Note: This essay is by guest contributer: Anne Milligan; artist musician, singer and a lovely soul.

Martha Herrin Hollis is my maternal great-great grandmother from Alabama, which is one of many mysteries unfolding with the ancestry work. Isn't she grand? 
I have no idea if anyone will read what accompanies this photo, but it's a semi-brief essay I wrote from a Southern perspective after having lived in the desert for a few years and returned to this region. If anyone reads it, my desire is that it brings readers to a sense of unity about "the south"… We're all part of the same story whatever spin is put on it… we are bound together by our heritage (and often even by blood) although we may look entirely different. And most importantly, we are One in the "mist" of the Infinite which is Always and Forever loving and patient with us… 

Returning Home: A Southern perspective on soulfulness and unity
“The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time”
T.S. Elliot

It is said that to “return home”, literally or metaphorically, is to find one’s soul place. For me, the mid-southern region of the United States is clearly home for my most heartfelt sense of what it is to have found one’s geographical soul place. None of us own it, but many of us feel it, straight down to the marrow of our bones.

There is a spirit which hovers over the South, with its pervasive gray mist, sometimes threatening, often comforting, and oh so familiar! I feel it slowing my pace even now as I envision traveling the back roads of the Mid-South, questing after my own Holy Grail, my roots. In the mist, I sense the presence of so many who have gone before, those whose blood courses through my veins and pumps my heart. To them, we owe so much honor and respect… Mystery seeks to unveil itself through endless questions about the past: “How did Moses Park meet Mary in the rugged frontier of the 1700’s? How did George meet Harriet, and Hardy L. Park meet Lockie Annie in the early and latter parts of the 1800’s in Tennessee? What were they like together? Was love and loss woven into the essence of their lives also?

Stray cotton balls float freely in the winter mist, evoking collective memories of the harvest time; cotton carnivals, princesses, queens and kings of the plantation… Also, a great sense of despair overwhelms my heart and, at times, all I can hear are the wailing cries so deep and strong that, in my weakness, I can hardly allow it in… It is a cry of heartbreaking loss, bent and broken backs, thorn-tattered fingers, and displaced persons wailing out their haunting melody: 

“Sometimes I feel like a motherless child………A long way from home.”
In the misty grey of winter, where all seems to linger so closely, the past and present collide as a mere droplet in the imminent presence of eternity. Here, now, I feel conscious of having been conceived, raised, and immersed in the mist. I feel deeply sorry for the displacement and suffering inflicted upon the enslaved; I feel terribly aware of the displacement and loneliness of my own mind and heart at times; I’m grateful always for the land; and I am in love with the songs and the flavors of the South. From the mist, I have ventured out with courage at times, and have risen above the clouds for no other reason but to see with new eyes from whence I have come. And I have returned home feeling more grateful and more conscious of the context of our lives in the larger “mist”; that soulful , eternal home in which we all live and breathe and have our being in God the Creator of all.

Written by Anne Milligan

Photo of Martha Herrin Hollis