Understanding my Ancestors = Understanding Myself. My Spiritual Pilgrimage to Romania. Part 1

It all starts with family and a desire to understand ourselves better, or perhaps to know ourselves differently…

I have always been interested in where I come from, in family stories and history, but sadly  like many North American’s this information has not been easily available to me.

The moment my ancestors got on boats and travelled from their homelands of Romania, Scotland, Ireland and England much ancestral connection was lost, and I am not alone in this reality…

Most of us who live, work and call North America home and have done so for many generations are not actually, originally from here, our family members once were immigrants looking for a better way, or perhaps escaping poverty, starvation or in fear for their lives.

Those who left brought with them many things, deep grief being one of them, grief for what they had to leave behind, for the foods they loved and may not taste again, grief for the family left, their folklore, and the land that gave them a sense of place in the world.

They also brought gifts and personal stories and for some of us, these small precious things were lovingly preserved and handed down, but for others, because of so much grief, it was best for our ancestors to just move on and let all of it go…this is the story of what it is to live in a place that is not our ancestral homeland, and of going back in search of ancestral similarities…. This kind of pilgrimage is what I have been interested in exploring since I was 25 and my dear friend and teacher Pookinak an Ojibway woman, lovingly directed my mis-guided projections of longing for the ways of my own ancestors onto her traditions as I looked for a spiritual place to call my own.

The moment she told me that I needed to discover who my own people  were, it was like a light bulb went off and I started with a flurry of phone calls to my parents and grandmother…

At that time however not much information came forward as far as stories go, but I told that this line is Ukrainians from Romania, and I realize now that it was mostly because I did not know the right questions to ask, so it would take me another two decades to fully understand what to ask, and why I was asking in the first place…..

Wearing my ancestral belt from Romania

Each ancestral journey is an extremely personal one, it is after all not just about our ancestral  family, it also goes into the deepest depths of our family of origins and explores not just where we come from, but why we are the way we are, and why our parents and grandparents became who they are, and it takes us on a journey that many of us often wish we have not taken at first, because as my grandmother put it when I first started asking questions” Nikiah we come from peasants and poor people–you will not find royalty here!”

Not that I was looking for some sort of royal line, but the reality of our ancestors is often not a pretty one, and if we go in with ideas of poetry, then we are going to be greatly set straight! That is not to say that there is not beauty and wonderful gifts to discover, but more to say that the recent history of  the ancestors is not pretty no matter where you come from and is more often one of starvation, colonization, oppression, and many, many wars.

But I digress, because before I could even set one foot into the door of understanding why I come from a lineage of mothers who all too easily abandon there daughters and fathers with heart disease and a stubborn streak that would shock the most stubborn of political leaders, and also a family with poetry in their hearts and the ability to cook anything thrown a them and make it taste good, I first had to turn to the spirit world, and I had to forgive it all…. 

By the time an ancestral tip to Romania was decided on and booked I had failed at least three times to book something to Ireland which is one of the places my ancestors came from, and had been working with a Romanian ancestral spirit helper for close to a decade.

I had also become a beekeeper after she showed me the ways of this line of ancestors as stewards of bees and medicine workers with honey and propolis, and I had learned how to clear my ancestral lines and heal them not just for myself but for others as well..

But all along something felt not quite in place and I understood that it was because I needed to visit the lands of my ancestral peoples, so I was confused as to why Ireland had not worked out yet because it should have been easy, and I found myself in England many times over the years with easy flights over, but not once did it happen, so I gave it up and decided to ask for guidance on where I needed to go first and was told Romania. I now understand why….

I remember my great grandfather Michael Czutuk like it was yesterday, he was a lumbering old man, with a deep love for pickled anything, but especially beets which my nanny informs me she took a jar to him at his old age home every week, including a fresh jar just the day before he died, so I like to think he was feeling happy and cared for right up until he passed.

I remember his sweets and giant hands, and I also remember his funeral as it was one of the first I ever attended.

What I did not count on with this ancestral trip to his birth place was that it was going to be so intense, joyful and deeply grief filled…

From the moment we landed in Bucharest it was intense, as this is a city filled with many, many dichotomies and peoples, and as we rode in the back of the taxi after a crazy time outside the airport in cigarette smoke filled air trying not to get ripped off, but also not wanting to  piss off too many taxi drivers we found one to take us, and he drove fast through the rainy city speaking in broken english and hardly looking at the road.

He dropped us in front of an area that looked abandoned in the dark with graffiti everywhere and it was almost impossible to imagine that the nice Airb&B wen rented might be in one of the buildings, and as we stood there exhausted and smelling like stale cigarette smoke we were sure we had been somehow duped…

However inside that old building was indeed the nice apartment we rented and indeed by the light of day, the view of the river and parliament shown on-line was there, it was just nestled into what we would soon discover about Bucharest, an edgy and graffiti filled place containing both beauty and ugly.