Working With the Dead, with Perdita Finn
Who are the dead, and what do they have to do with our vocation, the climate, or navigating our modern lives? It turns out that they have a lot to do with all of those things, and in this conversation with writer and educator Perdita Finn, we dive into how wonderful and natural it is to collaborate with those on the other side.
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Megan: Welcome to A Wild New Work, a podcast about how to divest from capitalism and the norms of modern work and step into the soulful calling of these times we live in, which includes the call to rekindle our relationship with the earth. I'm Megan Leatherman, a mother to two small kids, coach, writer, and amateur ecologist living in the Pacific Northwest, and I'm your host today.
Hi friend and welcome. I'm so glad that you are here. This is our second episode in the autumn 2023 season. We are really in it now, at least here in the Pacific Northwest. It is fall. There's no doubt about it. The crows are very active right now as I'm recording. It's wet. It's gray. There's starting to become more orange and yellow hues on the leaves.
It's cold in the morning and at night, so the shift is well underway. And you might remember from last week's episode that our themes for right and... Now this season, our death and darkness, and I am really excited today to bring you this conversation with Perdita Finn. And I'll introduce Perdita more in a moment, but I want to say first that one of the reasons I wanted to have her on the show is that the way she talks about death about the afterlife and communicating with the dead is so natural.
She's natural about it, and she helps remind us that our ancestors all did this. They all communicated with their loved ones, known and maybe unknown to them in this life, but they all communicated with beings on the other side. And that may not seem normal to us nowadays, but Perdita's work reminds us that it used to be normal and that it's a completely natural thing, a good thing.
She reminds us that we don't have to be quite so gripped in fear of our own death. of our loved ones. We don't have to be quite so gripped in fear of the dead themselves, that there's so much beauty and joy in the magic and life on the other side of what we see here. And that can give us such a different perspective on things like climate change, our work and how best to navigate these times that we live in.
And you will hear that in this conversation. We talk about what happens to us when we die, who is on the other side and why they want to help us and how we can collaborate with them, with the dead. And we also talk about how Perdita's work with the dead has helped buoy her in the midst of immense climate change and grief and, you know, the natural sort of death and life and rebirth of this experience, this human experience.
So it's a very juicy episode, if I do say so myself. And I have learned so much from her book, Take Back the Magic, and from this conversation. And a lot of it lines up really beautifully with what I'm going to be teaching at Ancestor Speak, which is my autumn workshop on October 28th here outside of Portland.
We will be gathering in an intimate group inside of an old growth forest around the fire, and we will be practicing land and ancestor communication. You know, Perdita and I don't talk about this a lot, but I think of our ancestors as. You know, they literally become the land, their flesh and their bones become the earth that we walk on now.
And of course, there's a spiritual component that is woven in and so they're not just material anymore. But when we communicate with the land, we are communicating with our ancestors. The land has soul. The ancestors still have souls. They are also in the material dirt and soil that I can touch the branches that I can see and lean up against.
And so this workshop is going to be about how to do that. I know that you want to do good work in the world. I know that you are gifted. I know that you're here for a reason. And we talk about that a lot. We think about it a lot. But this workshop is a chance for you to sit down on the ground and have a different, deeper conversation with the land and with your ancestors so that you can become who you really are and who you really need to be in the world right now.
So I would love to have you if you're in the Pacific Northwest and want to join us. Again, it's on Saturday, October 28th. It's a full moon in Taurus. It's a lunar eclipse. It is one of the most potent points in the year, and it's going to be a full day of Really, I think magical land and ancestor connection . So you can learn all about it at a wild new work dot com slash ancestor dash speak, or at the link in the show notes.
I also want to remind you that I've got a new page up where you can pitch in a few dollars once or a monthly to support this show and my work. It's at buy me a coffee. com slash Megan Leatherman. And I want to say thank you to Kerensa , who was the first person to become a monthly subscriber last week.
Thank you so much, Kerensa . And thank you to all of you who support the show, either by pitching in financially or sharing it with your friends or writing a review. This is a community effort and all of your support really helps make the work sustainable.
Okay, so let me introduce Perdita to you formally.
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.
Okay, my friend, I think you are ready for this. Let me read our opening invocation and we will dive in. So wherever you are, you can just take a deep breath and fill that belly, fill those beautiful lungs of yours. Feel your life, feel the life inside of you, the vitality animating your heart and your blood flowing through your veins.
You are here. You are alive. You are in this moment in your life. May each of us be blessed and emboldened to do the work we're meant to do on this planet. May our work honor our ancestors, known and unknown, and may it be in harmony with all creatures that we share this earth with. I express gratitude for all of the technologies and gifts that have made this possible, and I'm grateful to the Cowlitz and Clackamas tribes, among many others, who are the original stewards of the land that I'm on.
