ecological role is to tend the harmony and abundance of the ecologies we occupy — not just for ourselves but for all species. It is the role of those at the top of the Trophic Cascade. We embrace that leonine role, and we re-cognize our organismic and spiritual membership in the Web. We know our interdependence and interbeing with all other beings. Our practices and storeis are oriented to expand our experience of Communion with nature and the cosmos. We exist in a continuum of living memory. We come from all bloodlines. We remember that we were once Indigenous People, and we know that we are indigenous to this one planet.
A good ancestor plays to perpetuate the Infinite Game. We are actively engaged in a shift from finite, zero-sum game dynamics to infinite game playing. We understand that the collective project playing to win zero sum games always ends in all-lose. So, we seek to live from generosity and to enact systems change towards win-win game dynamics.
A good ancestor seeks to align technology with nature’s logic. The word I use to describe this is bionoetic: of the mind of nature. We understand that technology itself is neutral. We build technologies that support good sense-making and democratic process and restore human attention to real relationships with other humans and nature. We work to restrain technologies that extract attention and vitality from life. We use technology to restore and regenerate living systems and human consciousness.
A good ancestor understands that all life is dependent on place. Food, water, shelter, power — all the atoms that make up our bodies — come from place. We are grounded in place-based consciousness. We tend our local home ecologies, our watersheds, and our planet as homes. We are aware of the chains of causality that bring us our water, our food, our building supplies, our clothes, our technologies and our power. We work to engage right-relationship and reciprocity with all aspects of the supply chain from cradle to grave. We work to heal multi-generational histories of trauma in relationship to land, place and culture.
A good ancestor works collaboratively with all that wishes humans well to bring health, happiness, peace and abundance to all beings. We work not just human beings but the more-than-human animals, plants and forces of nature that co-inhabit this earth. We think of medicine as that which restores and increases harmony and health in individuals and communities. We work with sacred plant medicines as allies to heal and elevate human souls and bodies.
Our lives are grounded in daily, seasonal, cyclical and stage-based practices that allow for circulation of human consciousness with the rest of Creation. We dance, we meditate, we make music, we pray, we build things of beauty, we plant and harvest. We welcome the souls of children at conception and birth. We initiate our youth into adulthood through rites of passage. We initiate our elders as trusted wisdom keepers. And we hold death as a sacred passage into deathlessness.
We love and embrace death. Death and life are one Circle. A good ancestor welcomes death as our great teacher in the fullness of the Circle of life and death and the wisdom of death’s gate to the deathless as a foundation to living in balance.
A good ancestor stitches stories of the past and the future in a vital fabric of gratitude, praise, celebration and wisdom that applies to present-tense choices. We welcome grief as praise for what we loose and grieve boldly to release the manna of what was for future generations.
Above all, a good ancestor loves strong and bold and true, unashamed to stand for what is true.
This is a Remembering.
If you have asked this question with me, I thank you. You are a part of a Great Remembering that is beginning to happen all over the planet — an organismic and soul remembering that I believe to be a natural re-knowing of our true nature as Humans. We are all indigenous to this planet. We are beginning to remember that we are Creator Beings nested within a larger organismic intelligence of the Creator Being called Gaia and that by re-learning how to harmonize with Her intelligence over the arc of many generations we will find our way Home to ourselves.
