Ancestors Legacy Quotes

There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors.

We don't inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.

Are we being good ancestors?

The songs of our ancestors are also the songs of our children

Breathing in, I see all my ancestors in me: my mineral ancestors, plant ancestors, mammal ancestors, and human ancestors. My ancestors are always present, alive in every cell of my body, and I play a part in their immortality.

Your ancestors are rooting for you.

History remembers only the celebrated, genealogy remembers them all.

you are one person, but when you move, an entire community walks through you - you go nowhere alone

My forebears played a significant part in making me who I am. I honor their legacy. I will never forget what they gave me. I will love them until the day I die. And no one can take them away from me.

You are the posterity of your family. You are either continuing the progression or regression of your ancestors.

There is no such thing as an insignificant life, only the insignificance of mind that refuses to grasp the implications.

You carry all of us in your heart. We shall live in every breath you take. Every incantation you speak.

It is how it has always been. We will accept the legacy of our ancestors,' Asha says, smiling, and in her smile I do not see warmth or wisdom; I see fear. You're afraid of losing your hold on them,' I say coolly. I? I have no power.' Don't you? If you keep them from the magic, they will never know what their lives could be.' They will remain protected,' Asha insists. No,' I say. 'Only untested' -page 569

I AM THANKFUL FOR THE ocean, from which life springs. I am thankful for the ancestors, who lived, which is all any of us can do. And I am thankful for our vast human history, wide and various enough that there are legacies of triumph for every legacy of trauma. Everything is always changing, which means nothing can ever be hopeless. The

The larger question is, as virologist Jonas Salk once asked, "Are we being good ancestors?

If virtue has a color, it’s the color of the life within us, dancing with every heartbeat. It’s the legacy of our ancestors, the gifts of our parents that we try to live up to

I don’t think my journey has to be harrowing to be important. Simply doing the tasks of the day is enough. Such as getting up every morning to go to work to support my family and sacrificing personal time in service to others, teaching my children to give thanks for what they have and to care for others.

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

The living dead had taken more from us than land and loved ones. They'd robbed us of our confidence as the planet's dominant life form. We were a shaken, broken species, driven to the edge of extinction and grateful only for tomorrow with perhaps a little less suffering than today. Was this the legacy we would leave our children, a level of anxiety and self-doubt not seen since our simian ancestors cowered in the tallest trees? What kind of world would they rebuild? Would they rebuild at all? Could they continue to progress, knowing that they would be powerless to reclaim their future? And what if that future saw another rise of the living dead? Would our descendants rise to meet them in battle, or simply crumple in meek surrender and accept what they believe to be their inevitable extinction? For this alone, we had to reclaim our planet. We had to prove to ourselves that we could do it, and leave that proof as this war's greatest monument. The long, hard road back to humanity, or the regressive ennui of Earth's once-proud primates. That was the choice, and it had to be made now.

How many stories are there that have been lived, but will never be told? Far too many for me to squander the one that I’m living.

One could only wish there were more who understood the love of family, of history, and of ancient, sacred bonds that grow deep within us all. If family is not worthy of our time and attention, who or what is?

Our children pay a heavy price when we lack consciousness. Overindulged, over-medicated, and over-labeled, many of them are unhappy. This is because, coming from unconsciousness ourselves, we bequeath to them our own unresolved needs, unmet expectations, and frustrated dreams. Despite our best intentions, we enslave them to the emotional inheritance we received from our parents, binding them to the debilitating legacy of ancestors past. The nature of unconsciousness is such that, until it’s metabolized, it will seep through generation after generation. Only through awareness can the cycle of pain that swirls in families end. T

My teachers revealed to me how traditional Islamic scholarship rests upon unbroken chains of transmission called Isnad (Literally, “to lean back on for support”—an unbroken transmission of religious authority similar to the Rabbinic concept of Semikhah) that link each student back in time through the generations to Muhammad himself. To bring my own Isnad to life, my teachers would occasionally gift me books written by ancestors in my chain, like Imam Ad-Dani who lived in eleventh-century Spain.

We are a continuum. Just as we reach back to our ancestors for our fundamental values, so we, as guardians of that legacy, must reach ahead to our children and their children. And we do so with a sense of sacredness in that reaching.

I think about the legacy we’re leaving behind all the time: pollution and plastic and buildings and everything else. As one of the last humans, my choices and decisions are imbued with the full weight of the billions of lives that came before me. It feels like my ancestors are watching me, waiting to see how I ensure their legacy, how I remember them.

One can never be 100% certain when it comes to family lineage. One must always keep an open mind, willing to go wherever the facts may lead.

We are all a complete mixture;yet at the same time,we are all related.Each gene can trace its own journey to a different common ancestor.This is a quite extraordinary legacy that we all have inherited from the people who lived before us.Our genes did not just appear when we were born.They have been carried to us by millions of individual lives over thousands of generations.

The conviction reigns that it is only through the sacrifices and accomplishments of the ancestors that the tribe exists--and that one has to pay them back with sacrifices and accomplishments; one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater, since these forebears never cease, in their continued existence as powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new advantages and new strength.

