The Causey Consulting Podcast

Thinning of the Veil

October 22, 2020 Sara Causey Episode 50
The Causey Consulting Podcast
Thinning of the Veil
Show Notes Transcript

If you've thought about starting a family tree-- or maybe you have one that needs to be fleshed out more-- this is an auspicious time of the year to do it!

Key topics:

✔️ So many people had to couple up and survive harsh conditions for you to be sitting here right now, interacting with this podcast.
✔️ Enjoy the cultures. Cook recipes. Learn some of the languages. Listen to its music.
✔️ By Celtic tradition, the veil between the physical world and the spiritual world gets thin this time of the year. Who knows... could it be true?
✔️ Exploring the connections that helped to create you also helps you understand yourself better.


Need more? Email me: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/contact-causey/

Unknown:

Hello, hello and welcome to today's episode of the Causey Consulting Podcast. I'm your host Sara Causey and I'm also the owner of Causey Consulting, which you can find online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com. So funny enough, I was talking in the last episode about thundersnow. And how that lyric in the U2 song about the "bomb blast lightning waltz" always takes me back to that storm. And the way the lightning just cracked and rippled across the sky. We are in the midst in Oklahoma of this really strange weather roller coaster, which that in and of itself is not peculiar for Oklahoma, the old yarn about if you don't like the weather right now just wait five minutes, and it'll change, it's very true around here. We're on this roller coaster of like hot and humid temperatures and I mean, like summertime heat 86-87 degrees, which will then give way to cold weather. So as there's all this convergence of warm air and cold air, it's going to break out into thunderstorms, which will on Monday and Tuesday give way to thundersnow. And I thought "what are the odds that I was just talking about a thunder snow storm that we had years ago, haven't had anything like that since and then it's right on the doorstep again?" A little funny to say the least. In today's episode, I want to talk about ancestry and your family tree. If you have ever seen shows like a new leaf, who do you think you are or finding your roots and you thought man, I'd like to take a journey like that I'd like to know more about the people who came before me. This is an auspicious time of the year to do that type of work. If you don't believe me, go and look at your calendar. Go ahead. I'll wait. The 31st is of course, Halloween or All Hallows Eve. And then as we go into November, we have All Saints Day, All Souls Day, Day of the Dead, Veterans Day, Remembrance Day. And this is not by coincidence, this is the right time of the year to be thinking about people who passed on people who came before you, people who died in heroic acts of service to preserve your freedom. This is the time of the year to do that type of work. And there's a great passage in the book Honoring Your Ancestors, I learned how to correctly pronounce the author's name this time. It's Mallorie Vaudoise. I love how she says your ancestors helped to make your body with their bodies. My friend Nick was always kind of an agnostic, I guess you'd say. And he had an expression that I loved, which was whether there's a higher power or there's not regardless of what you believe, when you look at the odds against you being here, right now, it really is quite something. And the more that you fan out your family tree, you know, kind of generations and generations and generations, the further you're able to go back and really see just how vast it is. It becomes like Yggdrasil, the tree of the world or t e tree of the universe. It's li e look, look at all of these p ople that had to survive harsh onditions. They had to make t out of their own childhood, me t somebody couple up have ch ldren, those children had to s rvive at a time when infant ortality was quite high. They ad to go on have families of heir own, and so on. And when y u see how many of those coupling had to take place for you to e sitting here, right now, ith breath in your lungs on pla et earth listening to this podcast. It really is amazing and awe inspiring. They d d in fact help to make your body with their bodies. In ancien Celtic culture, there wa a recognition of this time of t e year, it sort of begins wh t would be called the darker half of the year. So at the a tumnal equinox, roughly peaking, the day and night sta d equal then the night begins o overtake the day. And there wa a recognition that this is sort of the last time for harvest, now's the time to begin preparin for winter for dark, cold, h rsh nights, you know, potenti lly unforgiving lands ape, it's time to prepare and to be inside more and to have enoug food and provisions to mak it until the springtime there as a belief also that at this time of the year the veil bet een the living and the dead, or he physical world, the here a d the now that we can see with o r five senses, and the spiritual