↞ ROOTS RUN DEEP ↠
Megan Allen
ROOTS RUN DEEP
Our roots run deep. Deep within our family tree, throughout our friendships, communities and our connection to nature through the wood wide web. We can follow our spiraling DNA strands to trace back our family roots to discover our ancestry, family health history and what diseases we may be prone to so we can practice preventative care in order to stay healthy and avoid any dis-ease.
NURTURE VS NATURE
My curiosity about discovering my roots began in childhood and has picked up in recent years. I have often thought about nurture vs nature and what makes me, me.
Nature: Do I look like anyone in my biological family? Do I have any family health history I should know about? Do I have traits or behaviors like anyone in my bio family?
Nurture: I have deep roots and learned behaviors from my parents who adopted me at birth and raised me. I am very close with my family and share similarities with my parents and two brothers. I even look a lot like my brother Kevin. On my mom's side of the family their looks and mannerisms are all very similar. There are also strong resemblances and similarities among my dad’s, step-dad’s and my step-mom’s perspective siblings and ancestors.
Three years ago I had a divination from my Earth Medicine teacher, Theresa. She asked me if I ever felt crowded like there were a lot of beings around me. She taught me that I have 6 ancestral lines crossing through me (from my 2 biological parents, my 2 parents and my 2 step-parents) that’s a lot of ancestors. You are the crossing of your parents lineage lines, so think of yourself in the center of an x of your father’s line and your mother’s line. Your past ancestors at the bottom of the x and your future ancestors at the top of the x.
SEVENTH GENERATION PRINCIPLE
The Seventh Generation Principle is from the Iroquois philosophy that the decisions we make today should result in a sustainable world seven generations (about 140 years) in the future. This principle applies to the decisions we make around the energy, water and natural resources we use use today and how our consumption and actions affect the next seven generations.
These seven generations are the ones that affect our lives and whose lives we affect. Our health, values, world view, money consciousness, relationships with indigenous and non-indigenous people, happiness and self-esteem are derived from how our family members view their lives and the way we fit within them. When we heal our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual traumas and illnesses we affect all our family members because family patterns don’t exist in isolation. They affect us all. We are related particles and matter in this energetic world spinning in the Milky Way galaxy.
With Love + Gratitude,
Megan