The mystery of existence will always remain a mystery. All we know for sure is what the ancients knew: each succeeding generation forms a link in the braided cord of humanity. Each of our lives is shallower if we do not know and pay homage to where we came from. The past forms the world that we currently inhabit, and our actions today, comparable to our ancestors’ actions of yesterday, will reverberate in the history of tomorrow. While the tools of our trades evolve from generation to generation, the way that people behave and the motives behind their behavior remains constant. Each generation must chart the same dangerous territories of the heart. Each succeeding generation must diagnosis the illnesses that imperil their mental, physical, social, and economic wellbeing. Life is brutally painful and extraordinary joyful.

Over the course of the millennia, all these multitudes of ancestors, generation upon generation, have come down to this moment in time—to give birth to you. There has never been, nor will ever be, another like you. You have been given a tremendous responsibility. You carry the hopes and dreams of all those who have gone before. Hopes and dreams for a better world. What will you do with your time on this Earth? How will you contribute to the ongoing story of humankind?

As the traditional healer Makhosi Petros Hezekial Mtshali tells us, Ancestors are benevolent beings who love us. You are their legacy, and they want the best for their progeny. Their own evolution in the Otherworld depends upon the completion of unfinished business or making amends for unkind acts or deeds that they may have committed during their lifetime.

What’s the legacy you want to pass on? We can’t choose what our ancestors did, or what was done to them. But we get to create the recipe that’s handed down. Write a recipe for a life well-lived. Take the good things from your family’s past and add your own ingredients. Give the next generation something delicious and nourishing to build on.

Never venture near the toxic family war zone without your security detail of angels, spirit guides, and ancestors by your side.

The Legacy began: “The duty of a lord of a province is to give peace and security to the people and does not consist of shedding luster on his ancestors or working for the prosperity of his descendants.…” One

Our basic human institutions - religion, matrimony, and burial, also law, language, literature, and whatever else relies on the transmission of legacy - are authored, always and from the very start, by those who cam before. The awareness of death that defines human nature is inseparable from - indeed, it arises from, our awareness that we are not self-authored, that we follow in the footsteps of the dead. . . . Nonhuman species obey the law of vitality, but humanity in its distinctive features is through and through necrocratic. Whether we are conscious of it or not we do the will of the ancestors; their precedents are our law; we submit to their dictates, even when we rebel against them. Our diligence, hardihood, rectitude, and heroism, but also our folly, spite, rancor, and pathologies, are so many signatures of the dead on the contracts that seal our identities. We inherit their obsessions; assume their burdens; carry on their causes; promote their mentalities, ideologies, and very often their superstitions; and often we die trying to vindicate their humiliations. Why this servitude? We have no choice. Only the dead can grant us legitimacy. Left to ourselves we all bastards.

Those who came before us, with their family names and genetic legacies, with their physical peculiarities, whether it be albino skin or brown eyes—none of this mattered. Family was who we loved and who we protected. Family was the tribe we created here and now.

The human race is the biggest mass murderer of all time. Think about it: we’re hard-coded to survive. Even our ancient ancestors were driven by this impulse, driven enough to recognize the Neanderthals and Hobbits as dangerous enemies. They may have slaughtered dozens of human subspecies. And that legacy shamefully lives on. We attack whatever is different, anything we don’t understand, anything that might change our world, our environment, reduce our chances of survival. Racism, class warfare, sexism, east versus west, north and south, capitalism and communism, democracy and dictatorships, Islam and Christianity, Israel and Palestine, they’re all different faces of the same war: the war for a homogeneous human race, an end to our differences. It’s a war we started a long time ago, a war we’ve been fighting ever since. A war that operates in every human mind below the subconscious level, like a computer program, constantly running in the background, guiding us to some eventuality.” Kate didn’t know what to say, couldn’t see how it could involve her trial and her children. “You expect me to believe those two children are involved in an ancient cosmic struggle for the human race?

People often refuse to recognize these changes, especially when it comes to core political and religious values. We insist that our values are a precious legacy from ancient ancestors. Yet the only thing that allows us to say this is that our ancestors are long dead and cannot speak for themselves.

Ironically, the inborn factor that is most likely to be making the major contribution to the savageries of modern war is the powerful human inclination to co-operate. This is a legacy from our ancient hunting past, when we had to co-operate or starve. It was the only way we could hope to defeat large prey animals. All that a modern dictator has to do is to play on this inherent sense of human group-loyalty and to expand and organize this group into a full-scale army. By converting the naturally helpful into the excessively patriotic, he can easily persuade them to kill strangers, not as acts of inborn brutality, but as laudable acts of companion-protection. If our ancestors had not become so innately co-operative, it might be much more difficult today to raise an army and send it into battle as an organized force.

We are uneasily aware that a similar catastrophe[, that of an immense meteorite or comet hitting the earth and causing massive global extinction,] could hit us at any moment... [T]he odds that it will happen in some unfortunate individual's lifetime are near certainty... And the unfortunate individuals concerned will probably not be human, for statistical likelihood is that we shall be extinct before that anyway.

