Plus ca change...

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes" -Mark Twain

Oh, my beloved fellow weary travelers ~

If you are reading this, I thank you for your time and attention, precious last bastions of authentic human connection in our distracted, hyper-speed, late techno-capitalist world.

I also thank you for your curiosity and openness. Ever dwindling resources in these polarized times.

This writing marks the beginning - or perhaps more accurately, merely a next turn - of an infinite iterative spiral of a journey with no beginning and no end. The momentary unfurling of a path encoded in the ancient structure of the twin-serpent double helix, its program interfacing with that mysterious and magical force known as "soul" at the crossroads of free will and destiny.

Cosmic disclaimers aside, I am embarking on something new here (new to me at least), whose trajectory is yet to be totally determined. I have a map and a vague outline, and of course my idealized fantasies of what I hope might come of this nebulous project, but the territory lies beyond the mists, awaiting discovery. And so we must begin, as all "beginnings" do, with a first, tentative step.

But what happens if, as we step forward, we are yanked backward?

(cue giant, cartoonish cane-hook sneaking in sideways from offstage to snag the dancing frog around the waist, aaaannnnd... scene. just kidding.)

Shortly after the recent catastrophic u.s. "election", an old friend/mentor texted me out of the blue while passing through my neighborhood. Her timing was impeccable: I had just thrown on my sneaks to go for a head-clearing walk, so we met at the entrance to the second-growth redwood forest that abuts my street. As we meandered through dappled sunshine, scent of pine and damp earth thick in the crisp autumn afternoon, she shared with me that she had just booked a summer trip to Poland.

An invitation.

To be clear: I have never been a Jewess who desires to go visit all the sites of ghastly historical trauma or the creaky, dilapidated hovels my ancestors fled in the dead of night with nothing but the clothes on their backs, frigid and starving, while brutish cossacks chased them across the ocean with torches and pitchforks. (At least that's how it happens in my dark imaginings.) And they were the lucky ones!

But, as my friend disclosed the details, it became clear that this was not a typical heritage tour or worse, a "Holocaust tour." No. She was talking about performance art ritual in the borderland forest, intuitive genealogical research, esoteric practices of Ashkenazi women folk healers, radical Yiddish counter-culture. She was talking about reclaiming our ancestors' thriving past, a millennium in the making, as the blueprint for a Jewish future in Eastern Europe and in the diaspora writ large. On offer was not a tour, but an ancestral healing pilgrimage. A medicine journey. Guided by another longtime friend and mentor who was creating a different, more radical kind of container altogether.

There are so many flavors of "yes". There's the carefully considered, pros-and-cons-weighed, decision-tree-analysis, aggregated-tally-in-favor, measured yes. There's the "sure, why not" of the shrugging yes that doesn't ask much, requires no sacrifice and makes little difference one way or the other. There's the throw-caution-to-the-wind, you-only-live-once YEE-HAW! of manic impulsivity, consequences be damned.

This was none of those.

This yes rumbled like thunder from the pregnant belly of Pachamama herself through the cracked soles of my feet, wrapped itself in florid, serpentine vines around my bones, entrained itself with my heartbeat, released its earthy fragrance out my pores. A rooted, choiceless-choice, clouds-parting, planets-aligned, exquisite-breeze-exhaling-through-a-crown-of-oak-leaves - obviously, yes! - that heralds a destiny.

In a moment of sacred convergence, the opportunity presented itself, spontaneously and magically, as the answer to a long-held prayer.

My friend was merely the messenger. The invitation was issued by my Ancestors.

Yes, them. The ones who lived and loved and danced and sang and worked and played and prayed for centuries in Yiddishland; the queer witchy neurodivergent ones; the healers and midwives and herbalists and artists and poets and mystics and visionaries; the ones who made offerings to the spirits of the primeval forest and guarded the liminal thresholds between the worlds; the ones so deeply rooted in land and place that they were inseparable from it. The ones who may have been touched by trauma but were not defined by it. For though my people have wandered for millennia, among them have always been those who heard the whispers of the land, allowed themselves to be claimed by her, and from that doykeit - "hereness" - watered the roots of a thriving diasporic culture.