All right, Perdita , thank you so much for being here today.
Perdita: Thank you so much, Megan, for having me on. It's really exciting.
Megan: I think it would be good to start by just kind of orienting us to your sort of life's journey has kind of been like in terms of relating to the dead and could you give us kind of an overview or whatever feels salient right now about what you've learned about what happens to us when we die?
Perdita: Well, I grew up, as many people did in the 1960s, in this kind of capitalist materialism. You know, neither of my parents was religious. In fact, my father was actively an atheist, you know, wouldn't let my grandmother take us to church or anything like that. So I grew up in, but it was a very psychologically oriented culture, which is, you know, very much making kind of, you know, we, we need to be very frightened of anything that might look like mental imbalance, or I had a grandmother who'd, you know, been in and out of mental hospitals for depression. Of course, I later found out her real story when I read her diaries, and it seemed like an entirely appropriate response to her life.
So I did not grow up in a culture with any folk traditions, anything, anything to root myself in a relationship to the dead.
My mother was a gardener and maybe that was the greatest teaching of all. My mother was an extraordinary gardener. She could make anything grow. I once asked her towards the end of her life, you know, what's your secret? She looked at me and she said, I just put them where they want to be. And she wouldn't have admitted it, but she was in conversation with the plants.
You know, she was in deep, intimate conversation with the plants. Once I, when I asked her towards the end of her life, what do you want me to do when you die? She said, I don't know, feed me to my roses. She understood. The ecological equation of life, which is whatever eats is eaten. Let my body become food.
I've eaten of this world. Now the world will eat me. And I think that was a great gift she gave to me. I actually began actively praying to the dead during a fight with her. After my daughter was born, I write about it in the book and you know, it's one of those fights about mothering that are so toxic and inevitable in our anti mothering culture.
And at the end of it, I found myself sitting in this house that my mother designed as a greenhouse with lots of windows and lots of plants, feeling, holding my own daughter and feeling, as I'd felt my whole life, the presence of beings I couldn't name and walking up into my mother's room in the dark. I was crying after this terrible fight we'd had, and realizing that my non religious mother had filled a whole wall, photographs of the dead and the very beings I had been feeling she had brought through and something fell into place for me at this moment: that this was a relationship for women, particularly, but for everyone beyond religion that rooted us back into a conversation, not just with the unseen world, but with the natural world, and that was over 30 years ago. And since then, I have been collaborating with those on the other side and experiencing really profound miracles and guidance.
I'm not psychic, I'm not a medium or an intuitive, and yet I wrote a book with a psychic who would say everyone's psychic. And so I think that's what I, one of the things I want to help people recover, is the language of the dead.
Megan: Yeah, no, that's beautiful. I remember that scene in your book and how powerful the image of that wall being covered in photos of her dead being there right in the bed when you were in the, in the dark. Yeah, thank you. Maybe you could help us get to know the dead a little bit and share what your experience has been like in terms of what they want, what they're available for, why they might want to connect with us. Something really interesting you cover in the book is also that they can, you know, we don't understand like time and consciousness and energy completely, so they can be in multiple places at once.
But as we connect with our sort of beloved dead, what do you think they want or need are available for?
Perdita: Well, when I talk about the dead, I don't say ancestors. I use, I'll use ancestors sometimes, but I use it in a non biologically deterministic way. Because when I talk about the dead, I'm talking about all the dead.
All the dead since life began on this planet. I'm talking about the multiple beings who have created the ground upon which we literally stand. We stand atop the bodies of the dead. They are the soil out of which we have grown and bloomed. And so many beings have brought us to this moment. So we can call on our grandmothers and grandfathers.
We can also call on our grandmothers and grandfathers from past lives. We can call on our pets. We can call on our teachers who might've been our mothers in our past lives or our friends. I do litanies of the dead and I teach people how to do litanies of the dead and call upon them sort of magically and playfully.
I don't want to leave anyone out. I don't want to be left out. So, among the dead in my litany, of course, are, you know, grandmothers and grandfathers, friends, neighbors, relatives, pets. But there's also the woman who died in my friend's apartment building in New York City, and no one found her body for a week.
She had no friends and no family. And my friend didn't even know her name. He just saw them taking her body out. And he felt sort of terrible that he'd never known her name. And I remember her because someone needs to remember her and remember the people no one has anyone to call upon them. I don't know why I remember her, but she matters.
Her story came to me. Her soul entangled with my soul in a way I don't understand, but which I can bring love to.
