16/02/2026
When I look at the photograph of my grandmother and grandfather, I see endurance. He came from traveler blood, from a people who knew the road, the wind, the unspoken codes of survival. He went to war as a sergeant in a tank division, pushed into Germany, carried through battles that history reduces to dates and maps.
In one crossing he was left in the water, suspended between nations, between life and death. He came home with what we now call PTSD, though in those years there were no soft words for shattered nerves. There was only silence.
My grandmother stood beside him and raised five children in the shadow of what he had seen.
In Night Bloom work we honor the flower that opens after the shelling stops. It is the woman who holds a household together when the man wakes from dreams he cannot explain. It is the traveler who learns to build stability without losing the instinct to move. It is children raised in rooms where strength is quiet and love is practical.
We inherit more than eye colour and bone structure. We inherit coping, resilience, unfinished grief, and the capacity to transmute it. What they survived becomes the soil from which we grow. When we choose awareness over repetition, we are not rejecting our ancestors, we are completing something for them.
There is an ancestral ritual in this and it does not require grandeur.
Sit with your ancestors photograph or their names written in your hand. Light a single candle in honor of them. Speak their names aloud. Thank the road that shaped them, the fire that tested them.
Acknowledge the wounds without dramatizing them. Say clearly that what was carried unconsciously can now be carried consciously. Then place your hand over your heart and state what you choose to grow moving forward in your life.
Night Bloom teaches that darkness is not an identity. It is an environment. Some of us come from war, from displacement, from men who could not speak and women who could not fall apart.
To honour our ancestors is not to romanticise their suffering, but to recognize the power that moved through them and still moves through us. We are not here by accident.
Night bloom opens April - Peakhurst Sydney