Transcript: PERDITA FINN on the Long Story of Our Souls /353
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today we are speaking with Perdita Finn.
Perdita Finn People walked across the land and told the stories of their ancestors and those stories sustained people and came up through the earth. That's what it means to have songlines again—to be connected to the stories we tell of the Dead and of the Ancestors in our lives.
Ayana Young Perdita Finn is the co-founder, with her husband Clark Strand, of the non-denominational international fellowship The Way of the Rose, which inspired their book The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. In addition to extensive study with Zen masters, priests, and healers, she apprenticed with the psychic Susan Saxman, with whom she wrote The Reluctant Psychic. Finn now teaches popular workshops on Getting to Know the Dead, in which participants are empowered to activate the magic in their own lives with the help of their ancestors. She is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World and lives with her family in the moss-filled shadows of the Catskill Mountains.
Oh Perdita, I am so excited to be having this conversation and it's a rainy day here, which makes me so happy because it's such a good time to be inside, cozy, and going deep with you. So thanks for being here.
Perdita Finn Oh I'm delighted. As I said to you before, it just is a real honor to be on this podcast. Thank you for it.
Ayana Young Yeah, I'm smiling ear to ear. And although there are so many places we could jump off from, I am really interested to talk about magic. [Laugher]
Perdita Finn My favorite topic!
Ayana Young I don't feel like I get to talk about it nearly enough and I am so drawn to talking about magic and the threads of magic woven throughout your work specifically. Your new book is called Take Back the Magic. So yeah, I just want to ask from what systems or ideas etc., can we or must we take back the magic?
Perdita Finn Well, I think that the magic... First of all, as I'm talking about magic, I think as modern people we're kind of imagining something technological and industrial, something outside of nature. And I think the deepest and the oldest magic is completely natural, completely organic. It's part of the kind of permaculture of our soul and that when we tap into it, we know it. We can feel it. It's not, you know, unexpected fireworks or the sun suddenly turning in the sky. Magic can be that moment when the rain comes or the rain stops. Magic can be that moment after the first snowfall. Magic can be falling in love. Magic can be that moment when we can't imagine spring is going to come, and it finally does. But what does it mean to, as human beings who tried to live outside of those natural rhythms, to begin to collaborate with them again and to recover that lost experience of magic in our lives? That's sort of what my interest has been.
Ayana Young I wanted to bring up one of your articles on substack called "Magic Or Not" and you write, quote, "Because real magic is funny, playful, and unexpected. It will lead us where we really want to go on a road we never imagined with adventures we cannot predict. Real magic can only happen when we let go of the levers of control," end quote. And I really love talking about surrendering control. It's really challenging for me, and I'm sure a lot of other people listening. But like 1) we don't ever have control anyways so it's probably an illusion on many levels, but I wanted to riff with you on: How does embracing an aspect of magic allow us to surrender control to the world, to the Earth?
Perdita Finn Well, my hands had been on the steering wheel with a pretty tight grip from life. And even if I could sometimes, you know, get myself over into the passenger seat, my foot was always ready to hit the brakes or grab the steering wheel, right? You know, how do we get in the backseat of the car? How do we get out of the car altogether?
One of the ways to do that, I think, is we have to really feel like somebody else is driving. And we have to feel like the vehicle that we're in is a different vehicle. And for me, that involves a couple of things, one is the intimate experience. This work began for me really intimately with collaborating with the Dead — with those on the other side. And it began in very small ways and noticing the Dead and calling out to them. And I say the Dead, not my Ancestors, because although I included my grandparents and aunts and uncles, I also included teachers and roadkill and spiders on my windowsill, I really tried hard not to leave anyone out. And when I would have worries or fretting, I sort of fell into this practice very idiosyncratically as a harried, overwhelmed, financially-stressed out mother of two young children. And I started asking for help with the other side and the other side started showing up, tremendously. And the more I asked for help and the more they showed up — grandparents, my impossible father, teachers, all kinds of people have shown up. And what I find is that all I have to do is say, “Help,” and someone from the other side will show up and genuinely help.
And that has been such a radical change within me because it's allowed me to loosen my grip on fear. Because what we're really clutching when we clutch that steering wheel of control, is we're holding on desperately to our fears. And how do we settle back into a radical faith? And I talk about faith…I'm no friend of any religion on this planet, but faith in ‘the other side,’ faith in the unseen world, faith that there are mothers without end from lives without end ready to catch us and guide us and hold us. And that has been a really big transformation in my life.
And I have found that that conversation with the other side, with the Dead is very, very close to the language of the natural world, of the Tree. That conversation with the dead brought me into conversation with the trees and the plants and the flowers with the owls and the hawks and the salamanders, so that it became a very fluid polyphony of engagement and connection all around me. And it's much easier to let go of our control when we have something else to hold on to. We need to hold on…we need to hold on to love, to connection, to intimacy. It's our first gesture as human beings as primates to hold on. If we don't hold on, we'll die. So what are we going to hold on to? Are we going to hold on to control, to fear? Or are we going to hold on to the hands of those who've loved us for millennia and eons, and help us without end?
