In this story, rowan ewanyshyn reads a timeline bending narration that blurs the lines of life and death to bring us closer to ancestors known and unknown. Painting vivid scenes of memories, visions, and dreams, we explore rowan’s own turbulent path towards healing ancestral pain woven with threads of softening masculinity, embracing grief, and ultimately finding belonging amidst the uncertain. 

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SPEAKERS

rowan, carla, Jamie-Leigh

Welcome to On Belonging, an audio series to connect us. On Belonging explores why so many of us are feeling called to find a deeper sense of belonging, whether with our ancestors or to land where we live, and beyond.

These powerful stories and conversations are an invitation into the lives and landscapes of the guests worlds offering pathways towards remembering and finding more belonging.

The following narration features rowan ewanshyn

Where I come from

Men have leather for faces, and

deep canyons for years.

Like Sisyphus, they spend whole

lives turning uphill

their hearts into

stones, because rocks can

weather the wind.

Survive

the storm.

Where I come from,

the wind always rolls.

When I think of my father, I first think of anguish, anguish that he felt day in day out in his body, mind and spirit, anguish that I felt and will always feel at the fact that I did not have a father that was able to be who I needed him to be. That I felt and still feel like he was not a father figure to me. Anguish at all the wisdom of his inner being buried so deep under so much pressure, it compressed matter into stars and turned hate into burning magma bursting at the seams. Anguish at this is an all too common reality. My dad was in so much pain and he let it out on his family and on himself. There is an anguish and folded into every tender layer of his cosmic wisdom. And even though he would laugh and cry and bullshit around, you could always tell how depressed he was especially the near the end of his life. But also think of more ephemeral sensations with the field of the cold Starry Night of a prairie winter and the way it takes your breath away in the best way possible. As if you were taking in the fresh Astaire newly minted or the quiet doing this of the early summer morning, multi fully at Worlds busy milling about in the early sunshine, while chickadees and Redwing blackbirds chatter amongst themselves the smell of grass and coffee percolating in my olfactory system, and the wind, the ever present wind coming west off the mighty Rocky Mountains.

My dad told me that he wants became surrounded by a pack of coyotes when he was young. And he had to chase them off with a pitchfork he had in his hand. He worked long hours on the ranch calving and making hay bales. He later worked in the slaughter yards in the surrounding area, truly familiarizing himself with all cycles of the bovine. He had an uncanny ability to forecast the short and medium term weather based off of the way the wind was blowing. That intimacy with wild things in the world and the deep wisdom and silent understanding are the traits that bring me back to center when thinking about my dad. He was also one of the few people who actually saw right through me, the irony of him being the reason that I had to create so many walls in the first place was perhaps not lost on him. But he saw right through it all. There was love there, but also abuse and refracted self hatred. But he truly was proud of who I was becoming.

Losing my father was fucking excruciating. The sea-sawing of grief and loss on the one hand, and rage and shame on the other was too much to bear. Beyond this push and pull, losing him brought me profound loneliness: even though, if I’m being honest, it’s been great to have him gone in so many ways, it’s still one less person for me who is supposed to be fundamental to my life, one more person I will never see again. I feel lonesome because he was so much a part of who I am, and I wish he was here so that he could see how well I’m doing, and how much of our familial bullshit I’ve worked on and worked through. I want to cry in my dad’s arms, and have him cry with me. Every time we watched King Theoden bury his son, Theodred, in the Lord of the Rings movies, he cried, and even though the scene was about a father burying his son, I can’t help but wonder if he was thinking of a son having to let go of his father. But at the same time, these are visions of healing that I’ve projected onto our relationship. I wish he was here to see me thrive, and I wish he could be me. I wish he could have thrived. I wish he could have healed his heart. I wish he could have had the capacity to understand and say sorry to me, his family and himself. I wish we could have held him in a warm, loving embrace. I wish I could shoot the shit with him, and talk in that fucking redneck-yiddish slang we used almost exclusively. I miss him so much, and yet I am still much happier now that he’s left this world. It’s complex. And nuanced. Sometimes, if I listen really closely, I can still hear the endless wind coming off the mountains of my mind, and those same rhythmic undulations etched into my dads spirit, too.

This is the story of me finding my way through ancestral trauma, finding the wisdom I needed and continue to need to heal as I learned to process and hold space for the story to keep writing itself. And even if I can't save nobody, at least I can say hi and catch up every now and then. There's power in the listening space in the welcoming space of spiritual quietude. This is a gift that my dad gave me even if I don't have quite as sharp of ears as he did. This is a thank you. This is a finally feeling like I belong to my story that I spent so long running from.

