March 15, 2021

The Light Of Ancient Wisdom 

When I was in high school his obsession took us to Copenhagen for a year. He was a man obsessed with the mysteries of plants and when offered a sabbatical to continue his work in plant genetics with one of the best electron microscopes in the world there was no question we would move to Denmark. 

Looking back, our life was filled with images of plant cell structures and DNA strands and more than the occasional joke about genes and jeans. I remember making a family pilgrimage to Germany and the home of Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics. Somewhere I have a photo of Dad with Mendel’s statue and I often wonder if Mendel inspired my parents to name my brother Gregory. Dad was happiest in the lab or, as we used to tease him, out standing in his field. For Robert A. Nilan was outstanding and would become one of the world’s most renowned barley geneticists, wearing proudly his Barley Bob nickname. 

While Dad was a man consumed by a passion for plant patterns and energies, he would not have been comfortable with those words as they do wander a bit beyond the bounds and rigors of scientific method and language. And even though, as one devoted to the mysteries of plant DNA, he used to say that being a geneticist was in his blood I don’t think he ever considered that statement anything more than metaphoric. At least not in this life.

After Dad died I had a session with an intuitive to check on how he was doing in those other realms. I was stunned by both the content and the urgency of Dad’s messages for me. Not at all a spiritual man in his life, Dad was adamant that I explore our family’s mystical Irish heritage that it seems goes back to the time of the Druids. This directive has continued through subsequent sessions. At first I was surprised. But on reflection it makes absolute sense. Druids studied and worked with the patterns and energies in the natural world. They were fluent in the language of plant energies. 

Scientists are now ‘proving’ that human DNA holds knowledge and memories passed down through generations. If there were Druids in our biological ancestry, it’s entirely plausible to me that some of that knowing was manifest in Dad’s life. It’s entirely plausible to me that Dad’s passion for the patterns and energies of plants was a Druidic echo. While in his life he would have totally rejected that idea, now he doesn’t need an electron microscope to see the cosmic patterns of plant life…and all life. 

Beannacht,
Judith – judith@stonefires.com