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“Rite To Ancestors:

Hail to those who have passed through the veil
From Life to Death, to Earth from Breath.
Hail to those who suffered to gift me with blood,
Hail to those who survived to gift me with body,
Hail to those whose songs gift me with inspiration.
Hail to those whom I knew and loved in life,
Whose memory I carry with me like a word of comfort,
Hail to those who left this land long ago,
Whose names I honor like a word of hope,
Or if I know not their names, whose lives I honor still.
I live and love because you lived and loved,
I speak and struggle because you spoke and struggled,
You live in me, as I will live in those who come after me.
Grant me the patience, O my beloved Dead,
To see the long view, and remember that what I do
Affects a million million souls I will never know.”
― Galina Krasskova, Northern Tradition for the Solitary Practitioner: A Book of Prayer, Devotional Practice, and the Nine Worlds of Spirit

“A foolish man
is all night awake,
pondering over everything;
he than grows tired;
and when morning comes,
all is lament as before.”
― Benjamin Thorpe, Pocket Havamal

“Courage and strength moves like the steadfast waves of the ocean. Ebbs and flows, highs and lows, loud and soft, firm and vulnerable, passing encouragement from one generation to the next.”
― Lynda Nguyen, Freedom and Feminism: Breaking The Rules. Telling The Truth To Freedom.

“…the understanding of any person is an exercise in genealogy. A man is not a static organism to be taken apart and analyzed and classified. A man is movement, motion, a continuum. There is no beginning to him. He runs through his ancestors, and the only beginning is the primal beginning of the single cell in the slime. The proper study of mankind is man, but man is an endless curve on the eternal graph paper, and who can see the whole curve?”
― Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain

“Maturity entails a readiness, painful and wrenching though it may be, to look squarely into the long dark places, into the fearsome shadows.
In this act of ancestral remembrance and acceptance may be found a light by which to see our children safely home.”
― Carl Sagan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

“How many stories are there that have been lived, but will never be told? Far too many for me to squander the one that I’m living.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“We achieve some measure of adulthood when we recognize our parents as they really were, without sentimentalizing or mythologyzing, but also without blaming them unfairly for our imperfections.”
― Carl Sagan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

“This is sacred space.
Libation . . . instead of pouring water on the ground, I pour words on the page.
I begin with this libation in honor of all of those unknown and known spirits who surround us. I acknowledge the origins of this land where I am seated while writing this introduction. This land was inhabited by Indigenous people, the very first people to inhabit this land, who lived here for thousands of years before the Europeans arrived and were unfortunately unable to cohabitate without dominating, enslaving, raping, terrorizing, stealing from, relocating, and murder- ing the millions of members of Indigenous nations throughout Turtle Island, which is now known as North America. I write libation to those millions of Indigenous women, men, and children; and those millions of kidnapped and enslaved African women, men, and children whose genocide, confiscated land, centuries of free labor, forced migration, traumatic memories of rape, and sweat, tears, and blood make up the very fiber and foundation of all of the Americas and the Caribbean.”
― Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Love WITH Accountability: Digging up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse

“Loving who you came from is like looking into the mirror and loving yourself. Your ancestry is your reflection in the mirror.”
― Deborah Bravandt

“There is this visceral energy, wild wisdom, living, breathing, and moving through my body that remembers, even though I don’t. It knows all.”
― Lynda Nguyen

“Oh my mother tongue, your existence in my life has been colonized by the imperialist.
Born with an Arabic tongue but raised to only understand in the English language.”
― mais amad

“I NOW KNOW WHAT JOE MEANT WHEN HE ALWAYS SAID THAT HIS PARENTS WOULD'VE LOVED ME.”
― Jarrett J. Krosoczka, Hey, Kiddo: How I Lost My Mother, Found My Father, and Dealt with Family Addiction

“This energy feels like a pull from the ancestors, helping me to find my own way, to transcend my own fears.”
― Lynda Nguyen, Freedom and Feminism: Breaking The Rules. Telling The Truth To Freedom.

