Written by Not everyone gets the family story.
Some of us grew up with gaps where the history should have been, or were handed versions of it that didn’t hold up, or came from people who simply weren’t interested in passing anything down. Some of us had mothers who made it very clear, in one way or another, that we were on our own.
I’m one of those people. My family history is full of silence and misdirection, and what little I do know doesn’t light a clear path backward. There’s no grandmother’s windowsill to look back on fondly. No folk wisdom quietly handed down between women over generations.
For a long time I thought this meant I was starting from nothing.
I wasn’t. I just had to learn to look differently.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand: the path found me before I had words for it. Long before I knew what any of this was called, before I’d read a single book or found a single community, something in me was already oriented in this direction. Toward the unseen. Toward meaning beneath the surface of things. Toward fire and symbol and the question of what persists.
That is inheritance. It just didn’t come through the people who raised me.
Some of us have blood ancestors we can trace and honor. Others of us build our lineage differently. Through the teachers and traditions we’re drawn to, through the communities where we finally feel recognized, through the authors and practitioners who wrote something down centuries ago that somehow describes exactly who you are. Those connections are real. That thread runs through you too.
And there’s something to be said for coming to this entirely through your own seeking. Nothing was handed to me already labeled. Everything I know about this path I found, tested, sat with, and decided was true. That’s not a lesser version of practice. In some ways it’s the most honest version there is.
If you came to your practice the hard way – through your own life and your own hunger for it, without a family tradition to inherit – you’re not behind. You’re the ancestor now. What you’re building, what you’re learning, what you’re becoming: that’s what you’ll eventually leave behind.
What did you find on your own, before anyone told you what to call it?