Ayana Young Yeah. I really love talking about faith and trust and control and surrender all at once because they feel so interwoven. And I think I used to have a lot less trust and faith in, probably in, most things. And maybe I felt like I couldn't even really find a way to trust spirit to take care of the Earth or the future or the past or, you know, really anything that I couldn't see in front of me and even that I was questioning. So it was a lonely place to be where there was nothing to ground faith in. And something I love about magic is that it seems to only be present if we do have that faith and that trust. But otherwise, it's like you can't see it or something. I mean, this is my experience, of course.
And so yeah, I'm just sitting here in that, and wrestling with how do we trust and have faith in love and magic and these other relationships when things have become so confusing? And sometimes it seems like we'll never get out of the predicament that we find ourselves in. And then I think also, to me, there's a real difference between having this type of faith and trust in the earth versus saying like, Well, you know, we can't do anything about it, but the Earth will take care of itself. Like the difference between trust faith, and then apathy or something, or they're giving up.
And so maybe you could speak to how you find that difference because, you know, just a quick example for me...Of course, I'm looking at where we're heading with climate change with the fact that we're really not as a global community working towards, like, curbing consumption of anything, seemingly. And so part of me is like, well, we're just going towards the cliff. But at the same time, I want to make sure there's no mines put on salmon rivers. And even if it seems like it's not going to amount to anything, because we're going to keep heading towards the cliff, like it still matters. It still matters to fight and to protect and to love and to show up, even if it seems bleak or impossible. And so yeah, this is like the trust faith and the apathy and where do you fall within that?
Perdita Finn Okay. I'm going to start really big, and then I'm going to end really, really small. How's that? The big place I want to start is...I often say that my work with the dead, getting to experience the reality of the Dead, and I don't really talk much about spirit or god or anything like abstract words. I do better with concrete nouns like dirt, Grandma Nellie. I can believe in my grandmother. She was a gardener. She could make anything grow. I trust her very much. But my work with the dead has shifted my entire belief sphere.
As modern people—and I mean by people sort of under the sway of agriculture for the past 10,000 years—we have lived inside the short story of a single human life, and that's a very frantic story. It's very hard to experience mercy and justice and love inside the short story of the single life. It's impossible to make sense of most lives within a single life. So many of them look too short, too sorrowful, too terrible. But for our ancient ancestors, for most Indigenous Peoples, they live inside the long story of their souls, which is not a linear story, with a beginning, a middle and an end, but a story that's about birth, death, and rebirth. And that's the story that our planet is telling, that our natural world is telling, that spring comes and summer and then it's fall and winter. And then spring comes again and the moon waxes and wanes and the tides go in and out and things come and go, and we all come and go, and we leave and we come back.
And if we can learn to live inside that what I call the long story of our souls inside the long story of multiple lifetimes, not just as human beings, and when I talk about rebirth and renewal, I'm not talking about it in some evolutionary, you know, I'm going to become...I'm going to graduate from being a grub to being a human to being a man, you know, it's kind of which is what a lot of even like Buddhism does with the idea of reincarnation, but just the reality of the multiplicities and possibilities within my soul. If I really begin to tap into that, and that's what a lot of my book is about. It's about how to do that, and how to really feel our way back into that belief sphere. Then I know I'm coming back to this Earth, no one gets away from this planet alive. We're all going to be reborn into the world we have made. We're all going to be reborn to parents who are the children we have raised, and what does that mean about how we treat each other and treat this Earth? We're going to be reborn here. We're coming back. I think a lot of people have a kind of sneaky suspicion that they're going to die before climate change gets too bad for them personally. We're all coming back. So we ought to start thinking about the world we're coming back to right now. And we don't know where and how we're coming back.
What I've learned about the Dead is what the Dead remember when they die is that long story. They see that long story through deep time and frequently there's heartbreak in seeing that story, and realizing what fools we've been to live inside the short story of the single life—what terrible mistakes we've made as a species and as individuals. I want to live inside the long story of my life and see with the eyes of the dead while I'm still alive.
And that, fundamentally, when we really begin to work with the Dead, I say that the place we arrive is we realize what souls know is that we've all been each other's mothers. But if we were all each other's mothers, we are the mothers of every being and every soul on this planet. What responsibilities does that give us? It gives us tremendous responsibilities, and tremendous heartbreaks and we're each going to have little ways that we start to work on the issues and problems all around us to follow them. And you've interviewed extraordinary people who have all found their ways of doing that. But we have to know that we're not going anywhere. No one. No one's going to get out of this story. We are the body of this Earth. And what happens to it is what happens to our own bodies, and we're coming back. So we better start thinking about the world that we want to be reborn into.
We need a lot of help right now. We need everyone on board. We need to call on those Ancestors who've made it through climate catastrophes in the past—who've navigated the Mount Toba eruption or the Bronze Age collapse. We need to learn how to call on them and ask for their guidance and learn from their mistakes. and we need to do that not in some generalized way, but in really specific, collaborative ways.
