On Ancestry & Lineage
Dear MRMG Sangha,
The Winter 2022 Day-Long Retreat’s theme was on ancestry and lineage. In preparation for the day, a number of our community facilitators wrote personal reflections on the topic. Read more below.
With love,
The Mixed Race Meditation Group
Pollyanna Macchiano
“The connection I have to my Filipinx and Sicilian heritage feels like a puzzle with too many missing pieces. I’ve only known one grandparent—my grandmother on my mother’s side—and have heard a few stories and some photographs of the others, all of them passed before I was born. I know even less about the people who came before them. For as long as I can remember, there has been this longing to know more about my ancestors. To see them, smell them, talk to them and understand how I got to where I am today. I haven’t been able to find enough information to build a detailed family tree—my desire for rootedness remains.
And yet, deep within my being, I know my ancestors because they are me. No matter whether I got to speak to them or hold their hand; they are literally in my DNA. There is something beautiful about reflecting on this, especially in my meditation practice, because each breath I take is like a prayer to those who came before me and those who will come after me. The few things I do know resonate deeply: I come from a family of origin that contains fighters, chefs, artists, nurses, farmers, and builders. Next, I ask myself: “What kind of ancestor do I want to be?””
Lenora Yee
“When I consider my ancestors, I consider what it might mean to rethink their absence. The absence of answers, of people I have never met, the mourning of what has been lost to the weight of pain, or smothered by trauma. There, in the center of the impossibility of knowing, what once felt insatiable, slowly became a seedling of constant curiosity. For me, unanswerable questions tucked in between the widespread versions of where my Chinese-Trinidadian family came from, became threads I could braid together. The many conflicting stories I came to understand prodded open gaps in my understanding of who they were, and in turn, who I am. These realities of not-knowing used to eat at me and make me feel lost. Slowly, I began to shift the empty spaces in my mind. The many absences of understanding became openings, doors leading to many paths.
In the legacy and mysteries of my family history, I felt something more. I craved to understand, and my desire began to feed my creativity, my stories, my music, and my poetry. I saw who I thought my grandmother could be in fruit markets, on the bus, walking slowly in the park with a soft smile staring at roses, or in an elderly couple with their fingers interlaced, the elderly Chinese woman who wore a red felt hat; they all became her. I felt the materialization of what I couldn’t know as what I instead could choose to experience. There was something so magical and boundless about being a part of her legacy. Though I would never meet her, at least not in this life, I could feel her and imagine who she was and who she might imagine me to be.”
Kristina Garrity
“Somedays I feel like a collision, an impermanent expression of some big bold spirit that's traversing through the world, a river of energy sprouting unanticipated rivulets, streams, swamps and marshes that all come together in some unforeseen place. I often wonder how it is that two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents (and so on) all came together in various spaces and at various times to produce me: one extremely tall, half-Indonesian Chinese, half-white American Kristina. In this way, my mixed race background has given me a basic respect for the mysteries of history and for the itinerant nature of our species.
Yet this ancestral intersection of cultures is riddled with power differentials. Much of coming to grips with being mixed has, for me, involved recognizing the deep intergenerational trauma that global systems of inequality have left on my family. The collision that created me is far from innocent, composed as much of domination and submission as it is of love and adventure. To that end, looking at my mixed race lineage with open eyes is intimately intertwined with a deeper commitment to transmuting this karma: not only through healing at a personal level, but through contesting the systems that can make being mixed so traumatic in the first place. I hope that, in undertaking this messy and beautiful work, I do my part in being a good mixed race ancestor.”