This is a relief, a sitting down by the fire pit in the back 40 that my dad used to light with a lot of gasoline. kicking my feet up for a while and enjoying the crackle.

Shake off my

dreams

shake off my

“hold me close”

shake off my

I’ve never

felt

worse

shake off my

pickled heart

shake off my

groove

shake off my dance.

I should have heard

your

needs,

I should have heard

your groove,

but those songs

I don’t know,

those dances

I can’t go.

Have more faith,

you’re my faith

have more fate

you’re my—

--This floor is just broken glass

shake off

me

shake off

for me

These floors are just

broken glass.

Help me out,

help me

out

of here.

There's no good way to tell someone that you've dad just took his life. My mom decided to fly out to where I live knock on my door and tell me in person. This is three days after he died. After a while. I remember looking back at my Instagram selfies I posted on the actual day my dad died. And I was like a ghost. It was spooky to see. Did I know at that point? Was it just a coincidence? I had conversations with others including the person who found my dad. Then after a while the shock wore off and reality sunk in. These are some of the most intense days of my life.

Three days after my mom had flown home, I had a conversation with my dad during a rambling messy walk outside in the deepest of grief on an almost sickeningly stereotypically rainy night. It was my chance to finally unload all that I had bottled up from my young life and never told him. It was a mix of anger, sadness of his passing, and a surreal supernatural connection that dwells in-between the artificial boundaries between life and death. I was beginning to realize that grief, however horrid and draining in the moment, had a strange power to it. I was bawling my eyes out and the spell of grief was certainly upon me. And dad was at this interesting stage where he was deceased, certainly, but his spirit had not made the crossing into the next world. He was hanging on, not ready to go. I don't remember everything from this conversation. But I do remember that I felt that he still didn't understand or agree with the pain I was sharing with him. Or taking responsibility for his actions. In death, I actually felt safe enough to tell him all these things. But I remember thinking that he still had so much work to do, and I was so angry. Even in death, we could not find a resolution.

And then a vision presented itself to me, one have a child, whether it was one of my own, or my dad has a child or most likely an ancestral Interplay thereof, I did not know. My understanding of it now is both my dad wanting me to have a son, but also me wanting to heal the small child and my dad and therefore myself.

The first three years were rough. But the six months immediately afterwards, were downright brutal. I was struggling so much. My relationship with my partner was on the rocks, and I could not get out of my own way. All of my trauma cycles were spiraling and spiraling out of control. And it truly felt like Pandora's jar had opened and unleashed everything from my life. And my earliest childhood memories appeared suddenly as crystal clear as if they were a dream.

My earliest rememberings wrapped me in the dew of the early Sunday morning summer grass, and I could suddenly envision at three years of age, my dad playing Neil Young to me on the guitar, and then singing along at age eight to the songs. The darkest memories of alcoholism and never feeling safe at home. Not all these memories were bad, and I have a few memories I'm grateful for that I do still cherish. On the path to healing, I believed everything spilled out so that I could do some spring cleaning, some mental clearing and Marie Kondo my inner psychic space so that I could go back together a new and hopefully better way. But I did not have this broader understanding for years afterward. And as it turned out, there was something more going on.

At the six month mark at the behest of my dearly beloved, because I was in no state to self advocate, I went to see a practitioner of the arcane arts. This particular healer, along with dabbling in many other good things which did not make the final cut of the DSM was also a psychologist. And the idea was check in and see if there's anything else going on between my dad and I that went beyond the stiff and tiring confines of Western understandings of grief and pharmacon. Especially as the connection between him and I went so deep, this practitioner lived on the doorstep of a mountain and invited me into her house. I chose one of her pre categorized healing options, soul retrieval. She was straight to the point and honest and sparingly few questions. At one point, even letting me know not so subtly that she had enough of what she needed from the realm of the verbal and that she needed to go deeper to get clarity. I laid down on my back as she got into the zone and got to work. She produced a smoke or vapor and consulted a few instruments while she scan my body up and down. When she got to my legs, she stopped. She glanced down at me, her glasses sliding down her nose, and asked: "This figure, a tall man, someone with glasses, someone with moustache of Russian or Eastern European ancestry, who is he ?" It began to sound a lot like my father. "Do you recognize this man? Because he's hanging on for dear life to you right around your legs." I groaned. "Why the legs young one," she asked. I began to tell her about my disability, and that it was through the legs that the rare genetic condition that affects both my dad and myself and causes mobility issues and more generally, to have the body intense chronic pain resided. At the time I thought, yes, I've shared bonds that span across the realms of fucking life and death, founded in pain, the metaphors are endless here. You can imagine how complex the emotions were for me that day. On the one hand, I was fortunate enough to come to the right place as my dad apparently needed some extra cajoling to get the fuck out of my space and get on with this whole Crossing Over the Rainbow Bridge bullshit. On the other hand, it did not feel good at all.