I begin every morning, fretting as I do about just about everything. I'm an Olympic class worrier, and, you know, I have children and friends and animals and the planet and everything to worry about. And for each worry, I turn it over to someone specific on the other side. And so I begin the day asking for help assigning my jobs to various teams on the other side, and then seeing what begins to happen. I'm astounded at what begins to happen. And it's like an untapped resource we’ve forgotten about—that magic that's available to us. I think we're going to need everything for the days ahead.
Ayana Young Oh, my goodness, there's so much in that response that I was noting in my head, like, Oooh, I want to hear more about this, I wanna hear more about this, and now I'm not sure where to begin. But there was something that you had said a few responses ago that I don't want to lose. And you were speaking about animals briefly. And in your substack article, "What Every Animal Knows," you write, quote, "What the plants and animals know, I'm sure of it with my whole being is that we are all feeding each other with our bodies and our lives," end quote.
Perdita Finn Yeah.
Ayana Young And in this article, you talk about the misconception that humans are the only animals that know they're going to die. And I was like, huh, wow. I don't know if I ever really slow down enough to think of that specific statement or idea. And so I just love to hear a bit more about your connection to animals and the wisdom you feel we can gain from truly engaging with them. And even just that statement, like how does that even open our minds to them if we start to understand them differently?
Perdita Finn Well, I grew up with a lot of animals. My mother never met an animal she could say no to, so I think we had 15 cats and various dogs, hamsters, guinea pigs, rabbits, a boa constructor and an iguana. We have so many animals in our house, it was just fecund. And I raised my children very similarly with a lot of animals in the house. We were rescuing wildlife when they were little. So we had rescued swans and ducks and geese and opossums. I once had 16 baby opossums living in my home—all kinds of wild critters. But I've always lived with animals very intimately and very closely, and I suppose I've felt very loved and protected by them.
One of the things I think we've forgotten as modern human beings is we have tried to live outside of what I call the ecological equation. And that ecological equation is whatever eats is eaten. And every animal in being knows this. You know, every animal knows that we all feed each other with our bodies and we used to know this as human beings, right? I remember reading a story. I'm trying to remember where I read it, but it was about the Kung people in South Africa. One of the last hunter-gatherer groups, and the anthropologist hears this man... he's eating an elephant and he tells the anthropologist that when he tastes it, he knows it's his wife who died a long time ago. And she's sort of startled by this and she has all kinds of, you know, gymnastics she does to try to explain it, but I think he means that literally. I think he knows that his wife who loved him has come back as the elephant who feeds him now.
The Jataka tales in Buddhism are filled with—it's the Buddha's incarnation as animals that show up to feed hungry travelers, a rabbit who jumps into the fire to feed a man starving to death. But I think our ancient ancestors knew that when they were eating, they were eating their kin. Not just an animal, but a being who offered its body lovingly. You know, what Jesus says, "Take and eat. This is my body," isn't a singularity, it was a ubiquity for ancient ancestors. Every plant and animal offering its body to us was feeding us just as the way a mother feeds her child with its body. But the other side of that equation is that we, too, have to offer our bodies back to the earth to be eaten. And I loved your podcast about Recompose and composting our bodies, of course, which is what I would most want.
You know, once a deer came into my yard, and she had been hit by a car and she was dying. And she was really flailing about and really suffering. And, you know, my husband says, "Should we call the police? Should we shoot her and put her out of her misery?" And my young daughter said, you know, "She's spent her whole life trying not to be shot, I think we're supposed to go be with her, she's come to us." So we went and sat at a distance near her and just got very still, and the stiller we got, the stiller she became. And ultimately, she passed as we sat with her, and died. And we left her there. And she offered us an incredible teaching, because within 36 hours, every bone of her was gone. The vultures came, the coyotes came, the beatles came, the mice came, and she was gone. And she'd fed everybody. And it was sort of extraordinary. It's really what I want my own body to do to feed everyone. I once read about St. Francis begging his monks to take him out as he was dying and just lay him on the ground. They didn't listen, of course. But, you know, we try to avoid that we don't want to be eaten. Um, but that's the equation, and I think animals know it, and they're trying to teach it to us. It doesn't mean that they don't want to stay alive as much as we want to stay alive, but they know that they're coming back, that they have a lot of life to work with. We don't have just one life to get it right. And there's not just one way to solve these problems.
