​We have forgotten.

We have forgotten who our bone ancestors were, and what they carried across oceans and mountains to give us life here.

We have forgotten that they left one land weeping, their bones crying for the soil they would never see again, and came to another with nothing but their strength and their faith.

And when they reached this new land, they poured their blood, their sweat, their tears into the mills and farms, into the rivers and roads, into the towns that once rang with the hum of looms and the laughter of children.
And when they died, their children cried for them.
​
Yet grief did not end there.
For when the mills themselves died—long after those first ancestors had passed—the grief rose again.
The children and grandchildren, the great-grandchildren, all wept at the loss of the very places that had sustained their families..

Across the veil, the ancestors wept with them, for their blood and bone had been poured into the rivers, the looms, and the very soil itself.

When the looms went quiet, their voices rose in mourning.
Their tears mingled with ours, weaving us together across the veil.

Every year at Samhain, we are asked to turn inward and remember that life and death walk hand in hand.

And so we journey into this time through the bone soul.
The bones of the earth show through as the fields rest.
The bones of our ancestors stir in memory.
The bone soul — our middle soul, our middle self — carries our face, our story, our presence in the world.
It is how we meet this incarnation, shaped by the union of our parents and the steps we take along the way.
It holds our personality, our preferences, our memories and knowledge.
It builds our reality, sorts and names it, and becomes as singular as each life we live.

Unlike the blood soul, which flows through ancestry, or the star soul, which returns to the heavens, the bone soul does not reincarnate.
At death, it lingers here.
It abides in the places that mattered most — a graveyard, a window, a tree, a river bend, a stone wall no one takes down because the stones themselves remember.
It may merge with land and become a guardian spirit: a hush in the pines, a spark in the hearth, a warmth at the corner of an old room.

This is why cemeteries hum with company, why childhood streets hold echoes of laughter, why the ruins of a mill still feel alive — the stones keeping rhythm with the footsteps that once shook their foundations, the air carrying voices too faint for the ear but never lost to memory, the very soil breathing with the weight of those who poured themselves into it.

The bone soul lingers in the places where work and memory meet — in mills and farm fields, in kitchens and parishes, in streets where belonging was forged through sweat, sacrifice, and song.
And so I know the bone soul in the towns that made me.

My Italian, German, French, French-Canadian, and Polish, ancestors came to Adams, Massachusetts, leaving beloved homelands behind. 
Some carried the road in their bones: Quebec into Vermont. Vermont into New York. New York into Adams.
Names like milestones their feet still remember.
Rivers and ridges etched into their journey like prayers.  

They came with hope.
They came with desperation.
They sought life in the mills, and in the homes that rose beside them.
They sought community in crowded streets, solace in parishes that rang with mother-tongue hymns, belonging in bakeries, markets, and the simple company of neighbors who understood the same longing.

They came seeking not only wages, but roots — a chance to weave themselves into the fabric of a new land.

My French, French-Canadian and Italian ancestors bent their backs beneath the roar of the Berkshire Mills, while my Polish great-grandfather and great-grandmother built a dairy farm that fed workers and townsfolk alike — bottles of milk left on porches in the cool of morning before the sun had risen.

These were not just jobs.
They were offerings.
They were vows made to a new land with no promise of return.

The mills consumed entire families.
Fathers, mothers, even children.
Children as young as seven or eight stood at machines instead of school desks — small fingers darting between threads, lungs full of dust, feet aching on floors that never seemed to end.
The clatter of looms was their lullaby.
The ache in their bones their teacher.

Education was rare; wisdom was forged in hunger and repetition and silence.
Many of mine could not read or write, but their bodies remembered — how to tie, lift, carry, listen; how to endure.

Inside the mills, men and children learned English because wages required it, but in their homes, the old languages whispered across the table.
Children became American by daylight and kept the music of their motherlands by night.
The mills remade them — in body, in spirit — blending bloodlines and habits, absorbing their stories into brick and timber until the buildings themselves seemed to breathe.

And after the workday, the bone soul of community woke.

Kitchens and stoops filled with voices in many tongues.
Women baked the breads their grandmothers had taught them, steam beading on winter windows.
Men told stories of rivers and fields they missed and of new ones they were learning to love.
Parishes rose that mirrored the ones they had left — bells ringing in mother tongues.
Bakeries, feasts, processions, saints’ days, and summer bazaars.

Little towns inside the town, where memory and faith held fast against fatigue.
Here, belonging was not a luxury — it was survival. In bread and hymns, in neighbors’ voices, in shared devotion, the bone soul of community kept memory alive.

This is how they kept their bone souls alive: togetherness as sacrament, the ordinary as altar.

