Bones Beneath the River of Life: On lineage & longing

Welcome to The Pondering Place.
This is where we wrestle with longing, memory, faith, and freedom — not as doctrines, but as living questions.
This piece is one of the first I wrote that felt like my soul had surfaced. I hope it meets you where you are.

I have this quiet ache that sits in the bones—not of pain, but of pull.

It shows up when I’m watching historical films or falling down rabbit holes on My Heritage or Ancestry. While sifting through old documents, brushing digital dust off names no one speaks anymore. Or while sitting on a rivers edge, or the cliff of a mountain. I feel a strange loneliness—for people I’ve never met. Grandmothers. Great-uncles. Someone named Ernst with a serious brow. They often feel close, like a whisper behind my shoulder.

But Jerry doesn’t feel it. He looks at the past and sees… the past. Interesting, maybe. Worth respecting, certainly. But it doesn’t call him forward the way it does me.

“It’s just names and dates, they do not determine who I am today.” he says—not unkindly.

That difference between us used to baffle me.

For years, I chalked it up to geography. My father and grandfather were from the old world, where family lines were both sacred and scattered. Jerry’s family has been in America since the 1700s. We could visit their graves if we had the mind to. Their stories are folded neatly into local history, their names etched into buildings and street signs. Maybe when you belong somewhere that long, you don’t have to long for anything.

But lately, I’m not so sure.

Maybe it’s not geography that creates that ache. Maybe it’s a kind of spiritual frequency that some of us are just tuned into—a genetic resonance, a soul-based curiosity, a divine breadcrumb trail. Maybe something in my DNA didn’t just pass down eye color or metabolism, but memory. Mystery. Mission.

Perhaps there’s one like me in every family—meant to keep the story alive.

Appointed to remember what others forgot.

Appointed to carry what others buried.

Maybe even appointed to heal deep wounds passed silently down through generations.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. Many cultures—Indigenous, Mexican, and throughout much of Asia—have never lost this connection. They honor ancestors not as ghosts, but as guides. Their names are spoken, their wisdom remembered, their presence invited to the table.

Sometimes I wonder if this longing I carry is really a longing to return to that—to a world where lineage was sacred, where the past wasn’t something to escape, but something to walk with.

There’s a kind of synchronicity in it all. A spiral of time. I think the past keeps sending signals, waiting for someone to answer back. And when I dive into the history of an ancestor—when I trace a name or uncover a story—I don’t feel alone.

I feel woven into something eternal.

And maybe that’s the truest inheritance of all.

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