You cannot understand yourself until you understand the seven generations behind you. From that vantage point, history begins to open up like the sky and strange and familiar family habits come into focus.

For me, I am exploring my Serbian ancestry currently. Seven generations take me back to around late 1790’s—not the greatest time to be a Serb farmer.

I see a woman kneeling on a dirt floor in a burning country. She cant write her name. She had to bury at least 1 child in the churchyard—a wooden church that looked identical to her house because the village of 10 families built both. Armies moved through her valley and she learned to read danger in the sound of hoofbeats before seeing the horse.

She prayed the way she breathed. Not because she chose it. Because her mother’s hands had shaped her hands into the posture before she was old enough to have an opinion about God. She was never alone. Either the living the dead or God was always with her.

Seven generations of people surviving the un-survivable, encoding what worked into muscle and nerve and reflex — and then passing it forward to someone who would live in a different world and have no idea why they flinch at certain sounds or trust certain silences or feel, against all available evidence, that they are not entirely alone.

This is the work of recognition. Of honoring.

What are you carrying that was never meant for you — and what are you carrying that was meant for exactly you, and nothing has told you yet?