Ancestor Honor

I look out the dream window at the line of my descendants. I’m afraid there may be a cutoff point where, because of human folly. there is an end of the line.  But no, I am overjoyed to see that the humans on earth go forward long, long, long into what we call future time. I stand at the small window and gaze. Something catches my attention, a sound of humming. A movement. The line is pulsing, more a wave than anything straight. I see and hear and feel a wave, humming like a bee hive, a wave throbbing with life and generativity. A taste of honey comes into my palate.

One figure in the distance is smiling at me. A smile of radiance! Some descendant, two hundred years or so “ahead” of where I stand at the window, is trying to get my attention. As soon as I give it, the focus emerges. My gaze zooms in with perfected distance vision on a small person, someone who looks like a preteen just before genderfying, but with a look on her face (I use the female inclusive) of such love and wisdom that I know she is, in these future times, a fully grown human.

I see her close up now. Who is this descendant? With the focus, comes a change in the sound. The humming becomes a kind of language I can almost understand. The descendant is singing me words in the Great Hum. She is bending now to—what—an altar? On her Ancestor altar, she is honoring – me! Thanking me for making her possible. Giving gratitude for my living my full potential, so that she could come to be.

I place my hands on the window frame and lean out, out. I reach out with my hands towards her. It feels as if her acknowledgment is a kind of touching, a physical touching that moves me deeply. An intimate touch across time. I long to embrace this dear and precious descendant. She picks something up from her altar, some small device, she looks down at it, and then straight into my eyes. And then I hear her voice, the embrace of her voice. As I stand at the window, within the house of my own life-time, I receive the timbre and resonance of her voice  as a physical touch on my ears, on my skin.

Now I truly begin to hear. My descendant two hundred years from now proclaims a poem, a poem I slowly recognize, as one of my own. Receiving my own song, back from the life-time of my descendant, I let the humming love in her voice caress me from the future. The words come more clear, “ONE THOUSAND YEARS OF HEALING” she says, and I remember that when that poem came through me, I experienced it as a great gift of hope for the future. Now I hear it transmitted back to me from that very space-time.

She finishes and puts down the reading device. Across the throbbing wave of time, she gazes into my eyes  with her resplendent smile of thanks. And bows. I don’t know what to do. I didn’t know I was an Ancestor. It is not so easy to receive this thanks, to be gracious. I take a deep breath and then, I bow back to my descendent. I call out loud from my window, You are welcome, welcome, welcome.