I think animals...I've watched animals do extraordinary things. I live out in the mountains, and I spend a lot of time out in the woods and the more connected you become in conversation with the plants and the animals, the more they talk to you. You know, my daughter has written about, but you know, it's one of the most extraordinary things…
I tell the story in my book of... I think we have many Jataka tales, many stories of animals loving us as mothers. My own mother was diagnosed when she was 70 with Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, and she was given three months to live. And her doctor said there was nothing he could do. It was very advanced. She had tumors up and down her spine all through her body. They didn't think there was any point in doing anything. And my mother was very fierce and she said she hadn't seen her grandchildren yet and she wanted to hold her grandchildren. And would he give her chemo anyway? And radiation anyway? And he agreed. And, you know, she got terrible chemo and terrible radiation. And, you know, vomiting and chills and fevers, the whole horror of it. But the thing that she hated the most because she was very vain was she lost all her hair. We had this cat, one of our 15 cats, who was this just indolent, useless Persian. He was very, very spoiled. He was the only kind of purebred animal in our house. And we sort of made fun of him. My mother had named him Baudelaire after the decadent French poet and Baude was just the most, you know, he was with like, some decadent prince. Anyway, this cat suddenly decides to drape himself over my mother's head and become her hair when she's sick. And he won't leave. We have to put kitty litter in her bedroom and food in there for him in her bedroom. He will not leave her bedroom. He will not stop touching her body. And, you know, she, my mother, sort of delighted by this because she loves animals so much. And she loves having him be her hair, and she won't wear a turban. She says I'm just wearing a cat. And it gives her pleasure in the midst of this horrific ordeal. When we go back to the oncologist, and he tells you the treatment isn't working and he thinks, you know, "Look, just stop, give yourself a few good months and just stop." And we go home, and I'm sitting there on the bed trying to metabolize this information with her. And I'm petting the cat, and I noticed their bumps all along his spine. And I take him to the vet the next day, who tells me that he's riddled with cancer. Now, you could say that whatever pesticides…And my mother was a gardener who used Roundup in her garden, because "it was safe." Not…That whatever pesticides my mother used had infected the cat, and they both ended up with Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma. Except that the cat died, and my mother got better. And she didn't die of cancer. She died 12 years later, after having held all their grandchildren. And I tell that story. And I've heard every time I've told that story. Somebody else has told me a similar story about an animal they know who willingly has taken on the illness for someone.
What if we knew with every mouthful we ate that we were eating the bodies of our mothers who had been offered up to us lovingly? How would we treat the food that we grow, the food that we eat?
Ayana Young Gosh, I'm over here, trying not to break down in tears, or maybe I should just let myself. And I loved when the cat in the background was meowing after the cat story. I was like This is magic. Are you kidding me? The cat is just like coming in at this, like, just, just.... thank you for sharing that. And yeah—
Perdita Finn Yeah.
I'm a bit speechless and can really feel the power and love and complexity of these interwoven relationships and having the faith to believe that these connections are that deep. And that we could, of course, always write off magic as something random or just happened to be that way. But there are these incredible stories, you know, that I really choose to believe in. Yeah.
To believe in them, I think we have to step back into the world of mystery. And, you know, we've lived in this Post-Enlightenment world, some enlightened world where we believe we can understand and explain and analyze everything right. And if we just get to the bottom of everything and cut up into enough pieces and dissect it carefully enough, we'll make sense of everything and understand everything and feel better. And the truth is, we seem to be feeling worse and worse and worse, right? You know, we've never had better communication technology and we've never felt more lonely. We've never had better medical technology and we've never been sicker. We don't want to believe in magic, and yet placebos work so often they have to be counted as part of scientific studies, right? And yet, we don't want to research placebos or think about you know, our medicine is nocebos. But the magic is there, and it's real, but in order to experience it, we have to turn out the lights. And, and that also frightens us, you know, we've grown frightened of the dark, and yet we torture our enemies by putting them in solitary confinement with the lights always on. And we've done that to ourselves, we've put ourselves in solitary confinement as a species with the lights always on. No wonder we feel terrified and isolated and afraid and nuts. We've made ourselves nuts. Seeds grow in the darkness.
Ayana Young Yeah, the insanity at this time, and it makes sense. I mean, when you look at what we're set up to do in this overculture, we're literally set up to make decisions to kill our own home, to kill ourselves, to kill everything we love. Like we are completely in an ecocidal culture.
Perdita Finn Exactly.
Ayana Young And what's interesting is that not only are we set up to perform ecocide, we're set up to perform ecocide being told that we will be fulfilled by the things that will kill everything we love, which of course they don't. And so of course, there is a crazy-making, of course, there is this insanity and this illness. How could there not be?
Perdita Finn You know, this kind of technological narcissism also imagines that somehow we're going to avoid death—as if death is a mistake or an accident or a failure, as if not every single thing in the cosmos dies. Like, imagine a night... imagine not being able to sleep. I mean, these guys also don't want to sleep either. Right? Sleep is a wasted time, death is an accident. But you know, at the end of a long day, being able to go to sleep and wake up the next day and renewed and go "Oh, God, thank—" you know, that feeling you wake up in the morning, okay, things feel more possible today, right? But what if the same is true of our lifetimes? There are lives that end and then the lives begin again. And it's a chance again, to try something else out. Death isn't a mistake. It's not an accident. It's what everything does. And there are no such things as meaningless lives. You know, inside of our culture, if your life—if you're not achieving something in the short story of a single life, you're worthless. It's such a system of domination and control and assertion of constant power. But, in the long story of our souls, every entanglement with another soul matters. Every miscarriage matters every--not because of some right to life ideology, but because the soul itself has made an appointment with ours, and wants to connect with us. You know, what if we could really experience that?
