I recently saw yet another post about eating ancestral foods and working with ancestral plants on Instagram…

Eat the foods your ancestors ate. Return to the foods that enlivened your DNA throughout generations. Turn to the native plants of your ancestral lands.

This was the message.

On the one hand, I love it. This is something I teach in my Rewilding the Spirit course, having students do a bit of research and prepare a meal that their bloodline ancestors might have enjoyed.

Yet I also teach my students how to connect with their land ancestors—the local ancestors that are keepers of the land they live on now, in this lifetime. Ancestors with whom it’s equally important to partner. Here, we prepare and enjoy local, wild foods to attune our current DNA to the current land we live on.

Reading this post on ancestral foods so close to Thanksgiving here in the States got me thinking—what would an ancestral Thanksgiving meal actually look like?

Even if you’ve only dipped a toe into the wild world of spiritual practice, you’re probably hearing a lot about ancestors right now. Ancestral altars, thinning veils, and the ghosts of ancestors past. We tend to experience a heightened awareness of all-things ancestral around this time of year. Yet recent years have brought about a collective zeitgeist in our interest in ancestral healing. But who are “the ancestors” really? The answer to this question is actually much more complex that tracing back your blood lines (though of course that’s part of it). As we step through this dark portal filled with ghosts of the past, let’s dive into who the ancestors really are—and how we can begin to work with them.

Summer Solstice, Litha, Midsummer, or whatever your word of choice, is celebrated in many wonderful ways throughout the world, including dancing around bonfires, seasonal feasts, visiting sacred wells and waters, and leaving offerings for the fae. I’ll be dipping my toes into all of the above this solstice, as well as a few new activities I encourage you to try…

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