Book Project

The Adventure of Home is a creative nonfiction book re-membering our indigeneity to this Earth through braided lyrical narratives unravelling the destructive social, economic and religious foundations colonialism gave us, and reweaving mythologies of a sacred wild.

 

I am a descendent of European settler culture, 13 generations of living on the soil of this      continent. This checkered past tells me I am not indigenous to anything. I don’t belong to the country of my ancestors, or the land they stole from others. I have no sacred story from my original homelands tethering me to this earth. I am a mythological refugee, one among millions. Our planet suffers because of it.

 

My ancestral stories roam from an indentured servant on the Mayflower to a framer of North Carolina’s 1776 constitution, from a slave owner in fledgling Louisiana to a founding mother of Farmington, Missouri still under Spanish rule. Mine is also a lineage of adventurers and rebels, healers and storytellers. The code is clear. My genes have been here for all of it—fleeing       political, economic and religious oppression in Ireland and Scotland, the making and breaking of treaties with Native People, the eradication of species and cultures, the insatiable hunger for open land and mineral wealth. In my colonial inheritance, I carry both greatness and guilt.

 

Seeking healing from this past, I dig deeper into my genealogy—the Celtic people of Europe’s pre-history, the indigenous of that land preceding even them. Societies teaching, like most    native cultures, of an animate and divine nature. Their stories flutter to me in tatters. 

 

I pick up these pieces, finding familiarity from some profound place in my DNA’s core. This, also, is my inheritance. A living mythology of ancient archetypes, rooted in wild nature, rise from the heart of the Southern Rocky Mountains around me. I nurture seeds in Winter          Solstice’s darkness, learn the migratory language of Sandhill Cranes in the spring. Lying in   alpine meadows, tracing the contours of rivers—dreams and visions blur what is “real.” These liminal spaces of ridge and water conjure enchantments—animals with agency, and a natural world imbibed with messages.

 

My journey serves as template for those of my kind. Through these ancestral stories                exemplifying the people we once were, we can re-member our indigeneity, our lost sensibility of belonging, non-duality, interconnectedness, and stewardship. We are initiated into an identity of reverence and reciprocity with the Earth, emerging with a fierce dedication to place, healing both our ecological crises and each other. We walk through both the dark and the light together, in an epic adventure of finally, truly, fully, coming home.

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