Singing The Bones (to heal my voice)

Touching the graves of my ancient grandfathers buried there brought healing to the long and difficult rift between me and my alcoholic father, and those before him…

The Call

The call of the bodhrán, the beating heart of the Irish drum, spoke in the rhythm of my own heart from a stage in the Rocky Mountain springtime—a siren for gathering, come winter, into a cauldron in Northern California’s ancient, giant forest.

Through the summer cycle of expansion and expression, although the imprint of that beat faded, it kept time in the space beyond time with my circle of wise and well ancestors. My elder council of Irish grandfathers and German grandmothers is a common presence now. Ancestral lineage healing does that—bridging consciousness with intuitive connection to their blessings and their burdens.

Six months prior to hearing the call of the bodhrán, the ancestors had guided me to Ireland and the ancient lands of the O’Grady clan in East Clare and Limerick, dating back over 1,000 years. Touching the graves of my ancient grandfathers buried there brought healing to the long and difficult rift between me and my alcoholic father, and those before him who landed in New York City in the poor, destitute state of the 19th century’s utterly colonized Irish people—before they became white people and learned to be good Americans, climbing the rungs of white supremacy to survive in a land disconnected from their long, deep relationship with the giant oak forests on their emerald-green island.

But it was not the Irish ancestors’ fault I could not sing, for they were party folk with lots of tradition passed down. No, the severing of my voice came down the line from my German grandmothers—the people of the rose—for they had shown me the invasion of their homeland and the moment of a woman’s beheading. I often beat my deerskin drum in a circle around my head after vocal exercises, the vibrations healing the ancestral scar from my throat, through my ear, to the sinus cavity above my right eye. The drum helps tired vocal cords relinquish their pain and relax a bit.

The Research

Tending to this wound of the voice on my German grandmother’s line throughout the summer, I was simultaneously working with an ancestral healer in South India to help my daughter’s people. She was born in India to a long line of women held down by patriarchy too. Her abandonment at a bus station as an infant, and subsequent adoption at age two, was her lineage’s last-ditch effort to try and lift the heavy burden that had flattened them into nothingness.

Our ancestral co-mingling provoked the stoic strength of my German grandmothers to pick up their Indian sisters, comforting them with the structural support needed to receive healing medicine from their own people: the helping powers of lotus flowers, and elephants, and Goddesses’ gifts from Saraswati and Lakshmi. All of it was guided by powers I had never heard of. Lords Dakshinamoorthy and Kala Bhairava, the healer told me—they are family deities who represent aspects of Shiva.

All of this was unknown to me for the twenty-odd years I had been raising my daughter in America, accompanying her journey to wholeness with a nervous system formed in a womb fearing for survival. She was the reason I had pursued ancestral healing as a profession, because intergenerational trauma is hard to reach with conventional therapy. My attention to their sufferings loosened their grip on her, and the powers conjoined into an ancestral flow that calmed the anxious nervous system of our shared progeny.

In return, the Indian grandmothers gifted me the honor song of the triple Goddess as medicine for my own voice, delivered via YouTube: Karaagre Vasate Lakshmi, Karamadhye Saraswati, Karamuule Tu Govinda, Prabhaate Kara Darshanam.

I kept faith every morning with that ancient Hindu chant, while beating my Irish drum, to heal my German voice through the summer and into autumn. In the days before Samhain (Halloween), the siren called again, this time in the form of an email telling me to research cultural artifacts of folklore and folksong from one of my ancestral lines and bring it with me to the cauldron in winter.

Where does one look within the matrix of this diasporic DNA that spans the globe for elements of culture that connect me? I decided to focus on the Irish, even though it’s where the pain and trauma of my own lifetime lie.

In Celtic tradition, a European robin is known as a messenger from the dead. When I visited Ireland the previous fall, while wandering among the graves of a long line of O’Grady grandfathers, the cheery little red bird guided me to doorways and headstones with our family crest and motto clearly visible. I now invited the European robin to guide my Googling.

