It’s been a while since I’ve updated my ancestral shrine, which lives on a wall shelf right above the computer screen I’m typing on right now. It’s got a toy skeleton, a cigar and some sweetgrass for my Ojibwe ancestors, a bottle of water I picked up after a particular underworld journey I made once, and a few other items including a tiny silver acorn with some of Twilight’s ashes in it. The part I have to update from time to time is in a picture frame behind it all: a collage of the people I call ancestors.

Some of them I’m related to by blood: my grandmas and grandpas are all on there now, having traveled on. Some by marriage; my mother-in-law and brother-in-law and my husband’s grandmother (that picture I love: she’s an old Sicilian immigrant, in her 70s at least, jumping rope in a backyard.) These are my ancestors of blood: family in the way western cultures tend to think of it. The rest of the people on my shrine, though, are not ancestors in the mundane sense.

Among the spirits I honor are the ones I call my ancestors of spirit. These are the people who have shaped me and inspired me, the ones who in one way or another have become part of my spirit. Keith is central among these, having been a mentor and teacher to me as he was to my High Priestess and many others in Blue Star. Others shaped me in my childhood: Mr. Fred Rogers, a Presbyterian minister by vocation and a television innovator who taught me and many of my Gen-X counterparts about feeling our feelings and understanding what to do with them. Some are Queer trailblazers: Freddie Mercury whose voice wakes up parts of me I forget about sometimes, and Alan Turing whose work shaped the Allied victory over Fascism in the 40s. And Eddie Buczynski, whose work paved new ways for gay men in the Craft and who is in my own initiatory upline, as he is for all of Blue Star.

This last week has brought an addition to these. When Dolly Parton died, she turned out to be only the second celebrity I’ve ever cried about when I heard the news. Dolly holds a special place in many queer people’s hearts for her love and acceptance, and her generosity towards the people she grew up amongst is truly singular. I’m a raging pinko, but I always said that when we eat the rich, Dolly’s the one we don’t have to eat. She could have been a billionaire, but she gave away so much of her money to help the poor of Tennessee and to raise literacy and love of reading in children around the country that she never amassed that level of wealth. She was a Christian but in the way that really counts, taking the teachings of Jesus seriously instead of ignoring the hard parts.

And so she’ll take her place on my shrine and get greeted and offered incense with the others when I do my regular practice. I will remember her gifts of love, joy, acceptance, and sass, and I will pray that I can mirror them and be a tiny part of continuing her spark now that she’s traveled on. So mote it be.