Down the road, the same story lived in Pittsfield, in a village once called Barkersville.
Barkersville was its own small world — about seventy acres where Cloverdale, Branch, and Church Streets cross today.

There were worker houses, a mercantile, a bank, shops, the stream that powered the looms, and a Barker villa watching over it all.
J. Barker & Brothers anchored the village, their pride the Railroad Mill — wool and cotton turned to satinet, industry singing through the valley.

Older maps whisper another name — Stearnesville — for the land keeps every name it’s ever worn.

Then came January of 1879.
A bitter morning.
The Railroad Mill caught fire.
By noon, it was gone — one of the worst blazes the city ever knew.
Livelihoods vanished with the roof.
Hope collapsed in ash.

By 1890, the hum was nearly silenced.
The village fell quiet.
But the stream kept going — streams always do — and the land, as land does, held the memory.
Even so, the people refused to be erased.
Survivors salvaged what could be saved.
Families endured.
Faith endured.

And in 1910, my home was raised by those survivors — hands that remembered the heat of 1879 but chose to keep building anyway.

The street I live on once bore Barkersville’s name.
The boards and beams around me were lifted by workers who would not surrender, their bone soul pouring into new walls after so much had been lost to flame.
​
When I opened a sun-porch wall, I found the ghost of brick where a fireplace once burned.
When I turned the soil, I uncovered the old slate walk, a path that had simply been sleeping.
I gathered dirt from the four corners of my yard and placed it on my ancestor altar, to honor those who built this street and gave Barkersville breath.

This is what I mean by ancestors of place and the bone soul working as one:
the ones who bled here, built here, stayed here,
and by dying here became part of here.
Their bones — or the ashes of their bones, or only the stories of their bones — entered the ground and taught the ground our names.

Ancestors of place are not always kin by blood; they are kin by land.
If blood was spilled on a field, the field remembers.
If a body was buried, the hill holds it close.
If hands shaped a millstone or laid a sill beam, wood and stone keep that touch.
And though towns rise and fall, something endures — the bone of a place.

To connect with the bone soul, you must walk where you lived, where they lived, where your people traveled and rested and worked.
Stand at an old fence. Sit on a step that has been sat on a thousand times.
Listen. Listen from your bone soul.  

Research helps — maps, deeds, ledgers — but your feet must feel it.
You must step where they stepped.

I was raised in Adams — a mill town.
Now I live in Pittsfield, in the old Barkersville neighborhood — another mill town.
Small town to small city.
The circle unbroken.

Adams still stands, learning how to remember itself.
Barkersville is a sign and a stream.
But I live inside its remnant, and the remnant lives inside me.
When I drive these renamed roads, I feel the workers walking with me.
My bones know both towns; my bones are both towns.

And I know what was carried, and what was lost.

For when the mills closed, it was not only wages that disappeared.
It was the bakeries, hymns, and neighborhoods that had been daily communion.
Economic safety was no longer guaranteed.
Roots that were growing deeply into the soil stunted.
What they had built was more than wages — it was belonging, and belonging was the hardest to lose.

Yet nothing freely given is ever lost.

The bone soul remains — calling us to remember, to reconnect, to restore what can be restored.
This is why we ache for communities we never knew.
Why a hymn in a language we do not speak can sting our eyes.
Why the photograph of a mill child—barefoot, steady, too old and too young at once—can stop our breath.
The bone soul is not only memory.
It is a summons.

And because it is the middle soul — the craftsman of connection and communication — it loves the tools that bridge worlds: language and art, story and song.
It loves practical magic and plain devotion.

If you want to meet it, speak aloud the names of your dead.
Tell their stories at your table.
Place a candle in a window.
Build an altar for the season — Samhain’s thin time — with photos and favorite foods and a dish of dirt from meaningful ground.
This is how an ofrenda opens a door.

If you work with cards, call the suits that speak its dialect:
Pentacles for earth and legacy,
Wands for fire and will,
Tarot as a bridge to the middle souls of the dead — guardians in graveyards, along streams, in mills that now sleep.

If you walk with dirt and stone, learn graveyard etiquette.
Offer what you take.
Take only what you can return.

And sometimes the simplest rite is enough:
walk the streets, greet the houses,
thank the trees for remembering.

And I believe animals may carry a bone soul too — especially those who choose us.
My Olde English Bulldog, Roy, has gone on, but I feel him in the corners of rooms and in the cadence of my days.
Some say the middle soul belongs only to humans, but I have seen its glint in the eyes of those familiars who nurture.

At Samhain, when the veil thins, I feel my boy, Roy, and all of my ancestors most strongly.