We’d fought the living dead to a stalemate and, eventually, future generations might be able to reinhabit the planet with little or no physical danger. Yes, our defensive strategies had saved the human race, but what about the human spirit? The living dead had taken more from us than land and loved ones. They’d robbed us of our confidence as the planet’s dominant life-form. We were a shaken, broken species, driven to the edge of extinction and grateful only for a tomorrow with perhaps a little less suffering than today. Was this the legacy we would leave to our children, a level of anxiety and self-doubt not seen since our simian ancestors cowered in the tallest trees? What kind of world would they rebuild? Would they rebuild at all? Could they continue to progress, knowing that they had been powerless to reclaim their future? And what if that future saw another rise of the living dead? Would our descendants rise to meet them in battle, or simply crumple in meek surrender and accept what they believe to be their inevitable extinction? For this reason alone, we had to reclaim our planet. We had to prove to ourselves that we could do it, and leave that proof as this war’s greatest monument. The long, hard road back to humanity, or the regressive ennui of Earth’s once-proud primates. That was the choice, and it had to be made now.

Part of Darya had always felt ashamed of her homesickness for Iran. How could she be homesick for a place filled with cruel laws and bottomless sadness? Because it was filled with so much more than that. Because her father was still there. Because her sister was too. Because the lemon trees and pomegranates were still there. Because the poetry was still there. Because her ancestors had cultivated a life and a legacy there. Because that place was home. Her home.

I was a young girl buying bubble gum at the corner store when I first really heard the full name bell hooks. I had just 'talked back' to a grown person. Even now I can recall the surprised look, the mocking tones that informed me I must be kin to bell hooks - a sharp-tongued woman, a woman who spoke her mind, a woman who was not afraid to talk back. I claimed this legacy of defiance, of will, of courage, affirming my link to my female ancestors who were bold and daring in their speech.

The Lord justified and sanctified the line of His forefathers. Likewise, every one of us, if we follow Christ, can justify ourselves in our individual being, having restored the Divine image in us through total repentance, and by so doing can help to justify our own forefathers. We bear in ourselves the legacy of the sins of our ancestors; and, by virtue of the ontological unity of the human race, healing for us means healing for them, too. We are so interjoined that man does not save himself alone.

The Rothschilds have been closely involved with the global elite since the inception of this group. The oldest known Rothschild went by the name of Uri Feibesch who lived in the early sixteenth century. His great great great grandson was Moses Bauer, who lived in the early eighteenth century. A well-known ancestor of this banking family was Mayer Amschel Bauer, an asset manager in Frankfurt am Main. Among other things he represented the money and assets of sovereign Wilhelm von Hessen. He became very rich, because he attended to the conveyance of the capital that belonged to this sovereign during the French Revolution. Mayer Amschel Bauer chose, without exception, women from very influential families that belonged to the global elite, for his sons. In the same way, his daughters married prominent bankers who also belonged to the global elite. All these families acted in the same way as the royal families: they married amongst themselves. Bauer’s sons were known as the “five Frankfurter”: they became bankers of five European countries.

Studying the history of our ancestors is instructive. I understand some of my parents’ struggles and sacrifices. I am acquainted with my grandparents and great grandparents’ way of life. The common denominator that runs through their lifeblood is a hardpan of resiliency, courage, and work ethic. They also shared a phenomenal degree of competency essential to make due in an open land where the pioneering spirit meets nature under a big sky full of endless possibilities for triumph and setback. My forebears took care of their family members and tended their ancestral land before the word caretaker was a recognized term for a loving man, woman, or child. Self-reliant people who master the skills essential for survival in a harsh clime also value helping other people who are in a fix. All my predecessors were quick to lend a hand to a neighbor in need. Their ability to see life through the heart was the decisive feature of their pioneering pluck. How we start a day, presages how the day shall unfold. Each day when I awaken, I feel clobbered by the preceding day. At days end, I feel comparable to a chewed on piece of masticated beef. I devote all available personal energy reserves to simply getting by and muss over how I can engender the energy to make it through today’s pulp works. In reality, I go on because akin to every generation that preceded me and every generation that succeeds me, I must continue onward or I will expire. The one fact that keeps me going is the realization that all generations of people struggle. What we share with preceding generations is our heartaches and our willingness to struggle in order to make the world a better place for the next generation.

Abraham Lincoln understood this moral bond explicitly: “We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducting more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tell us,” he said in his first important public speech, in 1838. “We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them—they are a legacy bequeathed to us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors.

Scientists know your DNA reflects the genetic legacy of your parents, their parents, and your ancestors. It’s possible that it also reflects their emotional experiences. As researchers learn more about our DNA, maybe we’ll find that our cells have encoded the traumas of our ancestors. Experiments in mice have shown that aversion to certain smells is passed down to the offspring after the parental mice were trained to avoid a certain smell by being shocked every time they smelled it.8 While we know that a family history of heart disease may mean close relatives share genes and genetic markers, if we look back, we can often see in family stories hearts that are broken, conflicted, and prevented from loving fully. In my family, people tend to die of heart disease prematurely. My maternal

Our children are an integral component of our stories as we are of theirs and, therefore, each child acts as the knighted messengers to carry their forebears’ stories into the future. To deprive our children of the narrative cells regarding the formation of the ozone layer that rims the atmosphere of our ancestors’ saga and parental determination of selfhood is to deny them of the sacred right to claim the sanctity of their heritage. Accordingly, all wrinkled brow natives are chargeable with the sacrosanct obligation of telling their kith and kin the memorable story of the scenic days they spent as children of nature splashing about in their naked innocence in the brook of infinite time and space. We must scrupulous document our family’s history as well as scrawl out our personal story.