And I think the only sobriety that we can really get in relationship to this culture is in its linearity and we have to return to that long story of our souls where we have enough time and we don't discount the smallness of a life or the meagerness of life, but know that every being we meet comes from mystery and returns to mystery and we sit inside that mystery as well.
[Musical break]
Ayana Young I don't know if you call it life after death, but I would say for me, I...What happens beyond the passing of our bodies, as we know, it is so far to me in my comprehension...like I can't even really? I don't know, I truly don't know. And I don't know if I have a feeling of any type of inner knowing. And so I guess I just wanted to dissect that a bit more with you of... Yeah, like, what does that even mean? What is the process? What do you do? Of course, yeah, there are different religions and spirituality that have entire stories that many people follow as "this is what happens," but I really don't have a sense of what happens. And so yeah, I would just love to hear you take us through that. Yeah, step by step even.
Perdita Finn You know, what is the life after death? Another life. If we're reborn if there's hell after death, it's the hell we've made and are reborn into, right. Life after life after life after life. In our ancient ancestors, that's what they knew. This is the world we were born to. We're reborn to the children we've raised or neglected. We're reborn to the world we've loved or the world we've hated. And what does it mean to know...the only reason we've been able to be so ecocidal is because we imagine somewhere we can get in a rocket ship to Mars and go colonize somewhere else, right. You know, defies even our gut biome. But how does it work? Well, I don't know how it works. I live inside the mystery. But this is the way it feels to me.
I'll never forget when I first had a glimpse of this, it was after a friend of mine had lost her baby at nine months during delivery. And my one of my very dearest friends, and how can you be with someone inside that loss? You know what I mean? Just devastating, just beyond terrible. But what I could feel was even in the brevity, that soul was huge. The life barely lasted an instant, but the soul was vast. And I did a lot of embroidery as a kid and I am sort of a nerdy kid, and I love when you do embroidery, if you follow a stitch, you know, if you look at the embroidery from one side, it's just a jumble, right? It's just frayed threads and knots and mush mush, and then you turn it over, and you can see the picture and it all makes sense. But from the land of the living, we see the embroidery from the wrong side, we just see a tiny stitch doesn't make any sense, but you turn it over and you see the whole thread and you see that thread becoming a rose or a pair of lips or a heart. It's many things. And if we think of our soul as a thread, wound together with other threads, woven...you know, we often talk about the veil, but the veil itself is nothing but the fabric of existence, what you know, was called the diamond net of Indra. It's that woven fabric of existence where our souls are woven with all other souls entangled with all other souls to create this experience of our reality. There's just back and forth and back again. I mean...
You know, I'm no student of near death experiences are what happens after you die. I've certainly…I know people who are and have heard a lot about it. I do know that the more intimate I've become with those on the other side. And I'm very intimate. I mean, I really talk to those on the other side a lot, I have an ancestor altar in my house. Every day is the Day of the Dead at my house.
I know two things about my own death. One is that when it's time to go it's because there's more that I can do on the other side than I can do on this side for the moment with this body. Now we say to my children, “When I go, it's because I can help you more from the other side than I can help on this side although I want to be here for a long time and hold some grandbabies.”
Um, but the other thing I know is that I'll be coming back and I also know that there'll be a reunion on the other side with so many mothers and so many...You know, when a baby's born, everyone's waiting to hold the baby and love it and cherish it, but on the other side, everyone's saying goodbye. And when we die, everyone is sad on this side and there's nothing but reunion on the other side. My 91 year old father in law died last summer. A few days before he died. He said to me, "So I've been invited to this garden party and it looks like everybody's there, you think I should go?" "Does it look like a nice party?" He said, "It looks rather wonderful." I said, "Well, I think you should go." I think we'll all have a garden party waiting for us on the other side and then we come back again.
How do we tap into that? How do we tap into that experience? I think through conversation and storytelling—the old ways. Through our information and intuition and imagination. We all have predilections, fears, talents, things we know and don't know how we know.
You know, my son, as a 10 year old, read about the savage genocide at Nanking of the Japanese to the Chinese, right. And from then on, he said it was the worst atrocity that had ever happened — worse than the Holocaust, worse than any war, anything that had ever happened. Nope. No one knew how bad the Rape of Nanking was with a vehement and a certainty that was beyond one life. And that was information. You know, some...we know what we know. And the thing and when we begin to embrace, you know, as Walt Whitman said 'the multitudes within us' that are beyond gender, that are beyond species—we begin to know how woven together we are with so many, many different beings, so many, many different possibilities. Most of who we are is a mystery to ourselves, and we can only feel our way in the dark by love to each other.
And that's really the challenge of it. It's not going to be some clear sighted explanation. We're not going to go to past life regressionist who’s always going to tell us we were some medieval princess, or Cleopatra. But we're going to feel our way to experiences and ways of knowing that we need going forward. We've done this before. We've done climate change before. We've done extinction before. We need to summon the wisdom from those past experiences.
