My sun sign is in Cancer, which has given me a sensitive attunement to the energies of family and community.  In this lifetime, the positive expression of group cohesion, creative expression and serving a community first budded for me when I began playing music in rock and roll bands in Detroit, and bloomed in a much fuller way when the music of West African drumming found me in the spring of 1992 at a dance class with the Uhuru Dancers in Decatur, Georgia.  The exchange of joy and celebration between drummers and dancers set my life on a completely new and energized path that I still walk today. It wasn’t until later, when I began to study the drumming in depth, that I learned how to be informed by the ancestral lineage through which the music, culture and history passes over centuries. Thank you Brother Yusef, Stone, Mohamed Diaby, and dozens of other teachers for including me.

I’m also aligned with the ideals of equality, freedom and opportunity embodied in the ideals of the U.S. Constitution, and understand the responsibilities we all have as citizens to hold those in power accountable to manifesting those ideals to the best of their abilities.  It’s also a citizen’s responsibility to point out the failings of leaders when they fall short, and inspire them to contribute to a more perfect union. Being born on July 4th, the United States also has its sun sign in Cancer. The last couple years of strife, turbulence and polarization in the country has been really difficult for me to experience.  The three weeks I spent in Guinea in December were a great escape from the tension, and also an antidote to the almost impossible fragmentation I experience currently in the U.S. The strong personal sense of solidity and grounding I experience in Guinea seems to come from the deep roots of history, culture and lineage everyone there shares. The people seem to know who they are and who everyone else is, and they can trust they share something profound with everyone they meet.

In the U.S., unless you are indigenous, you come from somewhere else.  You come from a land with a different vibration, a different history, and with the bones of many generations in the ground.  At some point, your ancestors were forced to come to this foreign land through slavery, or your ancestors chose to come here across waters or through the air on long journeys, leaving possibly centuries of family connections behind, pulling up deep roots to begin the difficult task of taking hold in faraway soil, in a different climate, surrounded by strangely new living things, among different norms, customs and values.  If you are indigenous, it’s likely some of your ancestors were slaughtered by European colonizers and U.S. military members, and the survivors forced from their ancestral lands to live isolated from their roots in undesirable locations, ill-equipped to thrive. This is the literal ground of unresolved injustice on which we all now walk, which holds the hidden dynamics that hinder real trust and rooting among the diverse people of the U.S.

My practice of ancestral meditation has helped me to feel more secure in knowing who I am, and has increased my respect for the variety of backgrounds in every other person’s lineage.  Each morning after silent meditation, I invoke the presence of my family of origin- my parents and siblings- and say their full names. For the women I include the names of other families they have joined through marriage, as this is the custom in the U.S.  Next, behind my parents I presence their parents, call their full names, and invoke their homelands of Italy and Germany, feeling the memory of knowing them when they were alive. Behind the grandparents, I presence and call the names of my 8 great-grandparents, none of which I knew in life.  Finally, I presence the 16 great-great-grandparents, whose names I have not found yet confirmed through research. I begin to let myself feel the fullness of all the lives that were lived and joined to create me, and all the experiences which contributed to the strength they needed to sustain their own life and marriage while giving birth to and raising new generations.  I bow my head to all those that came before me.

Finally, I bring the full array of ancestors behind me, and feel their energies come into me through my shoulders; my father’s ancestors behind my right shoulder, and my mother’s behind my left.  I feel the source of divine energy at the very beginning of the lineage. I take in the ancestors’ support and guidance, and let myself know that they’ll be with me all through the day as I meet, talk to, make music and work with others.  It reminds me as well that everyone I encounter on this day will also have ancestors arrayed behind them- ancestors who contributed to their sense of who they are in life. When my hologram meets their hologram, I don’t feel alone, and there is more chance we will connect with trust, wholeness and peace.

[go on to share how my ancestral meditation practice helps keep me rooted through these times of dissension and confusion.]