You’re both perfectly all right,” she informed them. “And we will get Aurimere back, and our magic back, and our town back, and then we will have everything we need.” “We have some important stuff already,” Ash offered tentatively. Lillian frowned. “What do you mean?” Jared surrendered himself to the strangeness of this situation, sank back onto the pillows himself with his head near Lillian’s hip, and sighed heavily to attract his aunt’s attention. “He wants to know you love him more than that stupid house.” “It is a very nice house,” Aunt Lillian said, sounding offended. “Your ancestors are buried in the crypt of that house.” “Sure. Okay. We’ll get our lovely creepy house back. When they bury me in that crypt, I want ‘Jared, very inbred, deeply uncomfortable about it’ on my tombstone.

A dizzying array of resources across multiple fields of human inquiry has been deployed to defend this belief. By far, the strongest were theological arguments that presented white supremacy as divine mandate. Particular readings of the Bible provided the scaffolding for these arguments. Black Americans, for example, were cast as descendants of Cain, whom the book of Genesis describes as physically marked by God after killing his brother, Abel, and then lying to God about the crime. In the white Christian version of this narrative, the original ancestor was a Black criminal, and modern-day dark-skinned people continue to bear the physical mark of this ancient transgression. This story implied that Blacks likely inherited both their purported ancestor’s physical distinctiveness and his inferior moral character. These teachings persisted in many white Christian circles well into the 20th century.

Dear father, It's been five years today, but makes no difference! Not a day goes by without me remembering your pure green eyes, the tone of your voice singing In Adighabza, or your poems scattered all around the house. Dear father, from you I have learned that being a girl doesn't mean that I can't achieve my dreams, no matter how crazy or un-urban they might seem. That you raised me with the utmost of ethics and morals and the hell with this cocooned society, if it doesn't respect the right to ask and learn and be, just because I'm a girl. Dear father, from you I have learned to respect all mankind, and just because you descend from a certain blood or ethnicity, it doesn't make you better than anybody else. It's you, and only you, your actions, your thoughts, your achievements, are what differentiates you from everybody else. At the same time, thank you for teaching me to respect and value where I came from, for actually taking me to my hometown Goboqay, for teaching me about my family tree, how my ancestors worked hard and fought for me to be where I am right now, and to continue on with the legacy and make them all proud. Dear father, from you and mom, I have learned to speak in my mother tongue. A gift so precious, that I have already made a promise to do the same for my unborn children. Dear father, from you I have learned to be content, to fear Allah, to be thankful for all that I have, and no matter what, never loose faith, as it's the only path to solace. Dear father, from you I have learned that if a person wants to love you, then let them, and if they hurt you, be strong and stand your ground. People will respect you only if you respect yourself. Dear father, I'm pretty sure that you are proud of me, my sisters and our dear dear Mom. You have a beautiful grand daughter now and a son in-law better than any brother I would have ever asked for. Till we meet again, Shu wasltha'3u. الله يرحمك يا غالي. (الفاتحة) على روحك الطاهرة.

Why do you think the Neanderthals and Hobbits died out? They had been around a long time before humans walked onto the scene.” “We killed them.” “That’s right. The human race is the biggest mass murderer of all time. Think about it: we’re hard-coded to survive. Even our ancient ancestors were driven by this impulse, driven enough to recognize the Neanderthals and Hobbits as dangerous enemies. They may have slaughtered dozens of human subspecies. And that legacy shamefully lives on. We attack whatever is different, anything we don’t understand, anything that might change our world, our environment, reduce our chances of survival. Racism, class warfare, sexism, east versus west, north and south, capitalism and communism, democracy and dictatorships, Islam and Christianity, Israel and Palestine, they’re all different faces of the same war: the war for a homogeneous human race, an end to our differences. It’s a war we started a long time ago, a war we’ve been fighting ever since. A war that operates in every human mind below the subconscious level, like a computer program, constantly running in the background, guiding us to some eventuality.

America stakes a relatively modest claim to world history when compared to other nations. Perhaps this lack of historical longevity partially accounts for why each generation of Americans tends to define themselves based largely upon the flashbulb remembrances that took place during their lifetime. Despite the relative newness of The United States of America emergence as a great power, post-Vietnam Americans display no deeply entwined interest in their national heritage. The battle cries of the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the battle hymns of World War I and World War II seem like ancient relics in the springtime commencement of the digital age. Today’s consumerism society brazenly casted aside the legacy of its predecessors similar to how one would toss away a functionally obsolete toaster, bulky television set, or land phone when the newest and slimmest best thing comes along. It is a fundamental mistake to forget the embryonic stages of America. When a nation’s citizens respect the accomplishments of its ancestors, the populous feels spiritually rooted. Without a clear vision and a unified approach, America will never become the beacon of universal justice.

An understanding of the cultural history of our homeland together with an intimate familiarity with our community’s customs injects richness into our lives. Awareness of our ancestors’ home life and their true-life encounters with poverty, deprivations, tragedy, and fleeting successes connects us to the phlogistic hiss of the past and awakens us to the possibility of future transformations in how we live.