“The echo is a gift, passed on to us by our ancestors many ages ago, to remind us of ourselves. To confirm our existence. To remedy our loneliness. Though we must be still in order to hear it.”
― Thomas Lloyd Qualls, Painted Oxen

“I will not delay the reader with lengthy quotations from the very many Taiwanese flood myths that were collected from amongst the indigenous population, primarily by Japanese scholars, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Typically they tell a story of a warning from the gods, the sound of thunder in the sky, terrifying earthquakes, the pouring down of a wall of water which engulfs mankind, and the survival of a remnant who had either fled to mountain tops or who floated to safety on some sort of improvised vessel.
To provide just one example (from the Ami tribe of central Taiwan), we hear how the four gods of the sea conspired with two gods of the land, Kabitt and Aka, to destroy mankind. The gods of the sea warned Kabitt and Aka: 'In five days when the round moon appears, the sea will make a booming sound: then escape to a mountain where there are stars.' Kabitt and Aka heeded the warning immediately and fled to the mountain and 'when they reached the summit, the sea suddenly began to make the sound and rose higher and higher'. All the lowland settlements were inundated but two children, Sura and Nakao, were not drowned: 'For when the flood overtook them, they embarked in a wooden mortar, which chanced to be lying in the yard of their house, and in that frail vessel they floated safely to the Ragasan mountain.'
So here, handed down since time immemorial by Taiwanese headhunters, we have the essence of the story of Noah's Ark, which is also the story of Manu and the story of Zisudra and (with astonishingly minor variations) the story of all the deluge escapees and survivors in all the world. At some point a real investigation should be mounted into why it is that furious tribes of archaeologists, ethnologists and anthropologists continue to describe the similarities amongst these myths of earth-destroying floods as coincidental, rooted in exaggeration, etc., and thus irrelevant as historical testimony. This is contrary to reason when we know that over a period of roughly 10,000 years between 17,000 and 7000 years ago more than 25 million square kilometres of the earth's surface were inundated. The flood epoch was a reality and in my opinion, since our ancestors went through it, it is not surprising that they told stories and bequeathed to us their shared memories of it. As well as continuing to unveil it through sciences like inundation mapping and palaeo-climatology, therefore, I suggest that if we want to learn what the world was really like during the meltdown we should LISTEN TO THE MYTHS.”
― Graham Hancock, Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

“If we impose on a map of the earth a 'world grid' with Giza (not Greenwich) as its prime meridian, then hidden relationships become immediately apparent between sites that previously seemed to be on a random, unrelated longitudes. On such a grid, as we've just seen, Tiruvannamalai stands on longitude 48 degrees east, Angkor stands on longitude 72 degrees east and Sao Pa stands out like a sore thumb on longitude 90 degrees east -- all numbers that are significant in ancient myths, significant in astronomy (through the study of precession), and closely interrelated through the base-3 system.
So the 'outrageous hypothesis' which is being proposed here is that the world was mapped repeatedly over a long period at the end of the Ice Age -- to the standards of accuracy that would not again be achieved until the end of the eighteenth century. It is proposed that the same people who made the maps also established their grid materially, on the ground, by consecrating a physical network of sites around the world on longitudes that were significant to them. And it is proposed that this happened a very long time ago, before history began, but that later cultures put new monuments on top of the ancient sites which they continued to venerate as sacred, perhaps also inheriting some of the knowledge and religious ideas of the original navigators and builders.”
― Graham Hancock, Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

“Our ancestors have a lot to teach us. This is not because they were wiser or more devout than we are or “betterâ€� Christians, though we can’t rule out such possibilities. It is because they can point us toward what is essential. (p. 50)”
― Margaret Bendroth, The Spiritual Practice of Remembering

“We also believe that from our end of this undulating time line, we have a certain omnipotence. We can see the mistakes and blunders of the past far more clearly than the people who were living through them. (p. 77)”
― Margaret Bendroth, The Spiritual Practice of Remembering

“You are the strongest male I have ever known, Dancer. No one is more worthy of your noble lineage. You honor your family and your ancestors. And you are a treasure for Andaria. I know the first Dancer of the Warring Blood Clan of Hauk smiles whenever he looks down and sees the strength and beauty of his namesake.”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, Born of Fury

“This little girl will be fearless. She’ll do whatever she wants. She won’t feel as scared as me.â€� A quiet mantra, she repeated it daily.”
― Lynda Nguyen, Freedom and Feminism: Breaking The Rules. Telling The Truth To Freedom.

