I heard you.

I never knew you. I still today know nothing about you, and yet I heard you.

You were a voice that reached out to me from beyond the vale of three lifetimes as I retraced our footsteps and found my way back to the country I know you called home.

I heard your whispers in the trees on the banks of Loch Lomond and felt your smiles in the warmth of the sun on my skin as I climbed cliff-sides in the Scottish highlands. I felt the the brush of your breath across my skin in the cool night air.

I never knew you. I have never so much as seen a picture of you, and yet I felt your presence all around me.

—

I grew up a child edited out of my own past, and yet decidedly still connected to the personal history that lurked in shadows and unspoken places. I remained connected to those people and places, always once removed from the stories I grew up with, stories born of parents who did not speak of their parents, and of grandparents who talked only of themselves.

I grew up divorced from the personal history that ties each of us back to belonging, back to one another along the vast network of human lineage, back to the shared heritage that can be traced back to a pair of common ancestors: grandfather and grandmother of the human race.

I grew up alone; separated from this vast network of interconnected lives, of interconnected histories.

I grew up rootless.

—

And yet I discovered myself unexpectedly rooted, tied not to a story or a history of self but to a history of place.

I grew up rooted to a small patch of Pacific coastline, a land of ancient redwoods and rocky beaches and the vicious, aching cold of the ocean’s waves.

I grew up among the trees, and learned to speak with the tongue of that place. I learned to walk among her spirits and greet them in our shared voice. I learned to let the ocean’s rhythm soothe the pace of my own fragile and faltering human heart and learned patience as I watched the winter’s rains linger and the summer’s winds blow.

And one day in the summer’s sun I excavated my heart and buried it by the sea shore, where it might be lulled to sleep, cradled in the rocking palm of the ocean’s tides.

And then I left that heart behind.

—

I wrote the words because they asked me to and I said, “I live in a beautiful world and it has deeply influenced the person I have become. My house is nestled in a clearing, surrounded by redwoods and spruce trees. I live near the ocean, and when the wind comes from the west I can taste its brine on my tongue. This natural beauty has infiltrated my psyche and greatly influenced my outlook on the world. It is a part of me.”

And then the call and came I walked away.

I left behind those rocks and trees I knew so well and moved 3,000 miles away to a place from which I almost couldn’t feel the fragile flutter of my heart.

And I was rootless.

—

I never knew her story, and by extension will never really know my own, lost forever are those chapters of my pre-history.

I grew up in a culture that moves forward without looking back and in doing so I fear we leave behind our stories, our wisdom.

Who today still cares to honor their ancestors, to cherish the guidance left behind in foot-shaped prints upon the Earth?

And this is why I cannot help but wonder, if I could hear her voice today— a voice reaching out from beyond the veil of time—

What would she want to tell me?