I'd already been having a few dreams, my dad in them and I was I was not a fan. Going through this intense process of grief, interspersed with feelings of massive and deeply held rage for a lifetime of abuse. And I can't even get the separation I need from him in death? I was never able to cut him out of my life or put up solid boundaries in general while he was still in the waking world. It just did not feel safe. But I was damn well going to put up some serious boundaries in the hereafter. Well, I said as much of my guide, she chuckled and resumed her work. She said, "your dad was adopted? No." It was less of a question more of a statement. "His birth mother is waiting for him to come find her. And she's missing the son that she gave up." In the early 1960s, my dad was given up for adoption and just a few months of age, he had to wait until he's more than two years old to be adopted.

In that stuffy little room, and across 1000s of leagues of time, space and the paradoxes thereof. She went to work and the rejoining of dad, his mom, and all his ancestors, great big burly Eastern European men and little babushkas was the kind of vibe I got, but also a lot of love and good food, which are essentially the same thing. She retroactively healed that maternal wound for my father and his matrilineal line, one of the deep wounds that held my father throughout his whole life. I told her this sounded good in theory, but that I see how it went and let her know. She gave me another one of those stern looks down her nose at me, paused a little, and not unkindly said that "hard work begins now, my dear."

The next period was a time of intense therapy, a lot of self work, and putting up hard boundaries with my dad. It took a few months for me to feel lighter from no longer carrying my father with me wherever I went. But when it did finally hit me, it was incredible. I would definitely recommend a good exorcism when necessary. Although intense grief, anger and spiritual fatigue were so present within caverns that stretched deeper than I could perceive. I felt the change and the breeze of my life. It was faint and subtle at first, but like a good spring air and invigorated me. But of course, the story isn't linear. I fucked up, backtracked, and for many years, the trauma my youth continued to plague me. Beyond this, I felt even more alone somehow.

I thought about these pieces

I’ve grown out of these pieces.

Tell me more,

Tell me all.

I am the broken home

I am the hold-em door.

Say something breakable,

Say something shakable.

Shallow hearts won’t beat

Shard of heart won’t bleed.

Hold me out of me

When we all go

free.

my heart hurt. Grief is truly the greatest teacher pushing us outside of not only our comfort zones, but the very world of the living. No more than in my deepest grief have I felt the pull of the multiplicity of reality. Within grief, I've found much needed change and desired healing. For me, it meant that the scars of my childhood and young adult life could finally stop scabbing having been reopened regularly even after I moved away. It's also an intensely messy nonlinear process without any such thing as a neat and tidy plot. And I definitely do not mean to imply that there's always or even any capital H healing that can come from grief. One thing I can say is that grief does not like boxes, and do not try to put it in one because it will surely try to escape. In a similar vein, I tried to compost the binary thinking that I'd grown up with a way of thinking inherited from Empire and released the idea of grief in my head from just being as simple as this sucks, it's all gray doll and depressing. Sure, yeah, it's all of those things. But one thing that surprised me in grief was this intense joy. One of griefs most complicated spell works. Grief did not let me linger much of my dad's passing, as in the span of a handful of years, I'd experienced a total of nine different deaths of close family members, friends and relatives, along with my partners, mom getting cancer twice and not living through it. It fucking sucked. And it was a really shitty half decade. My mental, spiritual, physical and emotional health was always touch and go. But there are some real hard bits in this time period. It was tough on my relationships and eroded familiar ways of being that I had known before the grief. And that's the thing, grief changes you. In my experience, I think of myself as a totally different person, more expansive, but also just different, as if something external to myself has nestled its way into my sinews and joints. It's uncanny and a bit unpleasant. I'd even say that there's a grieving process I went through just to try and process this alchemy. It's a hard process to describe, which is why I use magic as a metaphor for grief, I find that it often outstrips my ability to think about it. So I tend to just try and feel it.