Ancient generations passed down wisdom that all succeeding generations must apply and build upon. We are constantly learning how to interpret the past, not simply ancient history, but also from variegated educational encounters experienced in our own lifetime. We must listen to the voices of our ancestors whom passed along their hopes and dreams. We must also listen to our own youthful voice that optimistically projected the best type of world for us to live in and pass along to future generations of compassionate persons. The collective voices of passionate mavens of nature linked through time created the world that we now enjoy and together they shall alter this world in a profound manner for other people to witness and explore.

First of all, the tone of my muscle cells must hold my skeleton together so that it neither collapses in upon my organs nor dislocates at its joints. It is tone, just as much as it is connective tissues or bone, that is responsible for my basic structural shape and integrity. Secondly, my muscle tone must superimpose upon its own stability the steady, rhythmical expansion and contraction of respiration. Third, it must support my overall structure in one position or another—lying, sitting standing, and so on. Finally, it must be able to brace and release any part of the body in relation to the whole, and to do this with spontaneity and split-second timing, so that graceful, purposeful action may be added to my stability, my posture, and my rhythmic respiration. It is no wonder we find that such large portions of our nervous systems are so continually engaged in controlling the maintenance and adjustments of this tone. The entire system of spindle cells, with both their contractile parts and their anulospiral receptors, the Golgi tendon organs, the reflex arcs, much of the internuncial circuitry of the spinal column, and most of the oldest portion of our brains—including the reticular formation and the basal ganglia—all work together to orchestrate this complex phenomenon. We have, as it were, a brain within our brain and a muscle system within our muscle system to monitor the constantly shifting values of background tonus, to provide a stable yet flexible framework which we are free to use how we will. Nor is it a wonder that these elements and processes are normally controlled below my level of consciousness—if this were not the case, walking across the room to get a glass of water would require more diversified and minute attention than my conscious awareness could possibly muster. It is the old brain, along with the even more ancient spinal cord, that are given the bulk of this task, because they have had so many more generations in which to grapple with the problems and refine the solutions. Millions upon millions of trials and errors have resulted in genetically constant motor circuits and sensory feedback loops which handle the fundamental life-supporting jobs of muscle tone for me automatically. Firm structure, posture, respiratory rhythms, swallowing, elimination, grasping, withdrawing, tracking with the eyes—all these intact and fully functional activities and more are given to each of us as new-born infants, the legacy of the development of our ancestors.

Light a candle and sit in silence. Ask for guidance as you tune in to the silence. Start to speak to your ancestors silently or out loud. I honor my unique gifts, talents, and powers. I come from a strong and powerful people. I release the baggage and ancestral wounds that have been passed on to me. I will turn the pain and struggle of my past into purpose. I celebrate the freedom that I have because of sacrifices made before me. I promise to honor my lineage and live out my truth. I bow to the legacy that gave rise to me. Through my thoughts and actions, I pave the path for a legacy I will leave behind.

How strong they had been—all of them!—ancestors of today’s African Americans. How many of them had untold stories, legacies erased into oblivion?

Never venture near the toxic family war zone without your security detail of angels, spirit guides and ancestors by your side.

If we evolved from chimpanzee-like apes that are unusually sedentary, what happened to make humans so much more active, and how does that legacy affect how much we move? The answer, which we will learn about in later chapters, is that climate change spurred our ancestors to evolve an unusual but extremely successful way of life, hunting and gathering, that demands more work. In terms of physical activity, hunter-gatherers are only very active for a few hours a day, but they nonetheless walk five to ten miles a day, carry food and infants, dig for many hours, sometimes run, and perform myriad other tasks to survive. In order to cooperate, communicate, and make tools, our ancestors were also selected to have large expensive brains. Last but not least, we evolved to be highly active to fuel a unique and unusually exorbitant reproductive strategy.

God, I pray that my family will continue on in the faith. Give my children ears to hear and the memory to recall their legacy in future years. Remind us to pray often for family members and for our descendants, just as some of our ancestors surely prayed for us. Create from us, O Lord, a family legacy that will honor you for generations to come.

In his book The Return of the Dead: the transparent veil of the pagan mind Lecouteux exposes us to older definitions of ‘body’ and ‘soul’ that are ultimately heathen in origin. He shows in detail how Christianity went about ‘de-corporealising’ the soul and making it into an immaterial thing. To our ancestors there was no such thing as an ‘immaterial’ thing. Everything had a kind of body; some of them were just denser and more easily perceived by humans than others.

The takeaway of these stories seemed to be that our legacy was one of humiliation and suffering. Life treated those who came before me with relentless indignity, and I had a moral obligation to live better than them. Living better than them did not mean making my own choices. It meant honoring the choices my ancestors would have wanted for me.

