#there's irish ancestry on my dad's side. I don't know how much but they're very loudly proud about it

[bookwyrminspiration]

just found out apparently there is a song in hozier's new album abt language! wanted to rec it to you both because. it sounds very beautiful and also obviously because lyrics: butchered tongue

Oh, really? Cool! I've seen that Hozier songs have been coming out, but I haven't kept close track and didn't know there was a whole new album now.

I'm listening to it now and ough. Okay wow yeah that hurts. Especially that "Until the distance has been shown between what is lost forever / And what can still be known" line, that's incredibly reminiscent of several of the convos we've been having about trying to reclaim what we can, but how it will never be quite the same as what it could've been. And trying to reconcile and be okay with who we are while still feeling the righteous anger at what was taken from us culturally and linguistically.

And then "A butchered tongue still singin' here above the ground". I don't even know how to explain it, but you get it, right? We are butchered tongues, we're alive but with this piece cut from us. But we're still singing, we're still trying, we're teaching ourselves as many sounds and words as these butchered tongues will accept because we're not letting our language passively go. And despite our difficulties and how it's never be quite the same, we're still persevering.

I love this language...partnership? Camaraderie? Connection? Solidarity? we've accidentally discovered--thank you for sharing this song with me <3

[kaccvcate]

GREETINGS FROM MEOWTER SPACE.

In my travels I've come to find that I have an extremely strange family background. I'm going to be talking about it in some essays, which may contain descriptions of abuse and neglect. Here's the first one (it's long as fuck.)

On my mom's side, my great great grandmother was Creek. She was alive when I was born, and we briefly met. She was over 125 years old (nobody knows how old exactly.) The men on that side, who were all Scottish, died in their early 40s, except for my grandfather, who left when my mom was a kid. (I met him once, but my mom didn't want me to be around anyone Christian as a kid, so I never met anyone else on that side of the family.) I barely know anything about my Scottish ancestry, although growing up we called the native grapes "bullises," which is a Gaelic word for plums (they're also called muscadines, but I don't know what the truth is anymore.)

My family were subsistance farmers since before colonization, until my grandma became a schoolteacher. Our family moved to what would later be the Free State of Jones from what would later be Alabama, though I'm not sure why. During the Civil War, people in Jones county refused to fight, since nobody owned slaves in the area, and it was declared a Free State. My grandma lives in the Free State, in abject poverty with my uncle and his wife, who just scream at each other and beat their kids and neglect their 15 hoarded dogs all day. And if they have a problem with me saying so, they can eat shit and die.

My mom went to school for anthropology, and taught geology at the University of Southern Mississippi. She was extremely ashamed of how poor our background is, and I wasn't allowed to visit family much, although I wanted to very badly. I got to live with my grandma and my two adopted uncles who are around my age for a little while when we were kids, and they're some of the only positive childhood memories I have. I was extremely isolated and abused, especially by my step dad, who is currently (to my knowledge) employed as a programmer at a major video game company, as well as being a child molester starting when I was 2 or 3 years old (some of my earliest memories.) His name is Rigel Cameron Freeman. I ran away when I was 16 to live with my dad. When I told my mom what he did, she called me a liar and quit speaking to me, and that was the last I heard from her directly. So far as I know, she's been in mental hospitals pretty much since I left.

My dad's mom, whose first name was Ellen, was Ashkenazi Jewish, descended from a family who left Germany before the holocaust. She was a beatnik who was friends with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg, and she had personal beef with Grace Slick over a boyfriend. My dad's first guitar was a gift from Cat Stevens, although this was something he was a little embarrassed about and only mentioned to me once. She was especially close friends with Tiny Tim. She was in California trying to break into acting, and almost got a part in the Godfather allegedly (actually all of this is alleged by my dad, I only met her once. He really didn't like her, so I don't think he would make it up.)

Then she met my grandfather, Bob Marshall, who was probably in California to do drugs (sacred family tradition.) I have reason to believe he was mostly Choctaw and possibly Irish, although on that side of the family it's traditional to claim to be "French or Italian" unless you're very drunk, and then it's okay to be Indian. They moved up to Alaska and lived on the Athabaskan reservation, where my father, Rogan Russell Marshall, was born on April 19. Later, my grandfather became a civil rights lawyer, and he defended the right for prisoners with AIDS to be desegregated (basically anyone with AIDS would die in solitary before that.)