world that's bit more intangib e for us, is at its thinnest p int. Now, again, you may ju t think that's a lovely metaphor and you may not believe it to be true. But at the very least I would say, this is a time of good luck and good breakthrough for any type of ancestry, or g nealogy work that you might be interested in. So if you started a family tree on ancestry.com, nd then you let it go for a w ile, while you're inside doi g indoor activities, this s a wonderful time to begin cha ing down those connections. And e have so much technology at our disposal to make it easier, a lot of records have been scanned and archived. You can find hint and really cool things on an estry, you can dip into other pe ple's public family trees and ay, Well, I always knew that reat aunt so and so came from his country, I need some help fi uring out exactly where som body else may already have that answer for you, and be able o provide you with some answers that you didn't have befor. So one assignment that I have for you is to either begi or work on an existing family t ee. The second thing is to reall immerse yourself in the s ories of the people that you s e, this doesn't have to b literal and all consuming. An it also doesn't have to b only for blood relatives, ither. This can include adopt d family members, step fam ly members, and so on. One of my favorite things to do is t cook recipes. So as I find like a group of people from a cer ain nation or a certain part of the world, then I will find ecipes that correspond with t at and cook something. I mean I remember one time when I f und quite a few relatives tha had lived in the Black Forest f Germany. Well, what a grea excuse to make a Black Fore t Cake. You know, I'm a choco olic, so it wasn't exactly a ard sell, but you get the idea. I also had some relatives th t came from Hungary. So I mad a really good Hungarian goulash I also made a really good papri ash that I liked a lot. So i doesn't have to just be like,'m going to learn everything rom a very textbook point of view, you can if you want to, b t you can cook things, you can l arn some bits of the language, ance, or wear some kind of clot ing that you feel a connection to. I mean, it's very easy in most languages to at least learn something like Hello, Goodbye, m name is or I am, thank you, yo're welcome, those types of th ngs. And it just gives you a ittle extra boost or a little extra connection to som of those ancestors that ca e before you. While we're on th recipe train of thought one of my favorite Russian recipes t make is a or a bird's milk cake. It's p etty rich and decadent. So it's not something that I would reco mend that people cook and e t every day. But especially as the holidays are coming up. I now that's something that's family favorite. And eve right now thinking about it my stomach's growling a little bit. I'm like, Oh, God, that cak is so good. Learning ancestra stories can also help you to dentify parts of yourself, you now, you may find that somebod else in your family tree liked a lot of the same things that ou do or had a lot of similar in erests or similar personali y traits. Maybe you share t e same birthday. It's fu to make those types of connecti ns. There's a cousin I have, an he's a junior. So obviou ly his who I thought was his f ther is the senior. And there s a whole like backstory there t at I never knew. So I'm just gonna, you know, spill a lit le ancestral tea here and get nto some gossip. So my cou in is a junior his stepdad was t e senior and adopted him again which I didn't know I alw ys thought that that was his biological father. Well, so s it turns out, his bio dad as a violent alcoholic, again, never knew this didn't even now this guy existed. And appa ently, so when my cousin was an nfant, and I mean, like days o d had just come home from th hospital with his mother. The b o dad comes home in a drunken rage, gets a butcher knife and tries to murder my cousin nd his mother when my cousin is like an infant and I'm like, Oka, well, I understand why he got eliminated from the family s ory. People don't talk about im and, and I, I get it now, but I, I had no idea that any of hat had ever happened and till I started digging into this ancestry, and I have a grandfat er from the way, way back, an you know, you cannot make this tuff up. So in the 1100s, that j st absorb this for a minute in t e 1100s, he decides that he h s gotten to portly, and tell s his doctors to attempt a lipo uction on him. And I'm, I'm paus ng so that you can try to digest that too. I'm like, What the Wh t, what in the hell kind of plas ic surgery could there possi ly have been in the 1100s? Wel, not surprisingly, lik they attempted, they a tempted to do it, and then he d ed immediately thereafter. I hav no idea of what kind of lipo uction, you know that they mi ht have tried 900 years ago, bu, I mean, it's an interesting st ry. And I never would have nown that until I started d gging into all this. And the oth r night, I was adding another co sin into the family tree. Some ody who, you know, as I learne, was into also like myself nto