So, you want us to stop saying gay. Want to remove the right to acknowledge the truth of our bodies and hearts and eradicate the language that names us As if this will somehow keep you safe from our existence As if you can see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil us into oblivion. It was you who birthed us into a legacy of code makers and breakers. Humans who took their language underground. Cast spells and had wordless conversations with our ancestors Who gifted us new ways to speak in the open air. We painted pink triangles on the walls of The underground bomb shelters you built to bury us alive Left a trail of glitter pointing to the inborn light in our chests So the ones who came looking for us would know how we lived. We stole back the vernacular you created to hide us back from the tips of your forked tongues Alchemized the sounds that twisted your mouth into symbols of reclamation Used your vilification to dig ourselves out of the closets you constructed around us Made our way blazing and victorious into the sun. When AIDS devastated an entire glittering generation We crafted a whispered language of the isolated hospital room and empty funeral That can only be heard by bodies That have been asked to hold a loss too deep to name. When Matthew Shephard's bloody and broken body Was found tied to that barbed wire fence, the only clean part of his skin the trails of his desperate tears We twisted from the ethers an entirely new way to name collective grief and fear, one far too infinite to hold alone It has always been our tenacious together than holds us. Drive us underground We will always surface Singing words you can never own Because don’t have the range to hear them. Go ahead, take away our words, We will birth a whole new language You’ve been sending your armies for us since the beginning of time But we were born for battle. You wonder why we are still here? You made us this strong. You think getting rid of a word will silence us? You’d have to ban them all.

At the same time, it is important to remember that nostalgia for lower-tech times is based on fake memories. This is as true in the small scale of centuries as it is in the vast scale of life. Every genetic feature of you, from the crook of the corner of your eye to much of the way your body moves when you listen to music, was framed and formed by the negative spaces carved out by the pre-reproductive deaths of your would-be ancestors over hundreds of millions years. You are the reverse image of inconceivable epochs of heartbreak and cruelty. Your would-be ancestors in their many species, reaching back into the phylogenetic tree, were eaten, often by diseases, or sexually rejected before they could contribute genes to your legacy. The genetic, natural part of you is the sum of the leftovers of billions of years of extreme violence and poverty. Modernity is precisely the way individuals arose out of the ravages of evolutionary selection.

Creating accretes and compounds, and as a consequence, every day, each human life is made possible by the sum of all previous human creations. Every object in our life, however old or new, however apparently humble or simple, holds the stories, thoughts, and courage of thousands of people, some living, most dead--the accumulated new of fifty thousand years. Our tools and art are our humanity, our inheritance, and the everlasting legacy of our ancestors. The things we make are the speech of our species: stories of triumph, courage, and creation, of optimism, adaptation, and hope; tales not of one person here and there but of one people everywhere; written in a common language, not African, American, Asian, or European but human.

Ancestors are benevolent beings who love us. You are their legacy, and they want the best for their progeny. Their own evolution in the Otherworld depends upon the completion of unfinished business or making amends for unkind acts or deeds that they may have committed during their lifetime.

You and a select few of your ancestors, including your mother, are special protectors of your realm, here on earth. You are here to keep balance between what is right and wrong, good and evil. You and you alone are the Keeper of a deadly sword, known as the Ferryman. You must learn to wield the Ferryman and protect your world from destruction.

Every person is a bridge spanning two legacies: the one they inherit and the one they pass on. Family pathology rolls from generation to generation, like a fire in the woods taking down everything in its path, until one person in one generation has the courage to turn and face the flames. That person brings peace to their ancestors and spares all the children that follow.”47 Be that person.

We are our ancestors. Their blood, their bones, their sacrifices and relationships to the earth are what have literally made us. It is not only their wounds that carry on inside of us, but their resilience, wisdom and power. Our ancestors and homelands weave a way inside of us that expands as we live and breathe. It is a legacy of love that continues through us, reinforced by habits of stewardship and care wherever we are. Deepening relationship with my ancestors has urged me closer to the land as our kindred source, most of all; immersion in the earth and waters of place has transformed and re-membered me in the most anchoring and ongoing ways, and brought me closer to the healing possibilities within and for my lineages, in the process.

Cana’an is a crossroads of the earth. Be it birds or seeds, humans looking for life and refuge, or empires with a will to dominate for power and profit, this land has been frequented by many over the course of the past several thousand years. Our collective diasporas make one of the largest in the world, and our migrational lines are as complex with layers. Despite constant war, endless stories of exile, migration, language loss, and land degradation, there is palpable vitality and wholeness in the elements of place that still live through us. There is a lesson here—a medicine in this crossroads of rupture and immense resilience and revitalization at once, where loss insists on continuation, and life recreates itself constantly through the persistence of tending what remains, from wherever we are. No matter what has been lost or taken, a way persists as long as we do. Plants of place and origin are an interwoven part of these understated worlds that mend and make belonging. They, like our ancestors, have adapted to the challenges of lifetimes, embedding wayfinding intelligence inside of us. When we are lost or have forgotten, they have the power to re-member us. They wake up the ancestral lifelines inside of us. Every time we eat our cultural foods, harvest and prepare our medicines, nurture the soil where we are, plant ancient seeds in new places, these legacies bless our bodies and guide our beings back into union with deeper sources of life’s fundamental wisdoms and the earth’s unfaltering guidance.

They’d robbed us of our confidence as the planet’s dominant life-form. We were a shaken, broken species, driven to the edge of extinction and grateful only for a tomorrow with perhaps a little less suffering than today. Was this the legacy we would leave to our children, a level of anxiety and self-doubt not seen since our simian ancestors cowered in the tallest trees?

None of us is unaffected by the dreams and failures of our ancestors. In events played out before one is even born, our stories have already begun.

Many people held generational trauma in their bodies, the legacy of their ancestors, and she believed this was true of all women. The anxiety, the startle response, the vigilance. It lived in all their muscles and skin.