My son went to college and I would go to pick him up and he was never ready, and so I'd have, I'd go wait in the graveyard. I love to walk through graveyards. There's an old graveyard near his dorm.
And I would read the names of the tombstones. My psychic friends said the dead love to hear their names said out loud, so I'd read their names. In fairy tales, we know that, right? That a name has magical power. You know, the oldest mantras in the world. are a salutation and the name of the deity, Om Namah Shivaya, Hail Mary.
So I go, you know, Hey Bert, Hey Ellen, you know, I walked through the graveyard, saying hi to everybody. And what's amazing to me is there was one grave I always remembered, Elaine Bartlett. And I would think of Elaine from time to time for reasons I don't understand. And when I would worry about my son at college, was he eating? Was he sleeping? Was he okay? You know, I would call on Elaine to keep an eye on him. She was right there. Now he graduated over seven years ago, but Elaine and I are still keeping an eye on my son together. And I don't know who she was. I don't know what my relationship was to her. It's a mystery, but it's a mystery whose pleasures and joys and collaborations I can experience.
I can't explain it, but I can activate its magic.
So what do the dead want? The dead want to love us. The dead want to play with us. They want to love us. What does it mean to die? I just read this great quote from Mark Twain about who he says, we all ought to start dead because the dead are the only ones who know anything.
And it was his very funny, sly 19th century Protestant way of trying to make sense of that reincarnate wisdom that exists within all of us, right? The dead remember everything. And that's what it means to die. It means to see the, what I call the long story of our souls. Beyond a single life. It is to remember the complexity and intimacy of our entanglements with each other.
You know, perhaps when I die, I'll know who Elaine Bartlett was to me and to my son or who that woman was in that apartment building. For now, it's enough to call on them. What I know is that they're willing to show up and express love in my life and bring blessings to me. And I think all of the dead are willing to do that.
And I mean that - all of the dead. People sometimes get freaked out when I say that, they get scared. You know, what about the people who were monstrous when they were alive. And let me tell you, I've seen plenty of monsters in my life. Real monsters. But it's only been among the living. And there's been a huge bait and switch with civilization.
Civilization is the great, silencing of the dead and the demonization of the dead. In fact, during the European, what I, what I call the European gynocide , the witch craze , as it's often called, the single thing that would most put women in danger was speaking to the dead. This was the action, more than herbalism, more than midwifery.
If you spoke to the dead, if you were having a conversation with your mother, who was on the other side, this could get you tortured and murdered. Why did capitalism, on its rise to ever more homogeneity and power, want to silence the dead? And make the dead fearful? Make it dangerous, scary, horror movies, filled with horror movies?
Because if the dead are alive, everything's alive.
The trees are alive, the animals are alive, the stones are alive, the earth is alive, and it's not just a natural resource we can destroy or turn into our short term benefit. When the dead come alive, the whole world comes alive. It is the radical reanimation of all that is.
It's been a real project for a long time of civilization to silence the dead and to make people scared of the dead. Max Dashu , the feminist scholar, documents in her marvelous book that, you know, in the beginning of Christianity, the priests were always writing to each other like, how do we get the women to listen to us and stop going to the graveyards?
It's a problem. I say go to the graveyards. Leave the priests behind.
Megan: Wow. What an amazing call. I feel like just very activated in my body, even listening to that. Like, oh my God, you're so right. Never put those things together before.
Perdita: It is big in our bodies, right? And it is, you know, women's bodies have really been hurt.
And so reactivating this takes a lot of courage. It takes a lot of courage to begin. I began this work very privately, very slowly, I didn't tell anyone about it until it started bursting out of me. It took a while. I kept trying to find a container for it, Megan. I kept, you know, I tried Buddhism, I tried Christianity, I tried Sufism, I kept looking for a container and, and it didn't, nothing would hold it, but the earth holds it.
Megan: One of the things I loved about your book was, in my own work, I think a lot about how, like, in our DNA, we have a lot of information and the capacity to remember what life was like before civilization, and that those still, you know, we evolved in that way, so, like, those capabilities are still there under the surface somewhere, but then when I read your book, it got me thinking, like, Not only do we have the DNA, I think you might say that we also have like, soul memory, that I might have a soul that lived before civilization and knew what that was like.
And that's like, kind of blown my mind.
Perdita: Yes. And we can reach back to those souls and to those mothers. That's wisdom. We live in the information age, right? It's all clear, it's all there, it's all the facts are arrayed before us and we feel completely muddled. So much light we're blinded by. But wisdom was always portrayed as dark.
