all roads will take you there

on meeting the witness

embroidery of mokoša: goddess of mother earth, fertility, fate, harvest, moisture, sexuality, patroness of women, children, childbirth, home, weaving.

My prabaka (great-grandmother) sarafina was a croatian jew who met my pradeda on a train between processing laundry for a nunnery in dalmatia. she once used a straight razor and homemade plum brandy to remove his tonsils (he survived). baba kića, a prabaka on my mother’s side, would regularly scale about 1000m in elevation from lovćen to kotor bay to sell tobacco. Kića was unyielding. She would not even avoid a guerilla military invasion zone if it was on her way to her destination. I was told that she said neka pucaju (let them shoot) and insisted on her preferred route with her pack donkey (they survived). 

a haystack in kolašin

I, on the other hand, am scared of being misunderstood, of being embarrassed, and worry that i’ll miss a flight while sitting at the gate an hour before take off. There’s ancestral firmness and fearlessness in here somewhere, so how do i turn it on? I’m *still* trying to unlearn what i tell myself about qualities that feel separate. Storytelling, ancestral lore: this type of sharing is a process of remembering. We are so extraordinarily expansive, we just need to commit to wake up to that truth every day; to uncover rather than stay stuck in the illusion that we’re incomplete. We trace the stories of our genealogy because we yearn for understanding, identity, belonging. We get curious about an ancestor and wonder about their qualities and flaws through the lens of our perception of self. I ask about a great-grandfather, simon, who was a folk ethnobotanist. i ask about my aunt nina who introduced my mom to eastern philosophy and psychedelics, who killed herself before i was born. i ask my grandma katica about her personal relationship to spirituality and she looks at me as if i stink, her chin pulling into her neck, index finger tracing a fast circle near her temple.

martin jonaš. moja radost (my joy), 1981.

I don’t know if this much self inquiry is “good,” or if it’s getting in the way of actually being with myself. Different schools of thought say different things. I’m still confused about the ethics of where psychodynamics and spirituality meet and diverge. I just want to do a good job, guys. i’m still in the beginning stages of learning from a teacher i only met recently: my consciousness. A part of which is sometimes referred to as the witness- the one who notices the cacophony of the mind's thoughts and feelings, but doesn’t judge or get involved with them. the witness invites us to outperform ourselves. It teaches us that we are not a body, our thoughts or our feeling states. That we are not so reductive as we’ve been conditioned to believe, that there IS a place beyond all the noise. I am working my witness muscle in meditation practice. It’s the hardest thing i’ve ever tried, i feel like a bad student again. Like when i was asked to stand in front of the class and read the analog clock to announce the time- spoiler alert- i couldn’t!! As someone who is moving slowly away from a baseline normal of distracted and dissociative, this is precisely the type of practice that i need. It’s really moving to acknowledge how much more regulated i feel when i sit a bit. I reflect on the time i spent worrying that i was doomed and hardwired. I guess this means that i can’t take my crises that seriously anymore.

all roads will take you there

kića and sarafina didn’t placate or doubt their abilities, they were abrasively themselves. They are not being channeled four generations into the future for being graceful hero archetypes, instead, their legacy consists of making others uncomfortable through their firm, fearless being-ness. I’m not saying “be hard, give no fucks, perform invasive surgery on your partner.” I’m attempting to validate those of us who have a skittish part -which was a very powerful self defence once upon a time- who might need a hard internal pendulum swing to ultimately land somewhere that feels closer to the truth. Kića and Sarafina released the need to correct and control their image. They knew it was imperative to sacrifice likeability. May we all get curious about our unruly, unpalatable ancestral lineages in our efforts to revolutionize the collective soul.

hvala,

s