The Honey of Roses: On Repairing What Feels Too Broken
Ancestral healing, long-term love, & parenting all ask the same thing of you: patience and practice, even when life shatters in your face.
Sometimes life asks you to tend things softly.
Sometimes it explodes glass in your face.
You know that thing where people are coming for dinner, so you clean?
I'm in my dining room. I'm not in a rush; I planned plenty of time for the overhaul.
Wipe down the dusty windowsills, vacuum the chair seats covered in cat hair.
It's been a while since this room was last deep cleaned.
In the corner sits a floor lamp I inherited from my grandmother's house.
Tall as me, patinaed brass, smooth milk glass globe, open top.
I've had this lamp since I was 24, the year my sweet grandma died.
The light is intense because it uses old-fashioned light bulbs that are about twice the size of normal ones.
(Have you noticed that it's harder to find incandescent light bulbs? All LED, which I don't love.)
The light from this lamp is also old-fashioned; the warm cream milk glass throws a soft light across the whole room.
In the 30 years this lamp has lit my spaces, I've changed the bulb exactly once. That was 15 years ago.
It came with a spare, wrapped in faded blue cardboard.
The only problem with the glass lamp shade is that it flares out widely at the top and tends to get grimy.
When I turned the lamp on today, I almost heard it whine, "Clean me."
I use paper towels for some types of cleaning.
Wiping glass is one.
My hands are full of white stiff fresh paper towels.
As I touch the towel to the glass, I hear a loud gunshot.
Without a thought, my hands cover my face with paper towels, just as glass explodes violently.
Shards rain down on me, embed into my feet.
Later we'll find pieces across the room, diagonally, as far as you could get from that lamp.
I open my eyes to see blue flames shooting out of the lightbulb base.
The air crackles with electricity, acrid smoke filling the room.
My housemates come running at my loud expletive: one grabs the dogs, the other scrambles to unplug the lamp.
It was, to say the least, dramatic.
It shook me.
My heart raced for hours.
My hands trembled.
Not only because of the physical danger that could have been.
The moment of glass exploding and flame bursting in the middle of my house felt like a rupture in the membrane between worlds.
Thirty-six hours earlier, I'd awoken with a start from a dream.
I was in my grandmother's house.
She was alive, but the paint on the soffits of her house was badly peeling, the house in need of repair.
The house was sad and hurting. "I can help you," I'd murmured to her, thinking in the dream of who I could call.
Upon waking, I discussed it with Ari, and the message seemed clear: it was time to drop in with that line of grandmas ritually.
My ancestral reverence practice these days is more integrated and casual, following a decade of daily repair and worship.
I no longer feel it neccessary to hold the same ancestral awareness I once did.
After several years, my ancestral healing work was eventually complete.
Now my ancestors are more of a resource than a point of daily focus.
I feel their soft presence whenever I turn my attention toward them.
I still sing to them and say daily prayers, but they no longer require the same level of care they once did.
When I first began tending to my unwell ancestral lines, it felt like lifting a massive weight.
I was swimming in the grief of generations, and it almost drowned me. But over time, through years of practice, things have settled. Their pain softened, and my capacity grew.
That's the thing about tending. It changes you.
After the dream, I went to my rose garden and chose a beautiful salmon-colored rose to offer my grandmas.
I placed it in a small glass bowl filled with water and set it on the part of my altar dedicated to ancestors.
Struck a match, lit a candle, poured some whiskey, promised to come back to tend them later in the day.
But it was the weekend, full of fun activities, and I didn't make it back to my altar.
One of my activities was tending to my rose garden. Roses are so finicky. This spring, my children worked together, digging the earth and pouring compost and amendments into the soil before planting the rose bushes they had gifted me for Parents' Day.
I learned my love of roses from my grandma. Like many of us, I associate roses with grandmothers.
Lying in bed unable to sleep, it hit me: it was my grandmother's lamp that had exploded.
I'd named her in several conversations that day. I'd promised to tend, and I hadn't.
So, at 11:58 PM, I dragged my butt out of bed and lit candles at my altar.
I asked my well, bright grandmas what it was they needed.
Food, they said.
But I wasn't about to trek to the kitchen at midnight.
So I prayed and sang instead.
I imagined pink roses, like the one floating on my altar, cocooning our maternal line in scent and presence.
Pink light, from me and my children, from the garden they'd made, flowing toward our ancestors.
Every day, I engage with roses: I spritz rose water on my face, anoint my skin with rose oil, add tincture to my water, perfume myself with rose.
I love these flowers that bring so much beauty and goodness into my life. Last year I went to Grasse, France, to study perfuming during the rose harvest.
The roses that grow there are Rosa Centifolia. Not much to look at, but the scent is a thread of divinity.
The smell brings me immediately to presence: the kind that is animist, ancestral, pleasurable, and delighted.
Deep joy in the belly of the rose.
I've used rose oil to grow my capacity to feel love in real time. To soften my angry heart. To hold the container of reverence.
My dear friend, energy healer teacher Sâde Gryffin, taught me recently how to use roses to clear my energetic field. How to separate from enmeshment through visualizing a rose, and then exploding it into golden light that returns to the universe.
That's the funny part, right? I'm over here exploding roses into gold, and the ancestors are over there exploding lightbulbs into blue flame.
I have had very few experiences where my ancestors influence the physical world.
Once, I felt a gentle push in the right direction when trying to locate my ancestors' eroded graves in Cornwall, England.
But most of the weird ancestral coincidences have not occurred in the physical realm.
Changing my last name to Moray, for example, only to find out decades later while doing genealogy research that was the surname of one of my ancestral lines.
But exploding lightbulbs?
In general, I don't believe the dead have access to the physical amount of energy it takes to mess with stuff in our world.
It may be a coincidence that when I wasn't turning my attention to my ancestors, asking for help in my dreams, they increased the volume.
Could be.
But what if it's not?
What if the world is way more magickal than we acknowledge?
My ancestor teacher, Daniel Foor, taught me that it's rude to act surprised when things improve in your life once you start tending to your ancestors. It is my experience.
Healing transgenerational trauma has changed my life in significant, potent ways.
I never thought I'd be someone with the patience to tend roses.
To grow businesses.
To publish books.
To maintain long-term love.
To have a healthy, loving family.
Yet here I am.
The honey of roses, and the work of tending reaps rewards.
This is the last week of Camp LightHeart: Rosy Delight.
We’re working with roses as medicine.
For your too-hard heart
For your grief that feels endless
For your feel-good-ness that feels edgy but necessary.
Roses know how to hold both: the ache and the sweetness.
We’ll be learning and playing with them.
Dogma No. Ritual Yes.
We’ll be smelling, integrating, and opening hearts to more capacity for love!
P.S.
Some wounds live in the chest cavity as personal, quiet, solitary.
Some live in the space between two people, shared, relational, hurting.
If your heart work right now is about tending your grief and pleasure, the rose is waiting.
If your heart work is about tending a partnership that feels stuck but still precious, Ari and I are opening two spots for Kitchen Table Rebuild couples coaching.
I wrote about our relationship rebuild here.
It’s not too late to apply.
Whoa, not subtle. I would’ve been shook by that too, for the same reasons. Cheers on the midnight tending—feeling better/more settled since then?
Do you relate with your ancestors?