It's that dark source of knowing. That womb source of knowing. And yeah, we have, we have ancient memories. We know how to do things. Now we don't all know how to do the same things, and we don't all have the same memories. And so it's nice to collaborate, right? You know, I teach a workshop I call Time Travelers Transformations, where people start accessing that wisdom they know they've had.
And you can see it. You know, anyone who's really spent time with kids knows they come through with stuff, right? My prayer is that my parents in my next life recognize me . I mean, not just my talents or my fears or my personality. No, they go, Oh, it's Perdita. We know Perdita. Let's get her going. She loves to write. We got to read her a lot of stories. You know, they know me. And this used to happen in indigenous culture. This was the sustainability of indigenous culture. Tyson Yankaporta, in a really marvelous book called Sand Talk, talks about what it looked like to live in a culture that values circularity versus linear thinking.
And he talks about what does it mean when your great grandmother is going to be reborn as your child? How do you treat your great grandmother? How do you treat your child? There was a, one spoke with a wonderful anthropologist who'd been one of the first people to be out with the Kung in South Africa along, um, many decades ago.
And, You know, he'd been trained as a, you know, Western anthropologist, he was supposed to go in and kind of map out the power systems and the lineages of authority, and he couldn't do it. And what he discovered is that while people were out walking across the land together, Okay, one minute a 25 year old guy who was a good hunter was sort of leading everyone on some part of the adventure, but an hour later it would be an eight year old girl.
And what it was that each person had gifts, memories, interests, talents that they'd been accumulating for lifetimes that the community knew how to recognize and cultivate.
Megan: I mean, it's just kind of shocking to imagine what it would be like to grow up in a place like that instead of feeling like we're starting from scratch every child.
Perdita: Right? I mean, look at a Mozart. Mozart comes in, right? And he's, he's writing, you know, concertos. He does his first symphony by age eight, but he's done like some serious music by age four. Where does that come from? That's curious to me. He's chosen a father who can recognize his musical abilities, who can get him going, who's ambitious for him.
But how many lifetimes had he spent as a bird? How many lifetimes as a whale? How many lifetimes was he silenced? You know, that's one of the things we don't know too, is like, we look at a life and we think it's been nothing but misery and failure. A single life can be hard to make sense of, right? My best friend's mom was a really beautiful, really talented, smart woman. And she was a hopeless alcoholic. She died of her alcoholism at age 51. She never got sober. But when I wanted to get sober from sugar, I went to her and I talked to her. A lot. And she got me sober. And I pray to her every morning. And she's my sponsor on the other side.
Because she knows what it looks like when you don't get sober. She's been my, my, my fierce supporter on the other side.
Megan: Yeah. You sort of alluded to something there and I'm curious what you would say about how much choice we have when we, you know, as souls choose to incarnate. Do we always reincarnate? Do we always get to choose?
How much do we choose? Like, what's your sense of any of that?
Perdita: My sense is we've lost a lot of this lore. We have so few stories about reincarnation in our culture. We've lived inside the short story, for what I call the short story, for a long time. In fact, our foundational text, right, begins with Genesis, the creation of the world, and because it begins, it ends in apocalypse.
And we've been stuck inside that pretty nasty story for some time now. It's not a very generous... merciful story. And even, you know, when this rabbi comes along and says, Oh no, everybody can be reborn. He gets turned into a singularity instead of a ubiquity. Right? He's trying to resurrect that ecological knowing that everything comes back and yet it gets suppressed.
So I think we've lost a lot of the lore. How does it work? Time and space are sort of a mystery. Time and space aren't linear. They're folded over each other, tell us the physicists, like origami. We can feel this. We meet someone and we know we've met them before. We stand in a place and we know we've been there before.
We have a dream that's two places at once. And there's a person there who's two people at once. And we can feel these overlaps, these palm sets that occur all around us. I think we have many lives. But do we want to come back? Here's the thing. My favorite movie about reincarnation is Groundhog Day by Harold Ramis.
I think it's the wisest, most generous, most brilliant piece. I mean, it should be our only gospel, we need it so desperately. I'm serious. I'm 100 percent serious. And Bill Murray is this, you know, irritable asshole who doesn't want to be reborn into this life in which he's being reborn into perpetually over and over again.
But the shift that happens in that movie, is he makes a choice. Finally, he surrenders, he stops trying to game it, he stops trying to be a god, he stops trying to be cool, he stops trying to be nihilistic, he stops trying to do anything, and he says to himself, Alright, I'm stuck with eternity, what now? He takes a piano lesson, and he's been running into the piano teacher, she's been the first person he's met, every day that he's repeated, and some people have hypothesized for 20, 000 days, And finally on the 20, 000 and first day, he goes and takes a piano lesson with her.
