Walking with the Ancestors: The Season of Belonging
The days have grown shorter. Mornings carry that cool edge that makes the body pull inward, and I tug my scarf a little more snugly around my neck. The scent of wood smoke hangs in the air, and the trees are descending into their long rest. This is the time of year when the boundaries between this world and the Otherworlds grow thin, when the living and the dead share the same breath.
When the Veil Thins
Our European ancestors built their festivals around this knowing. Samhain, the halfway point between First Harvest (Lammas) and the darkness of Winter Solstice, marked the ending of the old year. In tending those ritual fires, they welcomed death as kin - part of the same living family that births, nourishes, and receives us in turn. To them, Walking with the Ancestors was part of staying in rhythm with life.
This season always finds me listening more closely. My dreams get more vivid; I walk through fields and forests and notice how the air feels dense with memory. So often, while walking along the river near my home, I sense a shimmer of awareness - and wonder if maybe it’s the land remembering itself through me.
Listening in the Season of Descent
Last weekend, while sitting on a bench next to the river running through this small german town I am staying in this season, I felt a familiar stirring - the thinning veil to the Otherworlds breathing open: nothing dramatic, just a quiet shift in air pressure, a soft pulse beneath my ribs. My body knows this language.
When I speak of Walking with the Ancestors, I mean something entirely natural. It is a practice that begins with breath, with noticing. It is less about summoning and more about remembering that the line between here and there is permeable.
Autumn has arrived, and the goddess Hel - dressed in a black gown, her flaxen braids crowned with frost - gathers the souls and the seeds into her wagon and carries them into the underworld. There they will spend the winter resting and remaking themselves, to rise again with the returning light. This image holds me each year as the world begins to darken. The earth draws inward, and we are invited to do the same.
When I sit with the ancestors, I feel a movement of return in my own body: my heart softening, breath deepening, the ground of my being settling and shifting. The dead are not asking to be worshiped; they are asking to be remembered, to be kept in the conversation of life.
Grief as a Form of Belonging
Each year, as light gives way to dark, I feel again how endings are not departures but continuations - the way life breathes itself forward. The world is built to let go. Leaves fall, rivers slow, the sun slips lower in the sky. Life curls inward, returning to the quiet that feeds its next beginning.
In our culture, this natural movement has become something to fear. We rush to stay productive, to fill the silence, to pretend the darkness isn’t coming. But in the old world, the one my bones and yours remember, people trusted the descent. They understood that grief is not the opposite of life; it is one of its deepest expressions.
Heide Goettner-Abendroth writes that early European matrilineal cultures saw death as a return to the Great Mother, a sacred re-entry into the womb of renewal. It was never an end, but a folding back into the whole. That understanding made space for grief to be communal, creative, and holy. Her work restores an older understanding of creation, one where loss belongs to the cycle of continuation.
The Tz’utujil teacher Martín Prechtel says that grief is praise - the sound of a heart remembering what it loves. I think of that each time I light a candle in this season. When I allow myself to feel the sorrow that rises with the dying year, I also feel the love underneath it. And of course, this ache itself is the proof of belonging.
Grief draws the circle wider. It roots us into the long continuity of life, where our breath is shared with the ancestors and the unborn alike. When we allow ourselves to grieve, we return to the rhythm of Earth’s own letting go. That is the quiet wonder of Walking with the Ancestors: learning that loss and belonging are the same song, sung in different keys.
Ancestral Presence and the Living Land
Listen deeply, and you’ll hear them everywhere—in the low hum of mycelial networks beneath the soil, murmurs in the river, and the sonorous songs of the stones. The ancestors have never left. They are braided into the living fabric of the world, carried on wind and water, dissolved into the breath of trees.
Wolf-Dieter Storl reminds us that the dead dwell in the landscape itself. Their spirits move through the mountains, rest in the forests, and travel with the migrating birds. He calls the Land a vast memory field, holding the stories of those who came before. The soil, he says, is full of memory and medicine both—and I have found that to be true.
When I lived in southern Germany, I could feel the awareness in the meadows, ponds, old majestic oaks, and even the ground itself. There were places where the air shimmered with a silvery gleam, and standing there, I sensed the inhabitants of the Otherworlds all folded into the same great dreaming.
To walk this way, to practice Walking with the Ancestors, is to understand that the Land is the original altar. Land holds the imprints of grief and gratitude, the songs of the living and the dead, the ongoing conversation between worlds.