farming and ranching, lov d raising cattle, loved rai ing horses, always had a lot f animals around, was defin tely an animal person like mysel. If you're familiar with how the platform on ancestry.com w rks, you know, after you enter s mebody's information into our family tree, you can als upload photographs of th m, and you can set a profile pic ure. Well, for this particular p rson I was looking at, you k ow, what I thought would be good profile picture. And as I was in the process of trying to download it, the computer creen went all wonky. It was str nge, it was like, if you're o d enough like myself, to rememb r old school TVs, like a like big box TV like sometimes, y u know, the picture would get all like wavy and swimmy, it wa like that my computer screen s arted getting all wavy and swim y and like the image started jum ing up and down on the compu er screen. And I was sitting the e thinking, you know, this co puter is not that old. It's a retty good machine. I don't nderstand what's wrong with it. And I really hope I'm n t about to have to take this thing to geek rescue. After may e 8 to 10 seconds, it stopp d doing that. And it went back o normal and I was able to save he picture. But then this col wind and I would really call it a wind, like I have a rig t above my front door, I hav what's called a , wh ch is a good luck bird. It's a Russian thing that hangs above he it's like in the entryway o Kings kind of sort of above the front door. It was like flapping like it was about to take fli ht off of its hanger. And my do who had been asleep, wakes up nd looks around with her e rs back, like what is happening here? A cold wind that went th ough the living room as I as adding this person to the fam ly tree. And I thought you know, to me this, this certainly fe ls paranormal. It feels like you know, an acknowledgment fr m this person to me like I am m presence is here and I'm awar of what you're doing. Now I'm not going to go too far dow the paranormal, ghost story path right now, becaus I'm going to save that for nex week. Since next week's episo e will be right before Hall ween, I am going to share wi h you a very strange experienc that I had the most like fla rant scary experience with t e paranormal that I have ever ad. It was like my own desce t into Hotel California. That' l be for next week. So if you e joy things that go bump in t e night, you like a good ghost story, you definitely want t make sure that you tune int that episode. But doing that ty e of work this time of the year, I think in some ways, the ve l does get thinner, you do h ve some lucky breaks. Like I've had dreams where I would dre m of an area and then I would ind people from that area in the family tree a day or two later in my research. Or I wo ld would see images that were lmost like memories that did't belong to me. Like I had a ream of I you know, at the time in the dream, I knew that it wa Boston. And I knew that it was ld. I knew that it was maybe colonial era Boston. I didn't eally understand why I as seeing those images. But in the dream it kind of seemed like it was somebody else's m mory I had somehow had acces to someone else's memory who had been there That place in tim. And it was beautiful, certai ly nice to be able to have that image. But it was at the same t me, so odd and so different. I w s able to find an illustration o line, that was a really good mat h for the type of landscape that I saw in the dream. And it was from the 1700s. So it was ike, I felt like I got to tak a journey through somebody lse's memory of that time and lace which was different, but al o really cool and, and a sort o privilege to have access to th t. I've had dreams of specifi names and specific dates or parts of the country. And then same thing have two or three days later, sometimes not eve that sometimes it woul be the next day, I would be d ing research and I would find hat there was some connection t that name, or to that place in ime that popped up in the amily tree. So again, in my opin on, and also in my experience, it really truly is an auspi ious and good time of the year o invest a little bit of you time in that ancestral or gene logical work. If it's something you've never tried before, I h ghly recommend getting on ancest y.com. And getting started l oking at the hints that pop up or sometimes you discover that you yourself have already been added or your parents or grandp rents are present and someb dy else's family tree, you earn about cousins that you' e never met before, stories t at people have memories that the have that you haven't had acces to yet, and it's a lot of fun And even if you're not into a ything spiritual, just r member what my friend Nick said, when you look at all of the odd that are stacked against y u being here. All of the things that had to happen all of the stars that had to align properly for you to be in a human body o planet Earth right now. It rea ly is astonishing. If y u enjoyed today's episode, lease share it. If you haven' already. Take a quick second to subscribe to this podcast and eave a review for us on iTunes. Bye for now.