It is a strong proof of the antiquity of this belief, and of these practices, to find them at the same time among men on the shores of the Mediterranean and among those of the peninsula of India. Assuredly the Greeks did not borrow this religion from the Hindus, nor the Hindus from the Greeks. But the Greeks, the Italians, and the Hindus belonged to the same race; their ancestors, in a very distant past, lived together in Central Asia. There this creed originated and these rites were established. The religion of the sacred fire dates, therefore, from the distant and dim epoch when there were yet no Greeks, no Italians, no Hindus; when there were only Aryas. When the tribes separated they carried this worship with them, some to the banks of the Ganges, others to the shores of the Mediterranean. Later, when these tribes had no intercourse with each other, some adored Brahma, others Zeus, and still others Janus; each group chose its own gods; but all preserved, as an ancient legacy, the first religion which they had known and practiced in the common cradle of their race.

Our children pay a heavy price when we lack consciousness. Overindulged, over-medicated, and over-labeled, many of them are unhappy. This is because, coming from unconsciousness ourselves, we bequeath to them our unresolved needs, unmet expectations, and frustrated dreams. Despite our best intentions, we enslave them to the emotional inheritance we received from our parents, binding them to the debilitating legacy of ancestors past. The nature of unconsciousness is such that, until it’s metabolized, it will seep through generation after generation. Only through awareness can the cycle of pain that swirls in families end.

Spending time with my ancestors is exciting and scary, joyful and sad, expansive to the edges of the universe and confining as the pain in my jaw. Grappling with their legacies is something I know I will never do perfectly. Making this reckoning as explicit as possible releases me from the idea that I will ever be free of this history. My understanding of the power of all our ancestors for each of us and all of us will continue to take shape in me as long as there is breath in my body.

I have had to find a way to enjoy movies and television even when the script is not written for me and the only characters that look like me are peripheral to the main action because I would like to see more than a few movies in my lifetime. I have had to find a way to work in offices that don’t see me as management material while still believing that there is a chance I can get a promotion anyway. I’ve had to study history that erased my culture from its pages and know that it did not actually erase me. I’ve had to learn laws that weren’t written to serve me. I’ve had to learn to write and appreciate words in a language that was forced on my ancestors. Not only have things in America not been built for me; they have never been built for me. And although that has been physically, financially, politically, and psychologically disastrous for my community, I have come to see that it is also damaging to be led to believe that everything should be built for you and that anything built with the consideration of others is inherently harmful to you. It is harmful to the individual who believes it, and it is harmful to every system they interact with that is supposed to be built on coalition.

The spirits of our ancestors are all around us, Emmalehua. They speak to us in the rustle of the leaves, the whisper of the wind, and the song of the sea. We must listen to their wisdom, and let it guide us on our journey. For they are the keepers of our history, the guardians of our culture, and the inspiration for our future. We must honor them, respect them, and carry their legacy forward, so that their voices may be heard for generations to come." (Kneubuhl 89)

The kind of world you inherit is your birth gift from your ancestors. The kind of world you leave behind is your death gift for the next generations. Leave it in a better state than you inherited.

What matters is that you did not know the story. And the reason you did not...is that our ancestor William - through his deeds of arms, his force of personality and his vast conquests - had achieved so much by the time his belly exploded that even this undignified end was soon forgotten by all but the most diligent annalists. ... You and I, continued the king, have achieved nothing yet. Nothing...You may die here in Normandy, like our ancestor. But unlike our ancestor, should your dead belly burst and release poisonous miasmas that sicken all who smell them, then that, my son, will be the story of you.

Gift-giving is an ideal that resonates with the original meaning of the word legacy, which has its origins in medieval Europe. A legate—from the Latin legatus, meaning ambassador or envoy—was an emissary sent by the pope to faraway lands, bearing an important message. So someone leaving a legacy can be thought of as being an intertemporal ambassador of the present sending a gift into the distant future.

On those crisp late winter days, when temperatures drop below freezing at nightfall, then rise once again in a sunny spring thaw you'll find them there. Three generations will be tapping, gathering, and boiling the sap, including some from the same faithful trees that towered over the property long before their ancestors arrived from northwestern Ireland.

What might our descendants wish we had done better for them?

Exploring our history isn’t about wallowing in shame. We cannot ever own the attitudes and actions of our ancestors. But if we fail to see the legacy of tragic, discriminatory and inhumane events, we allow their influence to continue.

And we might also give thought to the legacy that they have created, by which the people continue to live today. What is this legacy? We often remember ancient or traditional cultures for the monuments they have left behind--the megaliths of Stonehenge, the temples of Bangkok, the pyramids of Teotihuacán, the great ruins of Machu Picchu. People like the Koyukon have created no such monuments, but they have left something that may be unique- greater and more significant as a human achievement. This legacy is the vast land itself, enduring and essentially unchanged despite having supported human life for countless centuries. Koyukon people and their ancestors, bound to a strict code of morality governing their behavior toward nature, have been the land's stewards and caretakers. Only because they have nurtured it so well does this great legacy of land exist today. Here, perhaps, is the greatest wisdom in a world that Raven made.

The real gift any person can give is a web of connective tissue. IF we love fiercely, our ancestors live among and speak to us through these incandescent filaments glowing from the warmth of memories. Loving fiercely is real-time legacy building. Maybe that's the best way to honor people.