One of the most beautiful spiritual books I've read in decades is Otherlands by Thomas Halliday, I don't know if you know it. He's a, you know, a university scientist, Ph.D. scientist, Paleobiologist looking at extinction events on Earth. And yet you read this book, and you know he's psychic and he's channeling, He would never admit this, I'm sure. He's stepping into past ways of knowing and guiding us through them, and inviting us to reclaim both these great contractions and these great expansions on our planet and to remember them, and to feel our way into them so that we have the resources we need for this moment. And that's why I want to touch into the long story of my soul, I want to tap into my creativity, my resilience, and my connectedness. I don't know if any of this answers your question.
Ayana Young Well, I really feel like we're going to need a second interview, because maybe I'll just…I'll dangle the climate change topic for a moment. You know, I'll pause on that because I wanted to relay that I really appreciate your view of the afterlife, or I don't know if that's the way to say it, but life after death, or yeah, I'm struggling with my words. Because—
Perdita Finn Life after life is what I call it.
Ayana Young Life after life, that's, that's what I—that's great. That's what I was looking for because it seems like you really counter the narrative of the disposability of death or of our life in general.
Perdita Finn Yeah.
Ayana Young And if life after life after life really does continue, then everything does matter and nothing or no one or no moment really is disposable. And of course, disposability culture is part of that addiction, is part of the ecocide, is part of our disconnection. And so I'm really...Yeah, I'm seeing how that weaves together. And really, you know, wondering if we viewed life not as disposable, but rather as eternal, how might we approach the world differently? And so I don't know, you could of course, answer that question. It was just something I was thinking about. And also what came up for me hearing you talk about death, life after life, just how does a relationship with the dead change our ideas of what ancestry is and means, or even our own life after life after life? It does seem to expand the idea of ancestry for me, at least, or my understanding of it.
Perdita Finn Yeah, I mean, I often say that, um, I don't see a lot of straight lines in nature. I see a lot of circles and a lot of spirals, but not a lot of straight lines. And lineages are...the idea of ancestral lineage is a sort of an idea of civilization. It's about dominance hierarchies, right? It's about lines of power, lines of authority lines, privilege, lines of ownership. And, in fact, if you begin to explore your genetic history, you know, you quickly have 1000s of grandmothers all around you, right, going in every direction and that's just your biology. And not to mention their husbands and their children and their aunts and uncles and their teachers and their friends and the wet nurses and neighbors who were, you know, loving and kind and...
I don't like to leave anyone out from the other side, because I don't want to be left out. I really do try to include everyone. I do litanies of the Dead, of the Dead I know. And I really don't call on them generally, I call on them specifically by name and that includes my biological Ancestors, people who show up. I don't understand it, it seems quite silly, you could mock it, I suppose. effortlessly. I sort of submit to the mystery of it and submit to the holding of it.
I think when we call on the Dead on the other side, we get to know them intimately. We'll also begin to get to know all of the Dead and they'll start to show up for us in ways we can't even imagine. You know, you can even call on saints you know, the saints used to be nothing but the Dead. I don't even think there used to be gods and goddesses, or pantheon of gods and goddesses. I'm not very interested in god, one way or another, but I think what there used to be were ancestors. They were the Dead who showed up. And people walked across the land and told the stories of their ancestors, and they told the stories of the ancestors who could help you find water and the ancestors who could help you find food and the ancestors who could help you find love and the ancestors who could find you healing and shelter. And those stories sustained people and located people and came up through the Earth. That's what it means to have songlines again—is to be connected to the stories we tell of the Dead and of the Ancestors in our lives. You know what we really we feel so isolated and so frightened and so alone and if we can begin to emerge from that loneliness and feel held and woven together in connectedness, we find we can do things we never knew we could do we really begin to be empowered by our intuition and our imagination in ways we never worked before. I do think we can kind of liberate ourselves from this ecocidal catastrophe.
[Musical break]
Ayana Young Well, I really started to understand ancestors in a different and more connected way from that response, so thank you for personally helping me in my own journey to come to some type of... I don't know if it's a sense of belonging but like touching-belonging or or seeing it differently. And yeah, there's gosh there's a few things that came up for me and 1) just I'm interested when you talk about God and religion and how you're kind of putting that in one spot but then you bring up the Dead and the Ancestors guiding us and I guess where I'm trying to organize my thoughts is that I don't think it's healthy for humanity to not have either religion, spirituality, connection to the divine to some type of capital ‘T’-truth whether we call it morality—like a postmodern way of living has not gotten us anywhere good. I don't think.
Perdita Finn I don't either.
Ayana Young But yet, we still need to connect with something that isn't just our selves, our life—this one life that we are experiencing at this moment. And so maybe ritual now—
Perdita Finn Can I offer a suggestion?
Ayana Young Yeah, yeah. And if you have suggestions, please, and if a ritual is a part of that suggestion to bridge this gap, I really would love to hear about it.
