Ivy and My Family Wound

Whenever I’m pulling up the roots of the relentless English ivy in my garden, I can’t help but think of my mother’s family. It’s more than just a thought, though — it’s a definite knowing that, for whatever reason, I am also helping pull up the roots of that family’s dysfunction. For a long time I thought of it as metaphor, but one day the universe showed me that it went much deeper than that.

When I was growing up, we spent part of every summer at my uncle’s house in the Loire Valley. A portion of the garden had been abandoned to English ivy; it covered an old well and everything around it. When I played there as a child, mostly alone, it felt a little scary and forbidding. You didn’t know what exactly the ivy was covering; there could be traps underneath, or maybe snakes. The ivy on the top was always flourishing, but you could feel that it was hiding something.

Since coming to North Carolina, I’ve encountered ivy in every garden of every house I’ve lived in; and when we moved to where we live now, it hid pretty much everything — even part of the driveway. It still covers a large area, constantly trying to encroach on what I’ve painstakingly reclaimed.

Periodically I have an ivy-clearing day, and invariably that strange inner knowing about my family comes up again.  The smell of ivy is pungent and unmistakable, and I’m instantly transported to my childhood — playing alone in the ivy, connecting with forgotten emotions and mysterious intuitive knowledge. The sense of smell bypasses the frontal parts of the brain, connecting directly to the “old brain,” the seat of emotions, intuition and instincts.
But this seems to go deeper still: I sense that while pulling up the ivy, I am actually helping heal the family wound. My rational mind strongly rebels against the idea, however, and after awhile, I just forget about it till the next time I’m ripping out the ivy. Again and again it comes back, until it’s hard to ignore.

Once I heard myself say, “This is a grandfather root!” My grandfather seems to have played a key role in the family dysfunction, as I’d painfully excavated during nearly 10 years of focused healing work. I’d recently come to a place of resolution with this wound, after some very deep soul coalescence work with my grandfather’s spirit. Pulling up the “grandfather root” felt like an earthy ritual of transformation. But I am not the one initiating this ritual: The ivy itself is co-creating it with me, communicating at a level of consciousness I’m not even aware of.

My family, digging up the ivy

Smiling down on me, the universe gave me the proof that these were more than just intellectual or even emotional musings. Six relatives from that branch of the family came to visit for a month — a small miracle in itself, as this had never happened before and my older cousin, himself a key player in the family drama, had broken his hip only six months before. Of course, following the family tradition of keeping secrets, I hadn’t shared any of this with them. Toward the end of their stay, however, they decided to work in my garden and started pulling up the ivy roots. When I realized what was happening, tears came to my eyes: Their decision to visit had been surprising enough, but the fact that they would work on the ivy plainly showed me how deeply the healing had spread. Without the slightest clue, my family was participating in this ritual, affirming the interconnectedness of all life.

That evening, the process continued. We sat around smelling essential oils, and each person picked one (another first, and equally unexpected ritual). The oils were all very appropriate to the person, especially the one my older cousin chose: so strong and transformative that I couldn’t let him open it for fear of precipitating a crisis. But he didn’t need to — the healing was happening already, and I felt truly blessed.