I feel the workers of Adams and Pittsfield.
The children who grew too soon.
The immigrants who carried homelands in their tongues and poured their lives into the mills.

I feel Barkersville’s stream threading the quiet, Adams’ brick remembering hands, the Railroad Mill’s phantom heat, the will of survivors in the joists of my 1910 house.

They are still here.
Their bones are the land.
Their souls whisper in the wind.

The mills may be quiet now, but memory endures, and through memory we find belonging — to land, to lineage, to each other.

And my work — as a storyteller, as a keeper of ancestral wisdom — is to keep them alive.
Because every bone holds a story.
And every story deserves to be told.

And so I offer this prayer, this mantra, this invocation of soul alignment:
I am of blood.
I am of bone.
I am of stars.
We are one in three — root, branches, and tree.
May this always be.


Author’s note: My ancestors came from Italy, Germany, France, French Canada, Poland, and England; their stories live in my marrow. But this story belongs to many.
If your people worked the mills, kept the farms, baked the bread, sang the hymns — if you feel your own bone soul stir when you walk an old street — write to me.
Share what the land remembers of you, and what you remember of the land.
If this story has stirred something in you — a memory, a longing, a whisper from your own bone soul — I invite you to explore it further with me.

My work as an intuitive practitioner blends tarot, mediumship, and ancestral communication. Through story, spirit connection, and the imagery of the cards, I help you reconnect with the wisdom of your own lineage and the voices of Those who walked before you
​
Sessions are available in-person in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, or virtually via Zoom, WhatsApp, phone, or email.

You can learn more and book a session here: Book a Session
Because every soul has a story.
And sometimes, all it needs is to be heard.
​
For those who wish to trace these echoes further-​
— The Barker Brothers and Their Village (J. Barker & Brothers; satinet; the Barkers’ role in the village).
-- Lower Barkersville and the Osceola River Flouring Mill, Hungerford St. (maps, siting, the stream, present-day traces).
— Berkshire Cotton Manufacturing Company, Adams, MA (Berkshire Mills, growth and decline, later transformations).

When I first began to reach for my mother after her death, I didn’t know I was reaching for what
I now call the blood soul.
I was seven years old,
and all I knew was that I wanted her, I needed her, 
and I would talk to her in what I believed was heaven.

Later, with a bit of practice, I would imagine my grandmother, my great-grandmother,
and the faces in old photographs I found and kept hidden under my bed.
I didn’t understand it then, but what I was really doing was trying to connect to
my ancestral source --  my blood soul.

Because my mother died when I was so young,
I didn’t have her family to fall back on.
My connection to my maternal lineage was cut off, and I grew up not knowing my heritage,
not knowing the stories or the people who shaped her before me.
That left me with an emptiness,a longing,and a deep confusion.

I didn’t know I was seeking out my blood soul --  I only knew I was desperate for connection.

I clung to any smile, any kindness, any person who would see me.
I opened myself to energies and situations I shouldn’t have,
because I was starving for recognition and belonging.

Years later, when I began working as a massage therapist 
and then expanded into the study of energy work --
Chios, Reiki, therapeutic touch, craniosacral therapy, and many other modalities --
and when my mediumship began to unfold, I found myself circling back to that same longing.

And then I came across the framework of the three souls:
the blood soul, the bone soul, and the star soul.

These teachings exist in many cultures, each with its own language,
but the pattern is remarkably similar — we are more than one soul.

When I read about the blood soul, something inside me clicked.
It gave language to what I had been reaching for all my life.
The blood soul — sometimes called the lower soul or the lower self -- 
is the part of us rooted in our ancestry and our body.
It connects us to our DNA and family line,
to the wisdom and trauma carried in our blood,
to our instinctual and animal nature.
It is the part of us that knows joy, laughter, dance, movement, play, and survival.
It ties us to the land, to the spirits of place,
and to the deep emotional currents that flow beneath thought and logic. 

This blood soul includes our blood ancestors --
parents, grandparents, great-grandparents,
and all those stretching back into primordial time. 

But it also includes what I call our ancestors of nurture:  
those who may not be tied to us by blood,
but who raised us, nourished us, and shaped us.

They might be adoptive parents, neighbors, mentors, friends, or teachers.
They are the ones who fed us when we were hungry,
who treated us like family, who gave us the nourishment our bloodlines could not.

Their love and presence live in the blood soul, too,
because nurture is as vital a thread of ancestry as DNA.

