What's It All About?

By GrahamLewis · Dec 13, 2021 ·
  1. Came across this poem by a Tibetan Buddhist monk, and it triggered some reflections on my family tree research:

    People of my father’s and forefathers’ generations
    have continuously striven their entire lives, but all failed.
    Had I exerted myself like them, I would also have no success.
    Therefore isn’t it joyful to use this life to
    practice the profound sublime Dharma?
    . . .

    I've traced my father's and his forefather's generations on their journeys from Scotland, England, Ireland, and likely Wales. I've followed one side from the Debatable Lands to the Virginia colony, up to Kentucky (Tick Creek), and to Ohio to Indiana to Iowa to Kansas, sowing crops and Presbyterian churches along the way, leaving at more than one eponymous cemetery. And I've followed the other side from northern England and Ireland through the New Jersey colony, to Ohio, to Iowa, mostly farming, but also blacksmithing, innkeeping, and even chicken-plucking, while spending time in Quaker meeting houses and Methodist and Congregational churches.

    I literally know where a lot of the bodies are buried.

    In the case of my own father, I find it intriguing that having been born amid his mother's extended family in western Iowa, he grew up across the river in Nebraska and seemed to never really look back east. At least we never met any of those cousins or great uncles or aunts, all our stories were Nebraska-based; and he took his own family west across the state, until we migrated back again to eastern Nebraska. Yet after he retired he and my mother bought a farmstead about 20 miles from the Iowa community where he was born, and that's where he died, ten years later. In fact, the last time I saw him was as he lay in the hospital in the same city where he was born 78 years earlier. I have this image of him being greeted by the spirits or ghosts or souls (whatever term you choose) of all the Iowa relatives of his youth, his mother, his cousins, aunts and uncles (including Burt, the chicken-plucker) and maybe being welcomed into the spirit of those Quaker meeting houses that, to the best of my knowledge, he never set foot in.

    As though he came home without knowing it, certainly without consciously choosing it.

    But perhaps I digress. The question I ask myself is what it was all about, the lives of those earlier generations, struggling sometimes to thrive, sometimes to simply survive. The ones who did well, the ones who were ne-er-do-wells, those who died young, those who died old, those who raised families, those who died childless, all of them have ended up, far as I know, in the same place in this world: back to the earth from which their essence emerged countless eons back. Their farms, their houses, their possessions are all gone, as are their hopes, dreams, accomplishments, fears, failures, and successes.

    Perhaps, as the poet suggested, it is of as much value to spend time in meditation and experiencing the present moment as it was, or would be, to toil in the soil or forge horseshoes, or pluck chickens.

    ** As I finish this I realize how muchI presume they didn't ponder these questions as well, whether in Presbyterian churches or Quaker meetings or even behind the plow. Or plucking chickens. I hope that when the time comes for me to cross over that they will meet me with forgiveness and understanding.
    EFMingo likes this.

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