Perdita Finn Okay, so it's a big question, right. So I want to say that I like to think about ecology, not theology. If I can see it in the natural world, I trust it. Right? The moon, the mountains, the rivers, the stones. I trust stones very much. I trust trees a great deal and I trust the owls, implicitly. But abstract ideas that get me out of my body, out of my heart and into my head are very, very dangerous indeed, and often say that, you know, monocultures, mono agricultural experiences gave rise to monotheism, gave rise to Monsanto. Right? The idea of one god to rule them all—up and above, mighty, abstract—has been a catastrophic idea and it's a trauma response. It's our own trauma response of wanting to get out of our traumatized bodies that we've traumatized in the violence of civilization. And it's a traumatizing response because it has unleashed violence upon the world. Terrible violence. And, you know, we need rules and civilization because civilization itself is so violent, right? We need laws because we're, we've, we're living so out of alignment with the natural world. You know, what laws do the owls and the salamanders live by? Eat and be eaten. That's they live inside the ecological equation and they live inside an experience of belonging to the long story of their souls in to the fabric of existence that we've lost touch with.
I think the way back in, for me, is the intimacy and the intimacy of the Dead and the intimacy of those on the other side and to live inside mystery. And what I always say to people is ask for help with one thing today from one person on the other side and see what happens. Put it to the test. If it works, rinse, repeat, try again. Go slowly, ask for help. You will become an oasis of faith. And in a time when people are more and more frightened and more and more dangerous, because they're so frightened, that faith that you begin to cultivate within you will be a place where other people can find sanctuary. So I'm interested in creating those sort of small gardens in an oasis of faith for people to share and be together safely.
Ayana Young Wow. I want to hear more. And I yeah, I want to ask questions about deep time and thinking about the past. And then maybe we can think about the future.
Perdita Finn Okay.
Ayana Young In yourself deck article "Don't Look Back" you write, quote, "As someone who collaborates with the dead and thinks often about the mysteries of deep time, it might be easy to get stuck in the past the—endless traumas and objections of civilization or conversely, some bucolic moment when all was right with the world. On the one hand, I feel like I want to know about the past claim, its teachings and wisdoms with the help of my ancestors, but I certainly do not want to fall into an abyss of time," End quote. Whooo. I feel like this is so timely. And I'm wondering how can we avoid this armful loop of demonizing and idealizing the past ways that keep us trapped? As we, you know, try to heal?
Perdita Finn Well, as any addict knows the thing that keeps you addicted is resentment and that's a backward looking emotion, but the other side of resentment is nostalgia. And what I know about nature is: nature isn't nostalgic, nature's looking forward, and it's thinking creatively and wildly as it looks forward.
There's a place that used to be a gas station on the corner of two roads near me and the gas station was removed and no one of course wanted to move there because there'd been a gas station there. So it was just you know, asphalt that was left there at this corner. And I've watched over the years, you know, as the ailanthus trees moved in, and the chicory moved in and the dandelions moved down and, and how they're breaking apart—I love watching how they are remaking that spot of the world, you know, and it was sort of whisper encouragement and prayers to them and gratitude to them all the time. And I love watching the diversity of beings that are moving in and collaborating together to do something new with this space. And I want to be part of that collaborative experience, part of that wild, collaborative, fecund dance of becoming—that stepping into something new.
You know, the world is changing rapidly right now and maybe this is pulling into your question about climate change. Things are going wonky, right? Things are gonna get really, really wonky. And the idea that we're going to know what's best, I don't know what's going to be best, but I know I want to dance with what's happening and be part of the collaborative creativity of what's happening in the best, most interesting ways that I can and the most helpful ways that I can. And to do that I'm going to have to stay open to not knowing what happens next. It's not about returning to some past experience. It's going to be about stepping into something new. And that's often what happens you know, what I find where you—I learn when I pray with the Dead is that they often answer my prayers and very unexpected ways. And I learned to trust that that's where the magic is. The magic is because it happens in a way I don't imagine that's going to happen. Things can happen very unexpectedly when we begin to participate in that dance.
Ayana Young Okay, so I'm rubbing my hands together for this one, because it's...Yeah, I feel like so much of what you've shared has spoken to this really deep question in me that has been just gnawing at me a bit and it's about climate change, I guess. I don't even know if it's a question or more if I'm just observing, where we're at and what it even means now. But I guess I feel like I'm kind of in, like, a beginner's mind with it, again, of what is it even? And what are we doing about it? And I'm kind of, in a no mind about this. And I don't want to say that because of course, I'm still fighting to protect land, and I still am grieving the loss of our kin. But I guess, I'm gonna have a lot of guesses. But I'm thinking back to our conversation in ways where you shared about asking our ancestors, "How do we move through this? How do we grieve something that feels so huge and complex and overwhelming to our systems?" And so I don't even know what the question is for you. But I just want to sit with this—
Perdita Finn Yeah—
Ayana Young –thing in front of us and be like, what is going on?
