I have so little notion of where I’ve come from. I remember my Mom and Dad rather well, but even they are a wispy memory. I have a sense of their presence, but as time goes on I realize how little I really knew them. Nothing made this more clear than when I found the “secret” photo album my Mom had kept from her early teens until when she married my Dad. We went over old photos so many times, but she never showed me the photos of the time before marriage.
I knew my two grandmothers for a few years and they died by the time I started school. Both my grandfathers died in the clutches of alcoholism before I was born. I only saw one of them, Charles, in a single photo.
There the memory trail ends, almost without a trace. I have no sense of all those shadowy ancestors from whom I am descended, except that they were all German in their roots, some actually spoke German.
I know they existed because I have a part of them in me. Part of them still exists. Every one of them is inside me in the pattern of genes that have shaped this body of mine, And who knows what else of them lives on in me. In a very real sense, parts of them live on in me.
I once thought that this kind of inter-connectiveness was a philosophical concept, an idea beyond anything in the world of science or observation.
Now I can see that my connection with everyone that has gone before me, and those who will live in the future is real, observable, not a matter of conjecture. I can be aware of it in no less confident manner than I can be aware of my hand before my face.
I see that I am linked to all humans by more than culture, activity and intention. Any aware biologist or physicist can explain how we are all part of one another. It is an awareness that can also come through meditation.