I have known them, in my bones, for a very, very long time.

And I need them. Now.

If you're reading this, I need not draw up an exhaustive list of the multiple interconnected crises that together constitute the polyphonic symphony of polycrisis we have stumbled into at this particular juncture in the timeline of spaceship earth. (Never mind that it didn't have to be this way and the worst can still be averted. We all know where we are. At least those of us not currently lost in the fever dream.)

Things are going to be dark for a while, folks. Birth portals usually are.

I do find it amusing, in a gallows humor sort of way, that as the fascists seized power in my country my first instinct was to book a ticket to the place my ancestors left because of the same.

Did they look back? I don't know, but my grandmother wrote this poem about Lot's wife*, and well, we all know what happened to her:

In the state of active trauma, it's probably best to just keep putting one foot in front of the other. But that's no way to live forever.

There's a word in the Twi language spoken by the Akan people of Ghana, sankofa, that means "to retrieve." Symbolized by a bird with its head looking backward and its feet facing forward, sankofa reminds us of the universal truth that in times of duress, we can resource ourselves in ancestral wisdom.

Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi. It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten.

My grandmother knew.

The past has a way of catching up with us whether we want to deal with it or not. Now, as the echoes of history chase us deeper into the labyrinth, we hurtle forward trying to outrun it. Some of us, though, can't help but look back, knowing that the past holds not only our karmic debts but also the codes to forgive them: written in twilight tongues, hidden at the end of breadcrumb trails, visible and intelligible only to those willing to stay quiet and still enough to taste the salt on our lips.

And so it begins.

In addition to calling me to their lands, the Ancestors have given me the assignment to write about this journey publicly. Which is somewhat inconvenient given that I'm concurrently in the middle of another, rather sprawling writing assignment (aka a doctoral dissertation, already months behind schedule.) But, Spirit must exact its sacrifice.

Should you choose to journey with me (aka smash the "subscribe" button), you can expect to hear from me once every couple weeks. I'm aiming for the new moon and the full moon, but doing my best not to let the perfect be the enemy of the "good enough." I fly in mid-June, at which point you may hear from me either more frequently while I'm on the ground in Eastern Europe or possibly not at all until my return. I will likely do some (or numerous) integration posts in this space through the late summer, and then, after I begin my pre-doc internship in the fall and whatever needs to be documented from this journey has been wrote, I'll retire this project and file it permanently in the akashic record.

Posts will cover a variety of topics - I already have at least 5 more outlined in my head. Just know that the curriculum my group is being guided through is rich, varied, and deep, and I will be using this space to process, integrate, and share what I'm discovering in real time. To that end, I will also include links (both in-text and at the end of each post) in case any of it piques your own desire to go deeper.

One key part of a pilgrimage, I've learned, is how important it is to have community support and witnessing; a proper send-off and return. So, thank you for weaving in community with me, and for coming along for the ride as I unwind the threads of my own being back to their source, and in so doing become anew.

Love and gratitude.

Read:

The Golem of Brooklyn by Adam Mansbach - run, don't walk. Best novel I've read since I can't remember when.

I linked to her above, but Julie Wolk, our guide and facilitator for the Poland journey, wrote a series of Medium articles about her first trip to Poland 2 years ago and I highly recommend reading them all.

*Poem entitled "His Wife" by my grandmother Shirley Kaufman, from her book The Floor Keeps Turning, 1970.

Listen:

The Jew in You by Daniel Kahn - pretty much sums it up 😄

Daloy Politsey by Isabel Frey - this woman is a total badass. During a protest in Vienna against the Austrian far-right's collusion with Russia to swing their elections (sound familiar? sigh), she got up on a van and sang this song which means "Down with the Police". This song became a kind of unofficial protest anthem against the right-wing government, and the singer went on to win a Vienna city council seat this year as a left-wing Jew and an anti-racist. You can read about it here.

Watch:

If you haven't seen it yet, I loved A Real Pain. Apparently American Ashkenazim doing roots tours in Poland is very apropos of the current cultural zeitgeist.