My dad got into Emerson, dropped out because no one could afford textbooks, moved to Mississippi and started this crazy punk band, and then went ahead and wrote some movies anyway. My favorite is called the Attic Expeditions, it features Seth Green, Jeffery Combs, and Alice Cooper, and it's very trippy and fun. Unfortunately, he became disabled from the same autoimmune condition I have, ankylosing spondylitis, which, if you're born male, has much more severe symptoms (which is why I chose not to start testosterone.) AS used to be thought of as genetic, but has recently been linked to environmental pollutants, and I was likely exposed to something released by one of our many chemical factories (my uncle who abuses his kids and dogs is adopted, I mentioned earlier, grew up in my grandma's house when we were kids together, and has the same symptoms, and multiple people who lived on the same Hattiesburg street as my dad in the 90s were diagnosed.) He was living in Massachussetts in his mom's basement when he married my step mom, a public defense attourney, to get health insurance, and they lived in Miami for eight years together until she left him, shortly after I moved in.

After that, I had to drop out of high school, and I lived in hell for about seven years while I worked full time, usually multiple jobs, to take care of us, and all the cats he would bring home (as many as 13, but I ran my house like a cat ranch and it was kind of beautiful.) His physical and mental health was dogshit, he wouldn't stop doing hard drugs, and our relationship was so hopelessly abusive that I had to quit speaking to him as well. My feelings are complicated because, while I love and admire his work, and he taught me a lot of extremely valuable and positive things, the things he did to me would put him in prison if I believed in the law. I owe him everything, and at the same time, I almost wish we'd never met (I'll have to talk about that in another post as well, because it's a lot, and exremely heavy.)

My third parent, Scott Panther, I honestly don't know very well. According to local legend, and there are many about him, he's Scottish and Cherokee. He was close friends with my parents before I was born, helped start Rong (and probably came up with the best ideas for it.) He was my mom's boyfriend for a long time before I was born.

My mom met Scott and Rogan at a Rong show, I was conceived after a Rong show (Scott drove Rogan to her house), and the night I was born there was a Rong show. Scott was overdosing when my mom went into labor, and I was born at 4 AM while multiple tornadoes passed through town. Later that night, he was ready to play the show (hats off). No one told Rogan I was born, though in the full video of the show he mentions the other people in town who were born on April 18. Unfortunately, the video is probably lost - he gave all the Rong tapes to someone I don't know, and he didn't say who (he may have even been lying and threw them away.)

I inherited a lot of personality traits from Scott, as many people who know us have noticed, although I gained them not through direct teaching, or through any modern understanding of genetics. I've read that before colonization these kind of things were more common and better understood.

[kosmic-songbird]

You guys!!! I picked up Nancy Hendrickson's Ancestral Tarot and I've been working through it. I've been working on finding my spirit guide (ancestor-wise, I have a patron spirit already) and it's been so cool. I got some signs someone was reaching out to me last year and I mistakenly thought it might be a goddess because the signs were very traditionally feminine and whimsical. I'm talking purple flowers, giggles, and butterflies. But it suddenly stopped and I just went on with my life.

Well, as I started reaching out again for my guide, the energy returned and lo and behold my ancestral guide is a young woman, no more than a teen really. She's optimistic and creative and that's why she wants to help me, she says. When I talk to her I get that same sense that someone is laughing and it's such a pretty laugh.

I've been really trying to show her how grateful I am she is talking to me so I offered her a lavender shortbread cookie I baked, rose incense, blazing star flowers, and an origami cat I made. Basically just things I did for fun I thought she would like too since they're light-hearted and pretty. And I think she is as excited as me because tonight's reading was so so so good.

So I did the teamwork spread and it was solid. The author wants me to be addressing my guide by name at this point but that's something I want to be sure about so I've been patient. Well, when I got done with the reading, I went to thank her for her input and for the relationship we're starting to develop. I essentially ended with, "Really, just thank you so much Cara." And I stopped dead in my tracks cause Cara. Cara? Cara.

I can't tell you how lovely that laugh was you guys. I just knew that she was happy to hear her name and I decided to let go of the fear I'd divined the wrong name and just roll with it. (which happens to coincide with the reading since she was telling me not to be afraid of trusting my intuition.)

Anyways, I looked up the name origin and it's Irish/English, basically a Latin name. That checks. In a previous reading she'd communicated that she was from dad's side and I know that his bunch spawned from somewhere in that general area. I'm doing an ancestry test soon so maybe I'll find out more about the location so I could maybe learn the culture and honor her with that. She did say she was an ancestor of place so I think she would appreciate me learning to cook things from home or pictures of the place. Maybe music? And mythology/folklore, of course. As an ex-anthropology major and an English Lit grad I adore that stuff.

Anyways, I don't make too many personal posts but I am just so excited about Cara. Everyone has said I have a knack for tarot and spirits and I feel like I'm finally settling into something super sustainable and useful for my craft.

Wish me luck as I continue working with my ancestors and if you'd like to follow further updates check the tag #Cara.