It has only been recently that I’ve really considered the blood that flows beneath my skin as a transmission from the past, a ruddy sea of names and faces, graces and infamies that exist as shadows within nucleotides and tracings on yellowed, dog eared family records. We all contain within our mere bones memories of whole villages, kingdoms, islands and prisons whose stories somehow remarkably lead up to this very moment. From this moment, what shall flow from us? We tread daily across the backbone of the ancestors, and breathe thoughtlessly the wind of our successors.

As a child growing up on the banks of the Delaware River, I began to uncover my own peculiar place in this flux. I would toss out driftwood, pretending it was a sailboat, pretending it was a wish. I’d watch it disappear into the muddy currents and toss another… maybe some other kid would pick up the same gnarled, wave-tempered branch and christen it with yet more hope. On the beach, softened glass; blue, pink, green… as smooth as gull flight, shattered a forever ago against the rocks, to be perfected, a boy’s jewel. In the pocket. Pieces of china, blue and white faded and crackled, but occasionally you’d find a familiar shape; a leaf, a flower, lines of colonial ink frozen into a tiny shard, speaking for a former whole, like the remnant of an archaic word. This was a slight history lesson in a boy’s hand, of people that had gone before, built the town, and dashing their plates on the rocky shore. The rocks themselves, ancestors of us all… the exhale of volcanoes and extinct seas, collected by little hands, scoured for uniqueness, pocketed for remembrance. I’d skip rocks into a future filled with wonder, and trembling. Then my father would call from the house for dinner. During the whole meal, there with one half of what made my body, I’d be silent, thinking of the river, the reeds, and wishes downstream to the bay, the ocean.

Sundays we’d make the journey to visit my grandmother. Her house was a museum of who’d gone before; my late grandfather’s upper-crust honky-tonk in the basement was perfectly preserved, untouched except for my little fingers, looking through dim bottles, imagining a hubbub of grown-ups, laughing, clinking glasses, doing incomprehensible things. There were photos of my great-grands, and great-great-grands, facing the camera with stoic, firm jaws and piercing eyes. Calendars frozen in time, this was a wonderland. I may have easily slipped down the rabbit hole, fascinated by what may family had at one point done with such style and abandoned in such haste. I didn’t know them as a child, and their past was only spoken of in whimsy and passing. The house, the epicenter of the family, where we all gathered, yielded few answers. Perhaps that’s why I still dream of it… it was the encasing of many generation’s history, and little was ever spoken of it.

Now, a lifetime has passed since those days when I was a short, towheaded and impulsive child. Now I can say, somewhat, that this is where I came from. I wish I could speak of more, of lines further back, exact places and dates. I cannot. My mother’s family is kept behind a heavy, creaky-hinged door inside her heart. When she speaks with lips so like my own, it’s of pain and disdain for what they put her through. I can easily be walking on her forefather’s footpaths and be oblivious. The ground beneath me now is mixed with the lives of Cherokee, Scots, Germans and the mournful dust of slaves. When I drink apple cider from the produce stand, the water is someone’s ancient mother. I live on land where I was not born; I’ve had to nurture a connection, find stories, and weave them into the place in the soul reserved for our own kinships. I have a name, but I know little of what made it. So I must accept all ancestors as my ancestors, that this shelter is built upon an earth that budded an aspect of my beingness, somewhere. It doesn’t matter. We’re all gifted with a temporal entitlement to cast a shadow and make light, and our brevity is shared by every twist and turn of the branch of humanity, ultimately originating from one thick trunk, roots embedded deeper than imagination. My mother, so far away, is in these mountains. My family is as close as the dewy October grass that I run my fingers through, just to say hello.

When I’ve crossed boundaries and time zones to cast myself into the willed alienation of being far beyond my cultural context, I find myself at home. In Hungary, in the gypsy settlements and the Turkish bathhouses, certain faces would poke through my fascination and seem to remind me of those old photographs and well-worn photo albums that bind legacies in camera smiles. Familiarity, connection, relation, suddenly and oddly shining clear as I clutch my passport and straighten my backpack straps. In Prague, the cobblestone arc of the St. Charles Bridge seemed to belong to some part of my soul that knew it, some blood cell that was jumping up and down and hollering in recognition, for indeed my genes carried a memory of walking across the Karlovy Most, even if my mind didn’t… the flux of time bridged over the Moldau. I remember thinking, walking that moonlit, violin-strung span, that ancestry, and place, are mutable, and depending simply on how much I’d want to relate. On a train just outside of Auschwitz, my eyes welled up for the heavy air still screaming over that Polish plain where some of my own life must have been heaped in piles of ghost’s shoes.

In Haiti, a land of people whose skin contrasts from mine but whose composite soul drums in the place where I go to dream, I felt instantly at home, utterly surrounded by family, by great-grands and great-great-grands whose portraits do not adorn the walls in my grandmother’s house. The bare mountains, the steep hillsides cultivated almost vertically, the sound of the conch whistle and cacophonic roosters were as much a homeland as Delaware or western North Carolina, if not oddly more. The ground there still swells with blood of runaway slaves and the colonial oppressors they overturned, so far removed from my youth of manners and contrition, yet it swallowed me as easily as it swallowed the sun on my first day there, tossing up iridescent reds against a sky scented with wood fires. In the presence of some original soul, some ancient predecessor of what now moves me, I wept under blazing moonlight from the roof of an orphanage as I watched a procession of candles, drum and song disappear into the night. Somehow, some way, we are kin; an ancient lineage was intoned as distant chanting filled the air. The soul knows this even if the body doesn't.

The legacy that flows within you exists for the sake of the continuation of love, and the same could be said of this sweet Earth we are graced to experience, for all it’s trials and struggles. All of my ancestors, whoever they were and whatever they did, came into being through the same sensual passage, and made do with the land and time they were allotted by fate to harvest. One day I shall lay in the same dewy grass and become it, and people will walk or run upon it and suddenly see themselves bubbling up from the green, running their fingers through it. Or they may simply keep walking, whistling whatever tune that’s fit for that eventual sunny day. You are soil and dandelions, on the verge of becoming, in cosmic time. You yourself are an immortal, an ancestor, and the stuff that makes your own brave brow may one day become the ploughs and troughs of a new and unreckonable culture.Where you are now shall be a homeland staked by countless names, now waiting inside the pulsing of cells.

Every place is the dwelling of ancestors. Any time, they can emerge from the ephemera and viscera of the everyday and surprise us with elder wisdom. Even today, at the elementary school where I work, an African ballet performed for the children, and amid the twitter of giggles at the funny costumes, many little heads of every shape bobbed in time to the drum and dance, the stage became holy ground of venerable names, and perhaps, who was then speaking through the rhythm every one of us could call grand, and great-grand, and great-great-grand… here before us, that we may continue the legacy to savor the present.

This post prepared for the bi-weekly topic "Ancestral Place" over at Ecotone Wiki. Please join in and enjoy the responses of many excellent writers.