As I muddle along this winding path of grief and loss, healing and survival, I started to notice a presence from my dad specifically in my dreams, where ostensibly the veil is thinner. At first he would show up only along the outermost boundaries of thought and time, a feeling that he was there or a feeling that his, you know, his own being in general was somewhere. My interpretation of this is that he was trying to establish a tentative connection at the most arm's length, as if to say, I'm here when you're ready, son. I was tentative myself. And as folks who know me understand, I can be very stubborn. But as time went on, I both felt generally better from one year to the next and began to love my dad more. The pool was too great. And hey, sometimes these dreams just happen. The start of this was an utterly beautiful, simple and evocative dream that started out in a small forested area my partner and I had built a house on, it looked like your average single detached house with all the boring fixings including a fence. And lo and behold, there was my father in a bobcat excavating the backyard. I remember suddenly appearing to back as one can magically do and dreams and I remember trying to speak to him, but he would not answer only smile and keep on working. I was intrigued. I told him, I said, I will open the door more but no bullshit. Concent is important between the two of us and I maintain my right to shut the door to this connection like I did last time if you aren't on your best behavior. Nothing happened at first. And I didn't dream of him for a long while after that. But over time, they're developed a pattern of quiet helpfulness and acts of service. One time at a party in an old 1970 style houseboat, I remember being in very close proximity to my dad who one early morning after a long night of all of us being young people was doing dishes and cleaning up the kitchen and bar. I tried to speak with him again and give thanks but again that was met with not but a smile and a return to work. It was of course a lovely metaphor. My dad after years of tormenting his family was repenting via acts of service in his healing journey in the afterlife. There's a nice ring to that and a good cadence certainly was a nice change. I was still wary though as the emotional steady state of my upbringing was pure chaos and unpredictability. But these dream memories of my dad and me together very cherished and dear to me and tugged on my heartstrings. We had some good times together in a living world amidst all the trauma. And it made me remember those small and precious moments and really savor these new types of dreams.

We grew up in the country and so I always feel very connected to myself, my dad went on to spending time outdoors. The winds specifically has always been my favorite, and especially the late autumn, early fall when coming off the Rocky Mountains, sweet from the grasses, pine and decaying leaves. I get my love of reading from my father, my love of classical rock and music more broadly. My dad was not the smartest man in the world if we measure intelligence by things like literacy and other standard metrics of Empire, but he held a deep wisdom behind his eyes, even if he wasn't always able to articulate it. As I imagine is the case with all stories of abuse and trauma, we have an extremely deep emotional bond. At times in my process, it's felt like this is a bond of pain, violence, disability, chronic pain and illness and self hatred. But it's of course, more than that. My dad and I shared such a deep emotional reservoir that yes was fed by the rage of river no child should have to learn to endure. But it was also fed by sweet mountain streams and gentle prairie rain and the dewdrops nestled about the tiny worlds of grasses and clovers of my youth. Most recently, my father came to me and a few dreams around my birthday just to see how he's doing. I don't remember the words that we spoke. Instead, I remember feeling his warmth and love.

Almost two years ago, I went to a psychic for another matter, and I had a free question at the end, Huzzah! what to use it on? I felt my body a deep urge to ask about my dad and to see how he's doing in his healing journey. At that point, things have been going well and I was having a lot of dreams that thing quietly smiling and supporting me or hanging out or just being there. It was nice. And I knew this could happen, but it still surprised and shocked me nonetheless. I spoke very briefly about my dad to the psychic essentially saying that he was dead i.e. thus please connect us, and precious little else partly because I was testing this new psychic and I want to see her chops. She most eloquently described my dad's baggage and I asked a few questions to get the party started. To not go into details, it was suddenly all too clear that he had still not processed some of the shit I was hoping he'd deal with. Ugh. He said some stuff as communicated through the psychic that he would have said when he was still alive, like a refusal to take accountability. He was better with it. But at the core of it, he still wasn't quite there. It was an important lesson in not buying into healing fantasies, even if and perhaps especially if the person you have the healing fantasy with is dead. It took me a while to process this. And it set up a large bit of grief in my body again, a sadness that my dad still couldn't be what I wanted and needed him to be. We cannot project healing onto anybody. Even if they are no longer with us in the world. It can be so easy to idealize relationships after death. like to think that the dead are growing and changing as much as living just in a different way. And that there's loss to just having this stagnant idea of a relationship after one has died.

