A reflection inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke

In the Fifth Duino Elegy, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke imagines a beautiful and haunting possibility. He wonders what might happen if two lovers were able to truly accomplish what human love so often attempts but rarely fully achieves.

He writes of lovers building “towers of pleasure” and “ladders standing where there is no ground,” structures held up only by the trembling devotion of their hearts. And he imagines that if such love could be realized, even for a moment, the silent multitudes of the dead who watch over the living might scatter before them the “coins of happiness” they had saved but never spent.

It is a striking image: the unfulfilled love of past generations finally finding completion through the courage of the love of the living.

From an ancestral healing perspective, this vision rings true. Each generation inherits not only the wounds of those who came before, but also their longings, their unfinished tenderness, and the love they were never able to fully express. When we deepen our capacity to love—whether through devotion, healing, or conscious relationship—we are not only transforming our own lives. We are participating in the evolution of love across time.

In this way, love becomes an ancestral healing act.

Yet Rilke’s vision extends beyond human relationships. In the Ninth Duino Elegy he turns his attention to the Earth itself and asks:

“Earth, isn’t this what you want? To arise in us, invisible?
What, if not transformation, is your deepest purpose?”

Here the poet suggests that the Earth longs to become conscious through us. The rivers, mountains, forests, and soils that formed our bodies also seek expression through human awareness—through our words, our attention, and our love.

If this is so, then our work of love is not only personal and ancestral. It is ecological.

In animist traditions, humans are seen as living in intimate relationship with the beings and spirits of place. Land is not simply a backdrop to life; it is kin. Rivers are relatives. Forests are elders. In the past, some traditions even recognized forms of relational bonds or marriages between humans and land guardians, animals, water spirits or other beings of place, sacred relationships that anchored communities in mutual care with the landscapes that sustained them.

These practices reflect a simple understanding: belonging to a place is a form of love.

Today many of us live with fractured relationships—to our ancestors, to our lands, and to each other. Healing often begins by remembering that these relationships were never meant to be separate. The love that flows through family lines is intertwined with the love that flows through the land beneath our feet.

When love deepens in one place, it begins to heal the others.

Seen through this lens, Rilke’s two poems form a kind of wholeness. The first reminds us that the courage to love more fully can redeem the unspent tenderness of those who came before us. The second reminds us that the Earth itself longs to participate in this transformation.

Perfecting love, in this sense, does not mean achieving perfection. It means deepening our devotion to relationship—to people, to ancestors, and to the living world that holds us.

When we do this work, even imperfectly, we participate in a quiet repair across generations and landscapes.
​
The coins of happiness unspent by the past begin, at last, to circulate again.
--

The poem excerpts I refer to from Rainer Maria Rilke:

(From the Fifth Duino Elegy)
Angel! Suppose there’s a place we don’t know of, and there,
on an indescribable carpet, lovers announced
those feats that they never mastered here — the bold, high
figures of their heartleaps through space,
their towers of pure pleasure, their two ladders
that stand, leaning only against each other,
with no ground underneath, trembling — and then performed them,
before the circle of onlookers, the innumerable silent dead:
would not those dead throw their last coins
of happiness — hoarded through a lifetime,
kept hidden through a lifetime, unknown to us, eternally
valid — onto the blissful carpet before a pair
now truly smiling at last?


(From the Ninth Duino Elegy)
Earth, isn’t this what you want? To arise in us, invisible?
Is it not your dream, to enter us so wholly
there’s nothing left outside us to see?
What, if not transformation
is your deepest purpose? Earth, my love,
I want it too. Believe me,
no more of your springtimes are needed
to win me over — even one flower
is more than enough. Before I was named
I belonged to you. I see no other law
but yours, and know I can trust
the death you will bring.

I recently did some thematic harmonizing work with my female lineages. I came to the work feeling at a bit of a discord between myself and other women in my life. There has been a common theme throughout my life around not feeling in harmony with other women and I have been curious about the ancestral roots of this phenomenon. So I took it to my ancestors and they recommended that we do a harmonization process between my mother’s mothers, my mother’s father’s mothers, my father’s mothers and my father’s father’s mothers. All 4 of these lineages are in good health, each bringing a unique strength. In my process I started with my mother’s people and then worked with my father’s people and then with all 4 together. 

From the stories passed down from my mom, I had a sense that her two lineages did not get along. When I brought them together there was a great sense of each needing to be seen in its strength by the other. When that recognition took place, there was a feeling of great mutual respect that flowed from them into me. It was a sense of an ability to be with the greatness of the other without giving up any of your greatness. 

This hit home with some of my feelings with other women. I have felt like I have to become smaller to make them feel comfortable or have felt small in relationship to their greatness. To experience the greatness of my lineages stand in their fullness and recognize each other in that fullness gave me an imprint for how this can look and feel in an embodied way. I feel their coming together as a salve for a deep wound I have been playing out with other women.

My father’s lineages were a bit more in harmony from the start. It feels like the women in the two lineages are kindred spirits, each with their own strengths and insights, but with a common heart for the earth and the cosmos.

When I brought all 4 lineages together there was a sense of the feminine really coming home. Each lineage holds a piece of the larger tapestry of the feminine in a way that, when combined, they form a powerful expression of the larger feminine mythos that I can see play out in tangible ways in my life, but also in a larger cosmic scale. Some of the traits of this combined energy are deep earth relationship in ways that can predict and manage resources, as well as relationship with the celestial cycles, and additionally a tending of the feminine wounding by the patriarchy in a way that brings profound wisdom and healing to broken places.

I am a small part of a much larger work happening on this planet and in the larger universe (and multiverse). By coming into alignment with the wisdom of my ancestors, I can step into my part to play in a fuller way.

One of the gifts of my lineages is a wisdom around timing. We are part of a much larger cycle of learning and growing happening on the planet and part of what we are learning is how we create connection and work in harmony with each other. I don’t expect my lineage work to immediately alter all of the female relationships I have, but I do see how it adds a positive perspective and energy to those relationships, which moves all of us towards a larger direction of healing. I look forward to witnessing the patient unfolding this work is a part of.

If you are interested in exploring the wisdom of your ancestors and assisting in the healing of your lineages and the larger collective, you can learn more here!

My journey with ancestral healing actually started through plants. I was introduced to the idea that lineage was important by my shamanic aromatherapy teachers, Cathy Skipper and Florian Birkmayer. An insight they offered is that people who are called to ancestral work are often brought to this work by plants who hold the energy of lineage strongly in their beings. After their class I went on a mad ancestry.com research binge and tracked nine of my direct lines (mother's mothers, father's mothers, etc) back to being in the US before the revolutionary war. What I found was a pattern of Puritanism, colonization and enslavement... the founding wounds of the country where I reside. My ancestral work comes with this lens of tending the wounds that these lineages hold as well as inflicted. My ancestors were also burned at the stake and fled homelands for religious freedom. They were some of the original hunter gatherers in Europe and saw the change of their land and lives through farming, imperialism and capitalism. I hold the complexity of these histories with great compassion. I also believe that white people need to do some deep level reckoning, grieving, figuring out what their contribution to reconciliation is.

In 2020 I was gifted with the opportunity to participate in writing an essay for the book "Whiteness is Not An Ancestor: Essays on Life and Lineage by white Women". The final draft of this book was released to the 13 co-authors the day that Mr. George Floyd was murdered. This enraging event underlined the work that is needed to be done not only individually for white folks, but on the systems of oppression that we often unconsciously uphold.

To learn more about the book and get an idea of the kind of conversations that are needed in the white community, you can view a talk I participated in on the book: Youtube video can be found here.