THE GREEN THAT WAS ALWAYS IN YOU

On Ancestry, Aesthetics, and the Art of Feeling Safe in the Shift

by Val White

There is a moment, somewhere in late February or early March, when I walk into the flower section at the market and feel something I can only describe as recognition.

Not excitement, exactly. Something older than that. Something that lives below the ribcage, in the solar plexus part of the body that knows things the mind hasn’t caught up to yet. 

I reach for the stems of pastel blooms— on my walk home I stop to collect some fronds of palm —clipped from the wooded acreage behind our apartment, stowing them in my canvas tote with the bundles of eucalyptus, a bouquet of tulips in the color of a morning I haven’t had yet — planning in my minds eye a wondrous centerpiece for my table and something in me exhales.

Yes. This. It’s time.

I’ve been thinking about why that is. Why beauty, specifically the beauty of living green things brought into the home, does something to the nervous system that no amount of intention-setting or journaling or deep breathing quite replicates. And I think I’ve found my answer — in the most unexpected of places.

In the blood.

About eight years ago, I received a message from a distant cousin I’d never met. She told me she knew my grandmother Christine — maiden name Graham, my father’s mother — and that the Grahams had ancestral connections to Mary Queen of Scots.

I did what any reasonable person would do.

I became completely obsessed.

For weeks I disappeared into Ancestry.com, pulling thread after thread, climbing branch after branch of a family tree that turned out to be far more ancient and storied than I had ever imagined. And there, traced through centuries of Scottish history — Graham to Stuart — I found him.

King Robert III of Scotland. My 21st great-grandfather.

I sat with that for a long time. The weight of it. The strange intimacy of discovering that your blood carries a crown you never knew was there.

But here is where the story gets truly remarkable — and where it becomes, improbably, a love story.

Because as I traced the branches further, I discovered that Robert III had a sister. A woman named Isabella. 

And Isabella, it turns out, is Adam’s 20th great-grandmother.

Let me say that plainly: the man I fell in love with — a boy from California, raised on the other side of the country from my Florida childhood — shares a great-grandfather with me from 14th century Scotland. 

King Robert II of Scotland is my 22nd great-grandfather and Adam’s 21st.

We found each other across a continent, completely by chance, with no map and no reason — and we were family before we ever met.

I’ll be honest with you: I have never fully let go of this information. To this day, when Adam is being particularly Adam about something and I need to correct him (with love), I look at him very steadily and only slightly sarcastically say —

“Baby cousin.”

He finds this less charming than I do. But I maintain it is historically accurate and therefore entirely appropriate.

The story doesn’t end in Scotland, though.

Earlier this year, I turned to another branch — my mother’s mother’s side — and followed a different thread, this one winding further back, further west, across the water to the green island. 

All the way back to the year 660, when a man named Fergal mac Máele Dúin was born in Ireland. 

Fergal was a High King of Ireland. And he came from a long, unbroken line of High Kings before him.

Scottish kings on my father’s side. Irish High Kings on my mother’s.

And I am only just now meeting them.

There is something the nervous system does when it finds evidence that it belongs. 

That it comes from somewhere. That it was always, already, part of something ancient and enduring and real.

We talk a lot in wellness culture about safety — about creating environments that signal to the body that it is okay to soften, to open, to move through change without bracing. And what I’ve discovered, both through my ancestral research and through years of working with people on healing self-worth, is that safety isn’t only about the absence of threat. It’s about the presence of belonging.

When I bring fresh greens into my home in spring — a branch of something budding, a handful of herbs from the garden, flowers in that particular shade of yellow that only exists in March — I am not simply decorating. I am sending a message to my body. 

I am saying: the season is shifting, and I am with it. 

Look — here is the proof. Here is the evidence, right here on the table, that new life is real and it is arriving and you are safe to move through the door with it.

The aesthetic is not separate from the regulation. The aesthetic is the regulation.

Beauty, when it is intentional, when it is chosen with awareness, tells the nervous system a story. And the story it tells is: you are held. You are not behind. Something ancient in you already knows how to do this.

I think about the green hills of Ireland now when I arrange a vase of something living on my kitchen island. 

I think about Fergal, and the kings before him, men who understood the turning of seasons not as metaphor but as survival — who watched the land shift and soften and renew and built their entire lives around that rhythm.

That knowing is in me. It was always in me. I just didn’t have a name for it until now.

Bringing in the green this spring is not only an aesthetic choice. It is an act of ancestral memory. It is me saying to those ancient Irish hills and Scottish highlands that live somewhere in my cellular memory: I hear you. I see the season turning. I am turning with it.

And my nervous system — that wise, ancient, deeply personal instrument — exhales.

Yes. This. It’s time.

This spring, I invite you to bring something living into your home. 

Not because it looks beautiful on a countertop— though it will — but because your body needs the confirmation. 

The season is shifting. 

Beauty is the evidence. 

Let your home tell your nervous system the truth: it is safe to become.