Being human

Yes, we live in a crumbly old cottage where the one ‘street’ literally has no name, but we’re civilised. We have electricity and wi-fi like real people. I scroll, email, Substack, and endlessly look things up. I can’t even pretend to dislike it. This is the world I live in and for the most part it makes me feel comfortable. I’m a neurodivergent Taurus with Cancer ascendant; comfort is my North Star.

My online activity barely scratches the surface of how embedded I am in 2025, just like billions of others. If I had the choice to go off grid, honestly, I wouldn’t. Still, underneath all that truth, something older moves and I’m not talking about my bones.

Is this what we mean by ancestral memory? The kind of story that doesn’t quite belong to me, but lives in me? It lights up when I walk under trees. It means I notice the moon, listen for owls, pay attention to what’s growing, falling, or moving in the hedges. It isn’t loud or demanding but it’s there, always, speaking in a steady rhythm that can only be my mother tongue.

It doesn’t ask me to reject the world I live in, nor disappear into the woods, just to move through life differently. With awareness and reverence. To really be in relationship with life, however messy and modern that may be.

Recreating some kind of fantasy, cosplay past is not appealing to me beyond the hours I spend with Audible (#irony). The old ways weren’t all idyllic, magical or somehow better, but I do believe we were often in a deeper relationship with the earth we come from. Closer, anyway. Closer to place, land, and our ancestors. The unseen - the Otherworld - was a part of daily life. We know this from stories, songs, and stones.

We’re far from being the first generations to live through crisis, but perhaps we are the first to do so while being this connected to information, while disconnected from our bodies, our communities, and the living world around us.

Have you noticed, as I have, that it seems like a lot of people (mostly women and often past-a-certain-age) are remembering that it doesn’t need to be like this?

That there was and is a different way to be human.

Not perfectly, and not all at once, but with profound personal impact.

Maybe it could start with lighting a candle in the evening without needing a reason. Or walking barefoot across damp grass (a personal favourite). Maybe it’s the pull to stand and stare at the stars (full disclosure: I use SkyView, a great app for identifying planets), or the way your breath catches when a bird takes off from a fence post. Perhaps it’s as simple as whispering,”Well done” when the first blossom opens on your favourite fruit tree.

This remembering doesn’t need to become A Thing. It doesn’t require us to master a new skill or reach some fixed version of ourselves. It’s not a performance. It’s a quiet, internal shift back towards something that still lives in us, even if we’ve never named it.

I think it can feel like the need for rhythm over routine, or restlessness when life feels too much or too little. It’s there when we yearn for something we can’t quite identify.

We can’t go back, not really, so perhaps the first steps are to get still and listen to what our ancestors - human and More Than Human - knew to be good for the body and soul, even as they dealt with their own day-to-day. Then we can learn the skills and practices necessary to weave the ancient into the here and now.

This first step, this ‘Square One’, is where I find myself once more. The practices look like physical care for my animal body; ceremony and contemplation for my soul; connection with loved ones for our hearts, and time just being and breathing on this living planet.

That’s what I was made for.

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