The real gift any person can give is a web of connective tissue. IF we love fiercely, our ancestors live among and speak to us through these incandescent filaments glowing from the warmth of memories. Loving fiercely is real-time legacy building. Maybe that's the best way to honor people

Magnificent trees, the legacy of Lord Ashbury's distant ancestors, lined the way, their highest boughs arching to meet, outermost branches lacing so that the road became a dark, whispering tunnel. As I burst into the light that afternoon, the sun had just slipped behind the roofline and the house was in eclipse, the sky behind glowing mauve and orange. I cut across the grounds, past the Eros and Psyche fountain, through Lady Violet's garden of pink cabbage roses and down into the rear entrance. The servants' hall was empty and my shoes echoed as I broke Mr. Hamilton's golden rule and ran along the stone corridor. Through the kitchen I went, past Mrs. Townsend's workbench covered with a panoply of sweet breads and cakes, and up the stairs.

The human race is the biggest mass murderer of all time. Think about it: we’re hard-coded to survive. Even our ancient ancestors were driven by this impulse, driven enough to recognize the Neanderthals and Hobbits as dangerous enemies. They may have slaughtered dozens of human subspecies. And that legacy shamefully lives on. We attack whatever is different, anything we don’t understand, anything that might change our world, our environment, reduce our chances of survival. Racism, class warfare, sexism, east versus west, north and south, capitalism and communism, democracy and dictatorships, Islam and Christianity, Israel and Palestine, they’re all different faces of the same war: the war for a homogeneous human race, an end to our differences. It’s a war we started a long time ago, a war we’ve been fighting ever since. A war that operates in every human mind below the subconscious level, like a computer program, constantly running in the background, guiding us to some eventuality.

If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh I am the accumulation of the dreams of generations.

I do think that there is a need for folks who are not of African descent but who have in any way, shape, or form benefited not only from slavery but from systemic racism that has survived beyond slavery, to be able to acknowledge that," she explained. But not by taking blame for the actions of an ancestor; it's not about blame-placing it or taking it. Instead, Wells said, the idea is to see past an individual's feelings or actions to the systems built to protect the privilege and fortune amassed by some through the deprivation of others. We have to recognize the injury and care about those who have been harmed, she said, then we have to see the systems that produce and perpetuate those injuries. And to do that, we need to use our sense of the past to hone our awareness of the present

This is Disability Justice, an honoring of the long-standing legacies of resilience and resistance which are the inheritance of all of us whose bodies or minds will not conform. Disability Justice is not yet a broad-based popular movement. Disability Justice is a vision and practice of a yet-to-be, a map that we create with our ancestors and our great-grandchildren onward, in the width and depth of our multiplicities and histories, a movement towards a world in which every body and mind is known as beautiful.

Western man today is spiritually homeless, naked and exposed. The moment he starts to be anything beyond “one of the masses” he becomes terribly aware of that isolation which has always encompassed the great. He realizes his homelessness and his exposure. So he sets to work to build himself some sort of house and shelter. Our ancestors, those among them who were really great men, could have left us a legacy much more helpful for our progress.

Sometimes the most beautiful of flowers have the sharpest of thorns. - Ravina Braudur

Love's Legacy focuses on aspects of Chateaubriand's life, character, and literary intelligence in the context of the times and customs in which he and his contemporaries lived -- it leads to an adventure as I sought to resolve a genealogical mystery related to my own ancestors.

What you see around you is the result of thousands upon thousands of years of human experience. Knowledge and wisdom passed down to us from all our ancestors. And while the crisis back on Earth may be human-made, the story of life is the story of crises. Of facing them. Adapting and surviving. There have always been blights and pestilences that challenged our forebears. It now falls to us to use the knowledge they bequeathed us, to find a path to flourishing.” She gazed at the lush plants. “Here we have begun the process of learning how to build from scratch the biosphere from which we evolved—to build, beyond Earth, environments consisting of hundreds of thousands of interacting species—bacteria, fungi, invertebrates, plants, mammals, fish, birds, and more. This will be the key to safeguarding Earth’s legacy, of which humanity is just one small part.

For men, shame is the invisible twin to childhood trauma. It’s deeply rooted in the male psyche, part of the legacy of the patriarchy, and, from everything you’ve told me, embedded in your family’s pathology. A pathology, I might add, that has likely rolled from generation to generation,” George said. “So, let’s start there. Are you going to be the guy with the courage to stop the pattern and spare your children? Or the guy who sleepwalks through life and repeats his ancestors’ mistakes?

Propagated as the standard work on the subject, the central, entirely unscientific thesis of the book Magische Gifte (“Magic Poisons”) posits: “The greatest toxic effect is always produced by narcotics alien to the country and the race.”35 Jews and drugs merged into a single toxic or epidemiological unit that menaced Germany: “For decades our people have been told by Marxists and Jews: ‘Your body belongs to you.’ That was taken to mean that at social occasions between men, or between men and women, any quantities of alcohol could be enjoyed, even at the cost of the body’s health. Irreconcilable with this Jewish Marxist view is the Teutonic German idea that we are the bearers of the eternal legacy of our ancestors, and that accordingly our body belongs to the clan and the people.”36