Memory in the blood

Where do we go when we yearn for something
beyond actual memory, beyond knowledge
of our actual being; when we suspect,
realise or recognise that there is more to us
than what we remember of our own experience?

We have to go back before our time,
into our heritage, into the blood memory,
into our ancestry.

That is where the information we need exists,
to find our true identity.

Blood memory is a process which identifies a relationship
to individual and collective heritage and to one’s family and ancestors,
written through landscape and the body: where the claiming
of communal memory juxtaposed with current individual memory
is a necessity; where future memory is embodied through lineage
and passed on in literature –a sifting of one’s roots
through generational storytelling.

We are already the re-telling of the past, always transforming it,
and our stories are without end.

Adapted from Natalie Harkin’s Poetics of Remapping archives and with acknowledgment to Native American author Scott Momaday.

Dream intentionally - while you’re awake