Roots and Echoes: A Journey Through Legacy

We carry the stories of those who came before us—not just in our blood, but in our breath, our fates, our fears, our ways of loving and leaving.

May 12, 2025

Human beings are, in many ways, like trees. We have roots—deep, unseen forces that anchor us. We grow through a central trunk of experience, branch out into different directions, choices, lives and spread our individuality like leaves in the sun. But beyond everything visible, we are also connected through invisible threads. We are bound by a human and a more-than-human mycelium. In this silent web of possibles, legacy lives.

Legacy is not just something we inherit—it’s something that forms the very foundation of our perception. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we are shaped by emotional, psychological, and systemic patterns passed down through generations. Some people shrink this to DNA. But how are the stories of the other worlds passed down ? How are the silenced traumas of past generations still hiding in our own bodies ? Why are the gestures, the smiles and the anger of my grand mother still in me?

For more than three decades, I’ve been working on my family tree. What began as therapy, soon turned into a real emotional excavation and the journey of my soul. My medicine. I revisited my own story, and those of my ancestors, thousands of times.

Even as I uncovered new details—secrets, dysfunctions, villains, systemic flaws—the overarching narrative rarely changed. I was only telling the same story again and again. My mother is like this because of that. My father... uff. My grandmother, well... you get the idea. It was as if the more I discovered, the more trapped I became in the same loops. I could not see. I was the obsessed investigator, the fascinated archaeologist, tirelessly digging into a vast but strangely limited map. I exhausted myself so completely that I could no longer see anything. Eventually, I hit a wall. I began to feel delusional, as if the more I was chasing ghosts, the more they would pop up. I started to question the entire pursuit. Was this work helping me, or was it just conjuring the past, reopening wounds and spreading more pain into my life? Was it possible that being aware and open and porous, I was forcing dreadful and unnecessary portals ?

Don’t get me wrong, transgenerational therapy has been a faithful companion throughout these years. It has not only been my primary lens through which I make sense of the world; it has been my cartography, my language, and in many ways, my salvation. This path has acted as both mirror and map. It has challenged me to look deeper, to question inherited truths, and to make room for new ones.

And it hasn’t been easy. This kind of work asks for more than insight. It demands surrender. It demands burning. It asks you to lose yourself again and again. To die a million small deaths. But I cannot imagine a better - other - way to walk my path. Even in the darkest moments of confusion or despair, the process held meaning. Each piece I uncovered was a fragment of something larger—something systemic, something scary but sacred. I needed to be present and go through things. What if my suffering was not something I needed to fix ? But just to listen to….

I’ve come to believe that healing doesn’t always mean clarity. Sometimes it means staying with the mess, sitting beside the contradiction, and letting yourself feel the weight of all you carry.

Because here is the paradox: we often believe the past is over. We convince ourselves that the present is new, that our lives are a fresh start. But what if nothing is new? What if what we call “ourselves” is a living echo—a repeated chord in a song that began long before we were born? What if we are not blank slates, but palimpsests—manuscripts written over with newer ink, but still bearing the impressions of what came before? What if our anxieties are not only personal, but ancestral? What if the roles we play were handed down silently, waiting for us to either perform or refuse or outplay or whatnot ?

To know that we are the echo of those who came before is not a resignation—it is a rising. It is the slow unfurling of awareness, the quiet courage to choose again.
When we trace the patterns—not only in the names behind us, but in the way our hands reach, in the way we leave or stay—we make space for something new to grow.
Not by cutting the roots, but by tending to them.
Not by forgetting, but by folding the past into the present with tenderness.
This is not erasure.
This is not denial.
This is the work of weaving.
This is the work of becoming whole.

I no longer dig with the desperation I once did. Now, I listen. I witness. I name what I can. And when the stories begin to repeat, I ask myself: what haven’t I seen yet? What still needs to be acknowledged?

I don’t believe we are here to escape the past. I believe we are here to carry it wisely. To hold it in such a way that it no longer holds us. And perhaps that is what legacy truly is—not the weight of what came before, but the wisdom we create in how we carry it.

Our work requires an alchemical process : a kind of burning, a reduction to essence. You dive into murky, smelly, disturbing waters—waters thick with memory and grief—and you do not come out of them clean.

But you come out changed.

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Most events are unsayable, occur in a space that no word has ever penetrated, and most unsayable of all are works of art, mysterious existences whose life endures alongside ours, which passes away’. Rainer Maria Rilke