My people were buried among Christian ruins on the Holy Island in Lough Derg, County Clare, and later in the churchyard at Cnoc Áine (Knockainey), County Limerick—both of which were built over ancient pagan ritual sites. Following the robin down this trail, I traveled to a time before Ireland was invaded by Celts from the sea, and inhabited by the mythical tribe called the Tuatha Dé Danann.

Lo and behold, I unearthed a folktale called Cnoc Áine—the hill of Áine—the story of a Goddess from the time of the Tuatha Dé Danann. I am tethered to her hill as a direct descendant of my father’s father’s lineage, who are buried in that ground. I was to learn the story and speak it into the cauldron in winter.

The flit of the robin’s wings cast my attention toward a website called SongsInIrish.com. Try to learn a bit of ancestral folksong in the native language, the email from the siren had said, investigate a native instrument.

Since Irish is an endangered language, it’s not that easy to find folksongs in Irish, much less translated and recorded for beginners. Yet, here I was, humming out the refrain of Ó Cadh é Sin don Té Sin, meaning literally: “Since it’s no one’s concern, then no one should care.” Oh, how very Irish, I thought—a catchphrase for my people that kept us all quiet about difficult truths. This would be my offering to sing into the bones of my ancestors, my voice not quite so strangled in Irish.

The Gathering

Finally, winter comes. A circle of women materializes from the ethers of far-flung lands and time into a place that was once the widespread home of Pomo peoples, tethered to the ancient redwood forest of Northern California. Gathered for the Tending the Bones retreat, and under the artful guidance of our teacher Lydia, of Persian descent, we tell our stories to a cauldron full of diverse ancestral threads.

On the surface it’s a pot full of mostly white people, because our country conflates our ancestries into one defined solely by skin color. As such, we’re left ancestral orphans from the homelands our immigrant forebearers left, dropping cultural identity in the ocean to escape hardship and build new lives in a country that mistakes an economic system for culture. A sense of belonging is what we’re looking for—a purpose to the madness. Music and story offer a balm for ancestral estrangement in a world hell-bent on disconnection and destruction. America may be rich, but it is a culturally lonely place. Our ancestors know how we got here and want to help us course-correct. Can we hear them through the rifts of time on the currents of these songs and stories?

I do not come from a line of seanchaí, as the oral tradition of the Irish is known, but I delivered my tale about the hill of Cnoc Áine in the best storytelling voice I could muster, which is considerably more tolerable than my singing voice. Áine is the goddess of summer and sovereignty, fertility and abundance—a protector of sacred lands and values who challenges those who abuse power and defile the natural world.

In the folktale, after her people lose a pitched battle to Milesian invaders from Iberia (modern Spain), she is raped by their leader but claims retribution by biting his ear off and thus robbing him of the power to rule as king of her lands. What a statement for womankind everywhere who have endured that patriarchal power crime for time immemorial!

And then, things start to get weird.

A sunrise visit to the ancient redwood trees and the mists of time converge. The grove of giants in Hendy Woods sing to the old oak forest that sustained Irish culture for centuries, about successive waves of colonizers from the British shores hacking it all down—a fate familiar to the vast majority of California’s redwoods. Sigh. Humanity. I hug a tree to say I’m sorry. I wished to make an offering, considering how to remove a lock of my hair, when a tuft of old man’s beard—the hairlike moss growing high in the redwood branches—fell to the earth in front of me. I picked up the light green tuft and thanked the tree for its gift. Sunlight burned through the mist and a carpet of giant green clover crept inward from the edge where meadow and forest meet. Clover—a symbol of Ireland. I picked one and placed it in the nest of old man’s beard. A palm-size offering from two forests for the altar where we share our ancestral stories and songs.

The Healing

In the next mixing, folk music is poured into the cauldron. I can’t help but fangirl with our songstress teacher Leah, whose drum beats at a Rising Appalachia show last spring brought me to this moment. Her community singing exercises bring comfort and ease to my voice. The music moves through a community fabric profound in its holding, kindness, and nurturance, tending to the ancestral wounds of my severed vocal cords.

