“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
– Soren Kierkegaard

Does it sound trite, opening up with these words on a blog, dedicated to telling the story of my own personal search for my roots? Maybe a little. You can’t deny it, though. Life just doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense when you’re right in the middle of it…How did I end up in this position? What brought me to this place? Why do I keep doing the things I do? Is there really a reason for everything? These are the kinds of questions we ask ourselves at times in our lives. These are the kinds of questions that we ask at times of difficulty and challenge. These are questions that we ask, and then, we look backwards.

So, yes, this story is a look backwards. It will introduce names of people and places that existed in the world a long, long time ago. It will look at those who came before us. It will tip a hat and nod to the work of other ancestor hunters from the past. It will paint scenes from history. It will look backwards.

But we can’t live in the past. If we try to live in the past we learn that we aren’t truly living. We can’t live in the future either. If we try to always be forward thinking and to always think about what might come or what we want to happen, then we also are not truly living. We must live in the present, in the here and now.

So, this story will have a firm foot in the present. It is the story of MY search for MY roots. Yes, it will also tell the stories of other people and the roots of still other people, but it will always have a planted step in the moment.

And so it begins… my first entry into the rivers of time and consciousness.

Welcome to the blog of Jonathan Parrish Rivers!

Thanks for reading.