26. Ancestral Reverence as Devotion to the Earth - Daniel Foor

Your body is your ancestor altar, how hungry ghosts affect the living, the earth as the repository of ancestral wisdom, & more...

In the Intro:

  • Cleatus B. Wright , January 20, 1929 - February 27th, 1929

In the Interview:

  • The hunger for our ancestors

  • The story of Daniel's first ancestral connection, and the healing that followed

  • The ancestors are the collective wisdom of our species in all its beauty and trauma

  • Time collapses when in communion with the ancestors

  • Not all of the dead are equally well

  • The deeply embedded alcoholism in my fatherline

  • Addiction as the hunger of the dead moving through the bodies of the living, and the act of taking the substance as a form of ancestral communion

  • There are very few personal problems- a look at unmetabolized ancestral pain and systemic injustice

  • The dead can change

  • Ancestral forgetting as a function of the damage wrought by colonialism

  • We don't arrive at healing by exiling those who commit harm: an approach for white folks wishing to address their slave owning/colonizing/oppressive ancestral legacy (rather than ignoring it or living in perpetual guilt)

  • The role of the ancestors in social and earth justice

  • The interweaving of ritual, genealogical research, and healing

  • Synchronicity

  • They are shaking us awake in the burning house- the growing sense of urgency coming to us from the ancestors at this pivotal point in human history

  • The dead are in the earth, and the ancestors are animating the earth that is our bodies

  • Approaching activism in a more ritual oriented way

  • When a child is a returning of an ancestral lineage, mothering is my main form of ancestral reverence, and remembering that our children are the future ancestors of our further descendants

  • Are souls that die suddenly lost in limbo?

  • I ask Daniel a vulnerable question about my mom, who died in a car accident in November 2015

  • The most important way that we prepare for death is to be ethical and kind

  • Animism: living humans are just one kind of person / coming into relationship with the wider web of being

Links:

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