When I make offerings, I give them to the soil - a bit of bread, a few drops of milk, my breath. These small acts are how I stay in conversation with the living world.
The Body as Threshold
To live well in this world, we have to live in the body. When we leave it - when we numb, rush, or scatter - even for good reason, we create space for everything we don’t want to guide us. Fear, noise, confusion, and yes, even beings of the Otherworlds. Something always fills the vacancy. I believe our most important work is to practice coming back to the body.
This is why I teach what I do. Grounding is often mistaken for a technique—bare feet on the earth, a few deep breaths, visualizing roots growing out of one's feet, sitting beneath a tree. But grounding is deeper than that. It’s how we repair belonging. It’s how we right relationship - with our own bodies, with each other, and with the living field that holds us.
When we inhabit ourselves, the body becomes a meeting place of worlds. Body and earth come back into conversation; you can feel breath deepening, awareness widening, how space opens around you. The unseen doesn’t have to be invited - it’s already here. What changes is our capacity to feel it without losing ourselves. That steadiness is what presence makes possible.
To be grounded is not to be heavy. It’s to be at home - to remember the body as Earth, the breath as lineage, the heartbeat as language the world still understands. From here, the well and wise ancestors can find us. From here, what enters is what belongs.
A Simple Ritual for the Season of Belonging
As Samhain approaches and the gates to the Underworld begin swinging open, I begin making a small evening ritual. Nothing elaborate - just a candle, an offering, and a few moments of quiet.
I invite you to try it on if it feels good and right for you.
I light a candle and speak first to the Ancestral Elders I am in relationship with. I then acknowledge the well ancestors that stand with them. Besides the flame of the candle, I offer them incense, water, and something fresh—maybe bread, an apple, a bit of butter. I acknowledge the Land I live and work on and offer a little bread or milk to the soil outside my door.
Then I sit and listen.
The listening is the ritual.
You might hear nothing but silence. You might feel the air shift, or a warmth spread through your chest. Trust whatever comes. This is how relationships are tended: through attention, appreciation, presence, and the willingness to stay —in short, through cultivating connection.
As you sit, remember that grief and gratitude are not separate forces. They are two frequencies of the same vibration. Emotions are energy, and our emotions nourish the dead. When you show appreciation, you feed the bond between worlds with love.
The spirits of the dead respond to the same things the living do: beauty, kindness, and sincerity. The candle flame, the breath, the act of offering - these are the gestures that let them know they are respected and still included in the circle.
When we honor the dead, we remember how to live.
Let the ritual be simple. Make it yours. Listen for what wants to flow through you. What matters most is the sincerity of the heart meeting the moment.
Listening Across the Veil
Reflection belongs to this season. The questions I offer you here are not meant to be answered quickly. They are meant to be lived with - walked with - as part of your own Walking with the Ancestors practice.
Where in your life are you being asked to release, not as loss, but as an offering back to the cycle?
When you feel grief rise, can you also sense the love that gives it shape?
What rhythms or rituals help you remember that you are part of a lineage still unfolding?
Who are the well ancestors - of blood, land, or spirit - whose presence you sense when the world grows quiet?
How might you carry their wisdom into the way you live, speak, and tend the ground beneath you?
These questions are thresholds. Each one opens a small doorway into the conversation that never ended and never will - the one between the living and the long-loved.
Returning to the Hearth of Belonging
As autumn deepens, I feel the pull toward stillness - the earth draws us inward, breath wants to slow, firelight becomes the center of things again. This is the rhythm our ancestors trusted. It’s the body’s way of remembering that life continues through cycles of release, rest, and renewal.
Walking with the Ancestors is one way we return to that rhythm. Let us remember that the veil between worlds is not a wall, but a doorway. When we tend the doorway with reverence, we remember that the living and the dead are partners in the same creation. The conversation only grows quiet when we forget to listen.
Each time we sit with the unseen and honor the ones who came before, belonging deepens. We have a sense of the Land drawing closer; the heart steadies; the world feels, for a moment, like home again.
If you’d like to experience this season’s medicine more fully, I invite you to join me for Walking with the Ancestors, a free 90-minute gathering for this sacred time of year (internal link). We’ll listen, remember, and create simple ways to honor the relationship between the living, the dead, and the Land.
And for those who feel called to continue this work in a deeper way, Belonging to Place offers a guided journey into ancestral healing and embodied reconnection with your bloodline, your Land, and your purpose.
The fire burns low, the air cools, and the ancestors draw near. All they ask is that we remember.