Perdita Finn Well, I've had a similar experience, you know, my husband and I both started reading, I think climate.org Back in the 90s to give you some idea, okay. And we both started to feel like Cassandras right, you know, like, come on, doesn't everybody see this? Right? Doesn't everybody get what's coming? And the horror of Cassandra, right, is nobody believes her. The question I asked recently is, "Why doesn't Cassandra leave?" Why doesn't she just get out of Troy? She doesn't. She stays and she tries even so, even so, to try and get people to see. I mean, like you, how do I sit inside two things. So just the enormity of what's happening? I think a lot of people feel overwhelmed by the enormity. Right? What can I possibly do that makes a difference that matters? What do I do? What do I personally do? You know, every time we turn around, in my beautiful, liberal, earthy, hippie community, we're fighting one more development coming in trying to cut down 100 acres of trees. We fight off one group and another group comes in, you know, I mean, it's like, oh, my gosh, you know, it's like some, it's like some old movie where you know, every time we turn around, there are another enemy at the gates, right? And it feels that way. You know, you get one win here and there, 12 losses over there and it's just, it's just exhausting. [Sigh] What's going to give us the resilience and the joy to do what we need to do in this moment, even if we don't know what we're supposed to do?
And here's the face of... two things come to mind. One is an...it's come up in my head about three times, so I have to give it into it that I'm a Lord of the Rings nerd. My whole family is. And you know, at the end, when it seems like Sauron is going to win and all hope is lost, Eragon goes into the mountain and summons the armies of the dead and it's the armies of the dead who saved the day. And I think we're gonna have to summon the armies of the dead and the magic and we're gonna have to call on them at this moment. I don't know that we know what that's gonna look like and what that's gonna feel like, but what does it mean for each of us individually? I think, within each of us are the seeds of what we need. The Earth, the Dead, have a better sense of what needs to happen than we do. I don't trust the living to make these decisions very wisely. I really don't.
I get panic stricken when I think about, you know, what is it they say in 12 step groups, our best thinking got us here, you know, addicted and forlorn and destroyed. And I think that's, you know, our best thinking has brought us here. Our best thinking is the problem. And sometimes I think you know, that the whole rest of the Earth looks at us, like we're two year old toddlers at the end of a long day, and the kitchen is destroyed, and you just want to put them to bed, dammit, and get the house cleaned up. But I think the real challenge for each of us is to get out of our heads and back into our hearts, and to begin listening, and thinking about how the Earth—how the beings of this planet, the plants, and the animals, and the stones, and the mountains and the rivers—are asking each of us personally to collaborate with them. I think it's going to be in wildly individual and diverse and fascinating ways.
So you know, you're presenting us the diversity of people following their intuition towards what they need to do, whether it's someone figuring out how we can help bodies decompose, so we can avoid the American funeral system, or somebody else looking at how plastics are being microplastics being integrated into new ecosystems. Everyone's gonna have a different, a different answer. But it's going to come from inside each of our hearts in different ways and it's going to become about surrendering, giving up on the economy, on capitalism and money, and reason, and returning to an economy of faith and prayer, and trust.
You know, I think of, there's a man, a musician Sam Lee in England who sings with the nightingales, I don't know if you've ever heard of them. And, you know, he knows the nightingales are going extinct and he goes out and he brings people out to sing with them and to listen to their songs. And there's something so heartbreaking and beautiful and bearing witness to them and of course, trying to protect their remaining environments and wake people up to them and to know how to protect them, but also knowing about the futility of it. And yet sometimes I wonder about the magic that is happening with those songs of the people who listen to them, of the nightingales who hear them. We don't know what's going to make it through and how things are going to make it through. You know, maybe there are nightingales even now heartened by those songs, who will find a way to make it through and not go extinct. Or maybe those songs will be held and taught to another bird. I don't know.
I don't know, but I know that the people I see trusting their hearts and following their intuition and imagination are the ones that give me hope because I don't know what's coming and I know vast changes are coming. Huge changes, and they're going to be inexplicable, and frightening and we're going to have to figure out how to dance with them, lovingly, as mothers in the world. As mothers ready to help out, make a difference in the world. And I say mothers, I invite everybody male or female, young or old, those with biological children and those without to begin to experience themselves as mothers of every soul they meet in this world. And what would it mean and look like to show up that way each and every day?
Ayana Young Thank you so much, Perdita, that this has been just an incredible way to spend time watching the rain fall and I'm so grateful for you and your heart and your mind and the weaving of your words. Oh, yeah. Thank you.
Perdita Finn Thank you, Ayana, so much for having me on. It really is a dream come true.
Ayana Young Yeah, absolutely. It's been it's been just a gift, appreciate it
Perdita Finn And I thank you for all that you do in the world. It really matters.
Ayana Young Oh, thank you. Yeah. Bye, Perdita.
José Alejandro Rivera Thank you for listening to this episode of For The Wild. The music you heard today was by The New Runes, Left Vessel, Eliza Eden, and Arthur Moon. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson, Jackson Kroopf, Evan Tenenbaum, and José Alejandro Rivera.