About Us – Living Ancestors

Living Ancestors and Kate Frew Austin

Living Ancestors was born from a simple but profound recognition

We are not separate

Our lives are inseparable from one another, from the living world, and from the generations that will inherit the consequences of our choices. Yet many of the systems that have shaped modern life – our ideas of wealth, success, security and progress – have been built on assumptions of separation: from the Earth, from one another, from community and often from ourselves.

I was born in South Africa, a beautiful and complex land that holds both deep ancestral wisdom and the enduring scars of systemic inequality. I was born into a lineage that benefited from these systems. I was afforded comfort, education, security and opportunity while others were dispossessed and denied dignity, land and even belonging.

But I have come to see that systems of domination wound everyone they touch, though not in the same ways and never to the same degree. They inflict dispossession and profound injustice upon those who are oppressed, while often leaving those who benefit from them alienated from relationship itself – from the Earth, from community, and from the capacity to feel, to relate and to revere.

I inherited the rewards of these systems, but I also inherited their fractures. For years, I moved through the world with a sense of disconnection, an ache of not-belonging, a grief I could not name and a guilt I could not metabolise.

What changed everything was grief.

When my beloved husband died suddenly, the foundations of my life gave way. Everything I thought I knew about safety, identity, community and belonging fell apart. In the void that followed, something deeper began to emerge. I began to question the assumptions of separation I had inherited and to remember something both ancient and profoundly simple: that community is sacred, that the Earth is kin, and that healing begins in right relationship – with ourselves, with one another and with the living world.

Through grief and remembrance, I came to understand that guilt is not a place to live, but a threshold that can invite us into deeper relationship, responsibility and repair.

I also came to understand legacy differently. Legacy is not simply what we leave behind, it is what we participate in while we are here. It is what we seed forward through our choices, our relationships, our attention, our influence and our resources.

And I vowed that my own legacy would not serve separation. It would serve restoration, repair and reconnection. It would contribute to a more beautiful future for my own children and for children I may never meet.

Living Ancestors was born from these understandings.

It is an initiative dedicated to exploring our cultural relationship with wealth, legacy and inheritance, and to asking how the resources we hold – financial, social, cultural and ecological – might be stewarded in service of ecological repair, collective flourishing and a future worth inheriting.

At a time of profound ecological and social crisis, I believe we are being invited into a different understanding of belonging: one rooted not in separation and scarcity, but in relationship, reciprocity and responsibility.

I believe that:

Living Ancestors is an invitation into a courageous Journey of Return: to ourselves, to each other and to the Earth. And, ultimately, an invitation to the work of becoming good ancestors: those who act consciously and intentionally in service of Earth and the collective, so that life may flourish beyond themselves, beyond their lifetimes, and beyond their bloodlines.