The Pull Toward What We Can’t Fully Know

I have been circling the same questions for a long time now. At least ten years, probably longer if I am being honest with myself. It is not something that arrived all at once, more like something that kept tapping me on the shoulder quietly until I finally stopped pretending I did not feel it.

There is this pull that never really goes away. It is not loud or dramatic, and it does not come with clear answers. It is just always there, a feeling that something mattered deeply once and that we are living at a distance from it now. I think about ancestors a lot, but not in the modern, tidy way where you plug numbers into a test and get a map and feel like that explains anything. This feels older than that, heavier somehow. More like a knowing without proof.

And I struggle with that feeling because I do not fit neatly anywhere.

I am not religious in the way people usually mean it. I do not find comfort in doctrine or certainty, and I do not feel at home in rigid belief systems. But I also cannot accept that humans lived for tens of thousands of years and felt nothing beyond survival. They buried their dead with care. They marked seasons. They told stories long before they wrote them down. They noticed the sky, the land, the cycles, the things that cannot be controlled.

Something was there.

Something we cannot fully recover now.

I have even done the DNA testing. I have looked at the percentages and the regions and the little maps that are supposed to tell you who you are and where you come from. It is interesting, and I do not regret doing it, but it did not give me the closure I thought it might. Seeing results on a screen does not suddenly tell me who I am or where I belong. It does not fill in the spaces that feel missing. It just confirms what I already knew, that identity is more than data and belonging cannot be reduced to numbers.

That is the part that stays with me. The idea that meaning existed in a way we can sense but not fully touch anymore. We are too far removed. Too layered in modern life. Too accustomed to explanations that flatten mystery instead of honoring it. I think we inherited the world at the end of a very long story, with most of the pages missing.

For years I have read about old religions, folklore, pagan traditions, early Christianity, Norse and Germanic beliefs, anthropology, archaeology, all of it. I kept thinking one of them would finally click and say yes, this is what you are feeling, this is the thing you are reaching for. None of them ever quite do.

Because I do not think the thing I am searching for has a clean name anymore.

It feels more like standing in the remains of something vast and important and trying to imagine what it once was. You can see the outline. You can feel the weight of it. But you cannot live inside it the way the people who built it did. There is grief in that, even if we do not always recognize it as grief.

And yet that yearning does not go away.

Over the last decade or so, this quiet search has shaped how I live and how I think, and eventually it shaped what I create. I did not set out to make content in the modern sense. I was trying to put the questions somewhere outside my own head. I was trying to see if anyone else felt the same unease, the same pull toward something ancient and unknowable.

I think a lot of people do.

When people say they are spiritual but not religious, it often sounds vague or trendy, but for many of us it is not that at all. It is more like a loss. A sense of being cut off from roots we know must exist but cannot fully trace. A feeling that something sacred was once woven into everyday life and now we only have fragments of it left.

So I write. I make things. I explore ideas out loud. Not because I have answers, because I do not, but because naming the questions feels important. It feels like an act of remembering, even if what we are remembering can never be fully restored.

Maybe connection does not always mean certainty.
Maybe it is enough to acknowledge the pull and refuse to dismiss it.

This space exists for that reason. For people who feel the tug of history, ancestry, myth, and meaning but do not fit into clean belief boxes. For people who sense that something old still echoes in us, even if we cannot translate it into modern language.

I do not think we are meant to resolve this yearning.

I think we are meant to carry it.

And maybe, by sharing it, we make it a little less lonely.

~ Hearthblossom