As I write this, I am looking out the window at a pouring English rain at my friend Tessa’s home in Malvern, England. Traveling in the United Kingdom over the past ten years, leaving my home at Sunrise Ranch in Colorado to speak to groups of people here, I think of my roots in this land. My mother’s ancestors originated here not so many centuries ago. They came to America seeking a destiny of freedom and the great light which freedom brings to the human experience. Then, my parents returned to live here after the Second World War while my father earned a PhD at the London School of Economics, paid for the GI Bill. Now I have returned to this, my motherland, the place of my ancestors.

Our ancestors’ past all comes rushing to me now. Through the magic of time, our legacy joins us in this present moment. If we let it, it comes washed of all its sadness, all its failure, all its limitation. All that was not finished or fulfilled can die with what was left of our ancestors’ earthly frames when they rejoined the Creation from which their physical body arose.

Oh, I suppose it is possible to revive their heartache so that it becomes our own—their unfulfilled dreams and their tragedies. My father’s confinement in a psyche allowed his own great mind to imprison his even greater heart and his love for those close to him. My grandmother opened to the power of consciousness that was still confined by an old-world sense of class and privilege. But if we let those wandering ghosts return to the great heart of the Universe from whence they came, just as our ancestors’ physical substance has returned to the cold, cold ground, what is left is the unbroken line of purpose and destiny that is the reason for their lives and our own.

So their legacy is with me as I watch this rain: the ones whom I have met and others of whom I have heard. And so many before them who bring to me an unbroken line of great courage and perseverance of those that came before, because I have no doubt of the great strength of spirit which they possessed. But the courage and perseverance of the line itself—that legacy lives in me. Their greatness calls to my own heart and asks me to rise to be part of that legacy, to contribute from someplace deep within me—I know not where nor do I care—what is mine to give. All so that their legacy is embraced by me now, and in that act, transforms and becomes my destiny, living within my own heart as the fire and air which fuels the combustion of my own life. It becomes my passion to carry on this line that comes not only from out of the past but down from the Unseen which holds this story and all the potential for all our lives.

In times of stress, such intimations of greatness can slip through consciousness like sand. Not to truly disappear, but only to recede to a protected place of heart and mind that does not answer the desperate or anxious cries, or false immediacy of this fast-paced world. So as I watch this rain, I call upon the line within me. I reclaim my own purpose and destiny that disappears so easily when one tries to measure it, but which comes to life as it is acknowledged, seen and honored. I pray that I do my part in little things to remember what I have never known in fact, but what I have always known in that place within that knows all true things; that I feel deeply the purpose of all who have gone before and reclaim that ineffable purpose as my own. And I wish for you the same. I wish the nobility, courage and strength of those who went before you rises to greet you today, urging you on, inspiring your great heart to embrace your purpose and destiny now, and lighting the path before you.