Honoring my creative lineage: An Ode to the land of my bones
This month, I will write a series of vignettes (and poems) honoring my creative lineage, which includes the people, the land and the forces that have shaped me, prayed for me and dreamed me into being, so that I may walk my own empowered path guided by them and the gifts they shared with me.
An ode to the land of my bones
I write this love letter
to the land where I took my first breath,
the breath that connects me back
to countless generations of my ancestors
whose hands worked the earth,
growing, singing, laughing and dreaming.
This is a homage to the land of my people,
where our story begins.
In Kyiv and
Dymer and
Boyarka and
Chernigiv and Skorinets Village,
Ukraine.
These dots on the map
show the intricacy of a deep connection
through generations and song,
embroidery and prophecies.
The land has offered fuel for creations,
and has been a collaborative force
for beauty and magic to be revealed.
Like my great grandmother, Leza
who was given the name Hi-Leah by the village Rabbi
with a protective prayer
to keep her safe
from the mysterious illness that took her siblings.
He gave her a pair of scissors
and told her to make good use of them;
she would cut and sew fabric
And fed her babies;
My mother remembers those scissors,
housed in a special drawer.
And during WWII, her younger brother,
A Jew left behind in their village
was hid and saved by a Ukrainian family
when the Nazis occupied Ukraine.
They gave him a Ukrainian name, Dovidenko
and he lived with them for the rest of his years.
Or the Skorinets village,
where my Cossack great-great-grandfather Nazar
settled his family in the late 18th century,
A once a thriving and populated community
where he built a house for his wife and 8 children.
Or Chernigiv,
revered in Slavic culture as an important city dating back to Kyivan Rus
but also a place that held the roots for future generations,
where my family were forced to migrate after the war.
These stories,
their lives and fears and twists,
all live in me, all live on the land.
The blessed land that spoke to them,
that fed their cattle and grew their wheat,
and transformed seeds into harvest.
The land that witnessed devastation,
And heard the cries of mothers holding hungry dying babies.
Famines and wars,
executions and orders from the Soviet State,
the land absorbed it all.
And yet it healed them
In the night and in their dreams
with quiet prayers on their pillow sheets
and they were grateful.
My people lived on the land
and honored its knowing ways,
guided by season, the elements, the plants and trees.
They were folk healers and artists,
farmers, metal workers, beekeepers and seamstresses.
They spoke Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Russian.
They took Sabbath to rest.
And the land rested with them.
Thank you to the land that held my stories,
the prayers of so many,
where the tree of life grows
and connects us all to our sacred root.
I Give My Little Stars To Children (1983) by Maria Primachenko