A deep layer resonates with vibrations of the bodhrán that Leah starts playing, to my astonishment, while singing: Ó Cadh é Sin don Té Sin. It’s a rare song—needle-in-a-haystack level coincidence. I can sing the familiar words in Irish too! Mind blown that we picked the same folksong for this moment.

After dinner, Leah introduces us to her childhood friend who is just passing through to tell her story of ancestral discovery as a daughter of India who never knew India—just like my daughter. She grew up in Guyana, the only English-speaking country in South America, descended from a five-generation-long line of Indians who immigrated in the 19th century as indentured servants in the sugarcane industry after the British colony abolished slavery.

In her genealogical research, she discovered a familial devotion to Shiva and described a ritual the living descendants perform to release themselves from unwanted ancestral influence. My ears perk up, curious about this ritual therapy for intergenerational trauma. I had witnessed Indian grandmothers releasing the grip of their burdens on my daughter, but I had no idea we could do it from our side also.

The cauldron stirs. The soup of story, forest, song, and memory calls for a little spice. An instrument, perhaps?

The next ingredient we add is The Music of Strangers, a film featuring Yo-Yo Ma, the world-renowned cellist, gathering folk musicians from all over the world. He travels the globe in search of traditional instrumentalists carrying threads of culture from the edge of extinction to create the multilayered melodies of the Silk Road Ensemble.

A fiery bagpipe player from northwest Spain plays the Galician gaita—the hot zeal of her melodies igniting in me a connection to the spicy Irish instrument I brought for the cauldron: the uilleann pipes. Uilleann means “elbow,” so named because the bellows are played with the elbow. With an extensive register of notes, the Irish pipes play more variety than their low-droning Scottish cousin, great for complex jigs. That Galician instrument looks to be the progenitor of both.

The physical gyrations of this Spanish musician as she beats her bagpipe with breath—both hot and sexy—charges me with strange but undeniable intimacy. My pulse is raised when the film credits roll.

Outside in the darkness, confessing my admiration to the stars above, I feel my stomach tighten and wretch. What the…? Suddenly I’m heaving over the porch rail! Was it something I ate? Did I catch a bug? How will I fly home tomorrow? Questions swirl in my head as I pass out on my cot.

In the morning, I’m fine. Like nothing happened. Perhaps a little lighter in step. I’m centered, and a bit more grounded.

“Maybe it was an energetic purge,” my roommate says. I work in the energetic fields of people on a healing journey with ancestors every day—I’m not unprotected in that arena.

But what else could it have been?

I start to review the series of events: Áine’s story of sexual violence… remembering a blue thread mending the rift between grandmothers and grandfathers in that Irish line… then the forest melding… then the Irish song… and the instruments sharing the same migration route as the invaders who came to dominate Áine. My severed voice—an inheritance from German grandmothers similarly invaded—and the supportive presence of Indian ancestors telling me there is a ritual to call on the powers of Shiva to heal intergenerational trauma for my daughter—and perhaps also for me?

Is it possible that all the powers, portals, and passageways converge into a river reaching far back in history—to a time before Ireland was Celtic, more than 2,500 years ago—to dislodge the thing that blocks me from the power and passion of my own voice? Is there now an opening to bring forth justice and healing from an ancient pagan goddess into confluence with Hindu powers, that will somehow circle back to a time in Germany when my ancestral grandmother lost her head—and her voice?

If all these streams converge in my DNA, could that be the point of being a diasporic mutt of human migration—to clean up the ruthless ravages of all this time? What are the German grandmothers trying to sing?

It’s a question I’m still asking myself. I’m tentatively getting to know this newfound voice of mine, which now has more pitch, tone, and timbre than ever before. I have more confidence when I’m teaching mantra to my yoga students. I have a tipper on my desk calling me to play the bodhrán. My husband even complimented the extension of my vocal range—and that’s never happened before.

I long for community singing with elders—for healing—perhaps with those living out the endings of their lives in nursing homes. My voice wants to channel something, I think, from a female lineage snuffed out into silence. They don’t want to be silenced anymore.

With my elder council at my back, I will take the next step into the void, and trust the teacher will appear.