Pitru Paksha: Remembering My Ancestors

Pitru Paksha is the time of honoring our ancestors on the ayurveda calendar.  Translated as ‘the fortnight of the ancestors,’ the Hindu tradition has very specific rituals and practices, most of which are beyond my scope and understanding.  For me, I connect with the spirit of the holiday by taking the time to honor those who came before me, those who teach me, those who have contributed to where/who I am today.  Intentionality is at the core of much of my grounding into the practices I am learning through ayurveda. This practice asks me to ground into my ancestry and the messiness of family. As a person who races through so many things in my life, giving myself permission to stop and give attention and thanks to those who have participated in my current existence is liberating.

In these spaces of reflection, I’ve been taking the time to think about my grandmother.  My maternal grandmother.  She is my last living grandparent.   She is the grandparent that I have felt closest to over the years.  And she is the grandparent who I can often physically see myself within.  It’s the chin and jaw line that gives it away.  I inherited the Lehr jawline and chin.  Pointed, narrow and fleshy chin in the center of a relatively wide jaw line. 

Grandma with Santa

Grandma--Solemn

Great-Grandma

Me

I sit now looking at old family photos of my grandmother at various life stages and I catch glimpses of her mother, my great-grandmother, and I can see how I carry some of that residual DNA.  The looks are similar. A recognition of a shared history and story.  As I look at the old photos I see strangers at times.  But even in those stranger’s faces I can see me and start to build a story of where I come from.  It is a rich story for me to tell. Exciting to recognize myself as part of something more than the here and now.  To be part of something beyond my skin and brain.  It is like unraveling a puzzle as I look at the photos.  This is one strand of myself in these photos.  The story of a family in Victor, Colorado, settling in and then slowly growing and dispersing.  Seeing my grandma young and old in the photos, I can mark the years in her face.  I can see the ways in which she and her sisters grew away from each other and established their own families and new chapters to their stories. In my grandma’s stories, I am a later chapter, so to read the earlier chapters through photographs provides me with an understanding of the cycles of a life.  At times when I feel that my family is a disaster, splintered and thinning out, I can catch a glimpse in these photos that there is a solid foundation beneath all that feels fractured and deteriorated.  I see that as my grandma ages and nears the last chapters of her life, she has a rich history that she has passed onto me.  The distance between us now is momentary.  I don’t know how to explain it exactly, but as I travel back, I start to understand the way life is circulating through seasons, events, and years—all filled with joy and pain. What my great-grandma was in my memories, I see in my grandma now.  There is a comfort in that.  There is comfort in knowing that although my life is temporary here, it is part of a bigger story that extends and circles through my DNA and blood.  Stories woven in skin and blood and memory.

If I’m gaining anything from this experience of Pitru Paksha, it is how valuable it is to stop and take the time to give reverence and thanks to those who came before me.  To take that time to ground my thoughts in the swampy messiness of family. I can sit with the joy and the pain and find peace even as I have intense grief flow through me as the cycles keep moving us through time in complicated and often scary ways.  The value in all these practices and working with the seasons is gaining a visceral understanding of how I move through the same seasons every year, but each time there is something new revealed. So, it is simultaneously the same and completely different.  It is autumn, which happens every year, but this version of me is not the same as last year, nor will she be the same as next year.  The spiral keeps us revisiting moments and places, but they never feel the way they once felt.  That is enchanting to me, even as it scares me.  Known and unknown in one simultaneous motion….