“I grew up listening to languages my immigrant parents didn't want to teach me, so I get a regressive pleasure out of feeling my way through sounds to their possible meanings. Not "getting" a word, or a line, or a poem at first read was never an obstacle for me â€� in fact, it was a seduction.”
― Ange Minko

“In 1646, the king recognized John Aylett’s heroism by adding distinguished symbols to his coat-of-arms—including a canton, the Rose of England and a crest depicting an arm holding a sword.”
― Zita Steele, Makers of America: A Personal Family History

“Now we know that man is more than two million years old,' exlaimed Heyerdahl, 'it would be very strange if our ancestors lived like primitive food collectors for all that time until suddenly they started in the Nile valley, in Mesopotamia and even in the Indus valley, to build a civilization at peak level pretty much at the same time. And there's a question I ask that I never get an answer to. The tombs from the first kingdom of Sumer are full of beautiful ornaments and treasures made of gold, silver, platinum, and semi-precious stones -- things you don't find in Mesopotamia. All you find there is mud and water -- good for planting but not much else. How did they suddenly learn -- in that one generation just about -- where to go to find gold and all these other things? To do that they must have known the geography of wide areas, and that takes time. So there must have been something before.”
― Graham Hancock, Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

“On 16 January 2002 India's Minister of Science and Technology released the first results of carbon-dating of the artefacts from the flooded cities of the Gulf of Cambay. The results date the artifacts to 9500 years ago -- 5000 years older than any city so far recognized by archaeologists.”
― Graham Hancock, Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

“And there is but one passion that can let loose this accumulated force: his
passion for honour. For the Northman to be affected by this or that in what he
meets depends on something that has happened, something past, and
something ahead, an event which has happened to himself or his ancestors,
and an event which must be brought to pass for the betterment of himself and
his descendants. He does not live in the moment; he uses the moment to
reckon out: how can it serve him to the attainment of his end? He does not hate
a thing for its own sake, or on his own account; for if he can purchase a chance
of revenge by giving up his dislike, he tears his hate away, and where he can
gain a chance by enmity, the hate wells up again in undisguised power. This
does not mean that the Northman is temporarily beside himself when he is
seeking redress for his wrongs.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“There's a saying that to really know someone you have to walk a mile in their shoes. I'd add that to really know our ancestors, we have to put on more than their shoes, which were generally poor- fitting and leaky. Hitch a plow to an ox and work a field for a few hours, and you come away with a whole new appreciation for what your great-great-grandpa did come spring on the Ohio frontier. Pick up a Kentucky long rifle and aim it at fleeing whitetail, and you'll learn real quick about how important it is to use every bit of an animal you harvest; you may not have another one down for quite a while.”
― Chris Kyle, American Gun: A History of the U.S. in Ten Firearms

“Mei reached into her pocket and took out another steamed egg cake, this one topped with a dark red date. "How about a treat for the loyal guardian?"
ShiShi's fur bristled, and his tail became stiff and straight. "Absolutely not. I won't be fooled into accepting food from you."
"Fine, your loss." Mei took a bite. "Mmm. So delicious. I always thought guardians had a weakness for sweets."
"Or spirits." Liwei snickered. "Where do you think all those gourds of rice wine go when you leave them for your ancestors at the altar?”
― Elizabeth Lim, Reflection

“Your ancestors have brought you to this stage of life. Honor your ancestors.”
― Avijeet Das

“The old forefathers lived in their posterity, filled them out with their will, and wrought their achievements through them anew. A scornful reference to the departed actually strikes a living soul; for whereas the soul transmigrant merely repeats itself, and, saves itself by again and again coming into existence when he slips from one body into another, the kinsmen actually are their fathers and their fathers' fathers, and maintain them by their being. Since it is the same soul which animated the ancestors and which now makes bearers of honour and frith
out of the living generation, the present does not exclude the past. The identity of hamingja which bears the clan includes all the departed.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“There is a good reason why you cannot imagine one of the Pilgrim Fathers kicking back at Six Flags, or Daniel Boone going down a water slide. It is not that their lives were busier than ours, or that they were more serious people. We are all busy in our own ways, whether we are hunting down dinner in a forest or laboring through the crowds at our local market. The difference is in our attitudes towards leisure time.

Today reading a novel or going to see a play is just a way to pass the time, and a fairly admirable one at that, given the alternatives of video games and reality television. Two hundred years ao, however, a decent man or woman would not have wasted God-given time with people and events that had never taken place, and in a manner designed to artfully stimulate the emotions. The theater is “wholly useless,â€� a minister told his flock in 1825. “Can it teach the mechanic industry, or the merchant more economy and skill?â€� Surely not, he declared. Even at its very best, the theater is “mere recreation.”
― Margaret Bendroth, The Spiritual Practice of Remembering