Because my mother and I both carried A negative blood, I clung to that as proof of our bond.
No one on my father’s side shared that Rh-negative factor,
and as a child, I sometimes wondered if I truly belonged to that family at all.
They did not honor her memory.
They did not speak her name.
Slowly, her story was erased in what I can only assume was their way of coping.
I will never know why.
But the A negative blood flowing in me was undeniable evidence that I was her daughter,
no matter what anyone else wanted me to believe.
It was a thread of belonging I could hold onto
when everything else was stripped away.

Years later, in my early thirties, I met my best friend Stacy.
We became fast friends instantly,
standing side by side at the elementary school
as we watched our children walk inside.
We discovered that she, too, had A negative blood.
And I realized that if I ever needed a transfusion,
it would be her blood flowing into me — not my family’s.
In that moment, she became more than a friend.
She became an ancestor of nurture, proof that the blood soul is not only about DNA,
but also about the ways people enter our lives and become family of the spirit.

Through Stacy, I learned that nurture also flows in the blood soul.
It is carried in the friends who become kin,
in the chosen family who feeds us, comforts us, and stands beside us when no one else will.
They, too, are part of the river.
They become our allies, our saints, our adopted kin.
The blood soul weaves them into us
as surely as it does our great-grandparents, our healers,
our midwives, our keepers of memory.

Connecting with the blood soul does not have to be complicated.
It begins in silence, in spaciousness, in stillness.
Sit, breathe, and imagine your blood flowing through your veins
like a slow, steady river.
Imagine that river carrying not only life, but memory --
the voices of your ancestors moving with it.
Ask them to come forward.
You may not hear clear answers at first.
You may only feel a brush of wind,
a flicker of image, a single word.

Write it down.
Honor it.

Ask your blood soul for a message,
and then give thanks,
even if it felt like nothing happened.

Relationship is built through presence and repetition.
With time, that river will carry you into communion with your ancestors of blood and nurture,
and you will know their wisdom.

Now, at fifty-nine, I look back on that little girl and I see her not with pity,but with compassion.

Her confusion became my doorway.

Her grief became my teacher.

I am no longer just the daughter who lost her mother --
I am the woman who has lived through the aching emptiness of not knowing,
and who has discovered, through the blood soul, that I was never truly alone.

Because of this understanding, I became more than my wounds.

The blood soul gave me back a sense of belonging,
even when my family could not.
It taught me that I carry the wisdom of generations in my very veins.
It showed me that my mother’s love did not vanish with her death --
it flows in me still, and always will.
The blood soul turned my searching into knowing,
my silence into listening,
my longing into connection.

Today, I stand as an elder, a crone,
rooted in the understanding that grief and love are not opposites but companions.

My blood soul has taught me that my life is not only my own story,
but also the continuation of every story before me.
It has given me the strength to guide others,
to help them hear their own soul cries,
to remind them that they too are carried by rivers of wisdom and resilience.

And so I tell you this:
your blood soul is not just your past.
It is your vitality, your will, your spark.
It is the river that carries your ancestors,
the laughter of your inner child,
the pulse that reminds you that you are never truly alone.

To listen to your blood soul is to listen to life itself.
And in that listening, we discover that even in death,
love does not end.
It flows on, endlessly, within us.
Give it a try--

I've created a short, guided practice to help you connect to your blood soul-

Meeting Your Blood Soul

Take a moment to find a quiet space.
Sit comfortably, let your body relax, and close your eyes.
Breathe deeply, in and out, until your breath begins to settle.
Now, bring your awareness to your blood.
Imagine it flowing through your veins like a slow, steady river.
With each heartbeat, feel that river carrying not only life, but memory --
the voices of your ancestors moving with it.
Follow that river as it winds through you.
Imagine it carrying you back through time --
to your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents,
and all those who came before.
See it reaching back further still,
into the deep currents of human history,
until you feel yourself resting in the collective river of your blood soul.
Here, invite your ancestors of blood and nurture to come forward.
You may not see them clearly.
You may only sense a presence, feel a brush of air,
or hear a single word.
Whatever comes, welcome it.
Ask your blood soul: “What message do you have for me today?”
Sit with what arises.
Write it down if you can.
And when you are ready, give thanks --
for the blood, for the river,
for the ancestors who continue to flow within you.
Tell them, “I will see you soon.”
And know that you can return to this place at any time,
with only a few breaths and an open heart.

Thank you for reading my blog.
It is my hope that these words have touched something within you,
whether it’s a memory, a longing, or simply the reminder that you are never truly alone.
If you ever feel called to go deeper --
through a reading, a session, or guidance on your own soul journey --
I would be honored to walk with you.
You can learn more about my services and reach me anytime at:
www.EnergyTouchIntuition.com
With gratitude,
Jennifer