I have a lot of repeat dreams, or at least repeat scenes that I have had different dreams in. One of these scenes is my grandpa's old barn. Like most barns this one was old, rickety, filled with both pigeons and pigeon shit, and made of wood and questionable building practices. There were two slabs of a sliding door that opened outwards at the front. In my dreams, the doors would open slowly, revealing a dark vortex of a long dusk lit tunnel. It was more or less a barn but it was a hell of spooky and not quite right. There were all sorts of special implications of walking even five feet into this continuum. And if you went too far in you're probably lost for good or else you'd have to make it to the other side. Occasionally, a small ray of light would steal through the roof, but that's about it. It was primarily a cattle rancher naturally bones everywhere shallow buried in the ground littered in the barn, and definitely very prominent in this dream scene. There's a spooky unknowability to my granddad is from another time, an old man from a very young age despite being quite handsome until he got married, I said as much at his funeral to mixed reception. But suddenly he lost all of his fashion sense and seemingly became exponentially more serious as the years went by. I was always a little terrified of my grandpa as a wee lad. He was at times unpredictably angry and would chastise my brother and I when we cried in public when we were young, until my parents had to tell him to stop parenting us, which really meant only that we had one less person yelling at us. He was not as unpredictable as my father, but it was there. He was a Scorpio and his birthday was on Halloween, which was spooky. Pepper always made him sneeze and he was legitimately a big fan of turnips. He was also the central father figure in my life. In my youth until I was about 14, we would have more for dinner almost every night, and always for breakfast on one of the weekend days. We lived on the same property technically separated by about a 10 acre field where the horses graze and snowmobiling and played hockey in the frozen ponds. He was the one who gave my parents a house to live in in a solid material life by extension, when in reality, my parents are really quite poor. He was the most solid part of my young life and is actually the person I learned my comedic form and timing from, as well as a few really bad Great Depression era jokes. Three years ago, my grandpa at the ripe old age of 92, began to die. He made it to a venerable 95 before finally choosing assisted suicide, and desperate relief from somebody that just would not quit. In these intervening years, I called my grandpa every Wednesday at 1pm. It was the closest we've been since my childhood and it was the sweetest time I've ever had with him. Since we're both practical people, we both knew he was going to croak at some point. And so this unlocked a vulnerability I could only dream of previously, I got to spend hours asking him questions about his life, his incredible mother, who is both a university teacher and a men's hockey coach in the 1910s. And a dad who returned from World War One with the Military Cross and a deep well of trauma. In some ways, I might actually know more factual information about my grandpa's upbringing, and my father's. I got to ask each other the same questions every week. And he would let me know that well, "that's all I have to report" when he was getting tired and wanted to stop talking. He said many times how proud he was of me and I learned a lot about honorable of a man he was, even though I already knew. I realized that I get my fundamental values and sense of morality from him, which is a huge gift and probably the nicest thing I could say about myself. I also got to learn how to sit with death.

A long protracted death of literally countless goodbyes and potential final calls. This being the most recent death and a string of many throughout the last decade, I tried my best to enjoy the moments in between sobbing and laughing and a shared intimacy of at all. Grief and death were with us in every moment. And yet it was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. My grandpa received made right around his birthday. His body just would not let him go. I knew this day was coming for weeks and cried rivers every few nights. When it happened, I was terribly sad losing another father figure and perhaps you know, the more we're stable father figure at that, it hurt. But like I said, we got to spend so many hours connecting in those last few years of his life. And it was a sweet sadness that I endured. The timeline is blurry here, but for a lot of the time during which my grandpa was dying, and when I was meeting up with my dad on the astral realm. I've had these dreams in my grandpa in the kitchen of his old farmhouse, surrounded by dust and sunlight through the windows and the smell of lilacs wafting in from the bushes outside the front door. It was a white house with green trim and a green roof. There was a coal furnace in the basement and lots of Australian Indigenous art from the time when my grandpa hosted someone from that faraway continent. It was a small rustic farmhouse that was brought all the way from Central Saskatchewan eons ago. And it stood the test of time. It was also the house I lived in from when I was born to when my brother was born, which is just before my third birthday. In these dreams, I would always be sitting with my grandpa helping take physical care of him. But I also like to think I was helping with the transition or at least be there for him through it all. We touched on the spirituality a bit in her long talks. And when we never got too deep, I knew not to bring something like this up with him. He was after all steeped in old fashioned masculinity and scientific dogmatism. And even for most people today, this is kind of woo woo but it brought me even closer to him and it felt like such a wholesome and pleasant experience. I felt such a deep spiritual connection to this man who for so much in my life intimidated me, and was in the under flawed and at times violent person. But when taking care of his tender little body and heart and these dreams, he would just a shriveled little old Irish cutie pie, eagerly awaiting what came next. I don't know how to explain it other than there was just pure kinship between us. And the fact that we're not related by blood meant fuck off frankly.

