Ancestral Liminalism

I’m an Ancestral Liminalist.

Those words came through me a few years back while I was deeply engaged in a conversation between two particular embodied and complex concepts: “indigenous” and “autochthonic” (Greek - which loosely translates as “springing from the soil”). A conversation ignited by my own longing to belong to a people and a place. A longing that perpetually reminded me that I don’t wish to exclude, reject, or deny any part of what makes my existence possible, regardless of how hideous or heartbreaking it might be.

I sense this stems from my ongoing intimacy and love-making kinship with chthonic mother’s and their apokalyptic children whose very presences exude disruption. And as such invoke our gazes to perceive “what is so” in all its complexity and fluid nature-mattering.

I am mawcoktihikon (mixed ancestry), and I don’t belong to one particular people, place, cosmology, language, or history. I am a crossroads creature whose life springs from the cracks of multi-divergent and eco-plicitous becomings.

Coursing through me are the cellular (and thus, living) memories of genocidal unworldings, deep-time ceremonies, love-making entanglements, resilient dreamings, linguistic inheritances, physiological mirrorings, world-sensing paradoxes, time-bending rebellions, anarchic traumas, and transgressive grievings.

I painstakingly prefer to dwell in the places where personal truths gather; where galactic compulsions birth chaotic coattails that whip their tentacular arms along horizontal stretches of possible futures. I see the future as inhabited by hybridizations whose adaptational powers conjure mystical moments of “knowing” through our fine-tuned listening of right here, right now.

I was gifted a dream recently where a mixed-race femme-man, with his left palm pressed to my spine while in a trance, is showing me where the Puritans live in my body. And there, in that place where his palm pressed, lives an iron cross stretching down my vertebral column and through my scapulae. An alchemical emblem of confluencing integration; of crucibled shapings; of ancestral atrocities that birthed the anarchic shape of me.

My very existence is a rebellion. An ancestral existence bequeathed with an ocular muscle that gravitates toward the places of dissonance so as to bear witness to the "it is so's" that dwell within the steady centers of pandemonium. There, perched at the edges of possibility, I sing love-songs to Others feral emergences crowning through the turbulence of living.

[In honor of my Passamaquoddy, Greek, Macedonian, Sicilian, Celtic, oceanic, forested, photosynthetic, bacterial, pawed, storming, feathered, jurasic ancestors (and more that I have not named here) and the future one's whose shapes I hear drumming and thrumming in my heart.