I had one dream a week or two before he finally passed when I knew things were getting serious for real this time. It was like the other dreams but much more involved. There was a collection of all his favorite things like wooden carvings of animals he kept around various fossils and gemstones from his life as a geologist a trophy for curling, which he excelled at and a picture from water skiing barefoot with a straw hat at 77 years of age-- true sorry. Like most gyms of this nature, there were no actual words spoken, it felt more like we were trying to mouth the words like shape without form, gesture without motion. So I don't know what was said or what was communicated, but it was very meaningful. That was the last dream we had before he passed. Remarkably, my two dream worlds met after a time, crystal clear, dusty sunbeam filled and tear inducing to this very day. I had a dream where both my father and I were taking care of my grandpa. There was breakfast on the table and such a beautiful silence perforated by the glory of early morning birdsong. My dad's great big smiley too seldom used in life, my thoughtful, caty eyes. It was a wondrous conjunction of intergenerational care and love interwoven with the years of trauma and tension that filled the pages of my life. And the intervening time where all three of us were alive and interacting with each other as three imperfect, hurt and hurtful and unique individuals. Suddenly, there was no need for grand apologies sending off screaming matches, fuck yous, or even jovial times at Sunday breakfast when I was on toast duty, making no less than 10 pieces of toast for everyone. It was just care, almost like a fucking platonic representation of the absolute concept of care in some primordial, abstract sense. And like I also made me think that that's just what care is all the time, the personification of love through action. And that's what it really felt like. After we attended to my grandpa's needs in an almost reverent way. My dad and I both smiled at each other knowingly and healthcare the old man away from that perfect kitchen, into the rooms of the hereafter. It was one of the most beautiful scenes I've ever experienced. My Dad and my grandpa stayed on after I had to wake up, and from what I gathered, they were settling in for a nice long chat. And let me tell you, they have a lot to work through. This ain't no tidy epilogue, or happy ending of the end of a shitty and violent abuse filled book. Because the story is still going, and life doesn't work like that, but is pretty damn special.

Since freeing myself from the bonds of suffering I forged from my dad's dusty, old blueprints, I've cultivated a sense of adventure in my life. Like the rusted chains and general ironmongery of the workshop on the old farm, there is a relic of a past that no longer serves me. I've welded flowers and vines upon their lonely exterior, breathing life change and wind back into them, animating the brooding fortress of toxic masculine solitude and violent ontology into a silly chorus of old tin cans and bits of hay. And look, there it is, underneath it all, a calmness. silence that is yes, masculine, but a silence that is deep, mournful and supportive. It's not a happy ending, and there is no redemption. But projecting a healing fantasy onto my dad would have potentially made some parts of me feel better or whatever, but also would have closed the book on his life, forcing a sense of finality onto a story that isn't finished. There's loss in that too. Sticking with the messy mark of life, even in death, is a way to keep touch with my dad, and hopefully grandpa too, and keep working through our shit together as a family lineage. I'd much rather continue sharing notes with my ancestors, even if they still make me angry or disappointed from time to time, then write a different story that may look shinier on the surface but lack the fluidity and realness of true connection. I don't know what to say about belonging. Part of me wants to wrap this story up in a nice neat bow, and draw themes out and perform for Empire. It's not as simple as to say that belonging for me is just a process either though, it's real. It's messy, and it is what it is. But it's something I'm really glad that I've found.

An epitaph to you, the grandmother I never knew , the shrouded ancestry of strong women in hard times that I feel in my bones, opaque and elemental, like a murky memory of a maternal melody. A tiny noise from a dusty toy from a century filled with so much violence and epigenetic burn mark of fibers web of rickety dreams and prayers to the gods of Messianic doors to futures passed. To me to you. I add this thread.

Thanks for listening to On Belonging.

This episode featured rowan ewanshyn

with music by ZF Bergman

On Belonging is curated by carla joy bergman and Jamie-Leigh Gonzalez, with tech support by Chris Bergman. The show's awesome theme music is by AwareNess. On Belonging is a Joyful Threads and Grounded Futures creation. Please visit groundedfutures.com for show-notes, transcripts, and to read more about On Belonging.

Till next time, keep walking. Keep listening

These transcripts were generated in Otter, and lightly edited by our team.