And when we next see him, he's a jazz musician. He's an ecstatic musician who loves life and other people and where he lives. Love Is not only coming out of him, it's coming to him. Finally, he's been incapable of attracting love until he himself has found what it is to love life. And what does he say at the end of the movie? I'm not giving anything away, you can still watch it. "Let's live here."
What would happen if every human being on this planet said "let's live here?" Let's be reborn here. It's only because we imagine we're on a conveyor belt to somewhere else that we've been able to destroy this planet. We're being reborn.
We're coming back and we're coming back to the world we've made. We're coming back to the children we've raised. We're coming back to the environments we have cultivated. We are coming back to what we have made in the world. How would we live if we knew that?
Megan: Thank you. Yeah, that's such a rich and different perspective.
Perdita: Everyone wants a rocket ship to Mars, right? They want aliens to come down and rescue us from ourselves. We're here.
Megan: Yeah, that's so different if I imagine that I'm in a much longer term relationship with this place than just this life. That really shifts. And yeah, like you said, before the dead know that and understand that.
And I can see how working with them or being in relationship with them could also teach us a lot more about how to be here in a good way. So maybe if you're open to it, I'd love to offer listeners some of your favorite tools for connecting with the dead. You've mentioned some of them already: naming them, just acknowledging them. And then without giving too much away from your book, maybe just some examples of how they have communicated to you. Your book is just full of these like really amazing stories, but any tools you could give us to sort of start this conversation if we're new to it.
Perdita: Absolutely. So I often say that my work is very, very simple and it's so simple that it kind of confounds people.
We want, you know, some incredible program or system or levels of mastery, right? Like, you know what I mean? Like everyone, you know, the graduate degree. No, this is, this is so simple. If you make bread, you take water and flour and you mix them together to make bread, right? But anyone who's tried to get a sourdough starter going knows, well, there's a little art to it, right?
And that's why I teach workshops. They're sort of my bread baking with the dead, you know, how to get your sourdough going. And how do you do that? There are two ingredients. One is to collect the dead and know they're real. Collect your dead. Know their names. Don't make them amorphous. Nature is diverse and unique.
You know, an aster is not the same as goldenrod, is not the same as chicory. These are different flowers with different flavors and different smells and different healing properties. So get to know the names of your dead. And then start collaborating with them on your life. How do you do that? This is where the bubbles start to come in the sourdough.
I always say start really small. Stay, go really slowly and stay close to the ground. We don't have to save the world yet. What you want to do is get a little miracle juice going in your life. And how do you cultivate a miracle? How do you get a miracle, that culture of a miracle bubbling? Ask the dead for help.
Now, this is really hard in our modern culture because we are trained not to ask for help. I begin my day fretting. I worry about everything. I worry about my children. I worry about my health. I worry about my husband's health. I worry about my home. I worry about my animals. I worry about my friends. I worry about everything.
And then I turn over each and every one of those worries to someone on the other side. And I let them take care of it and see what magic happens.
So I had a student I loved. Her name was Nancy Senior . Oh, she was just wonderful. And she showed up and here was the crazy thing. She looked just like my grandmother.
And then she opened her mouth to speak, and she sounded just like my grandmother. And it turned out she'd been born in the same northern Massachusetts mill town where my grandmother had grown up. So I'm telling you, like, like, I just heard, ah, that accent, like, it just went into my soul, right? And there was something so earthy, and she had this big poster of John Lennon behind her, and it said, Imagine, and she was just, she, the dead were so real to her, and she was so much fun.
And she died unexpectedly during COVID. Just broke my heart. Oh, but before she died, she told my son about this wonderful farm. She knew he wanted to be a farmer. She had this CSA she went to. My son is now managing this farm, okay? But he was looking for a new place to live. And it's hard to find a place to live in Boston, outside in the suburbs.
And I said, Nancy, Nancy, you got to do this for him. You've got to, I can't do it. You found him a job. Could you find him a place to live from the other side? He found a great new house, and it's about five minutes from where she used to live. And I worried about that. I turned it over to her. I have teams of the dead on all kinds of projects in my life that I do.
My book comes out tomorrow. So the first cover, the cover is so beautiful for my book. Like, it's just like to die for, right? It's just like, it's like you want to eat it. It's so luscious. But the first cover sucked, and they sent it to me and I had this moment of horror like, Oh my God, no one understands this book. No one will buy this book if they see this cover. And I'm having a two year old temper tantrum, right? Like, what am I going to do? And I'm like, I'm freaking out. But I've trained myself. My first job is to ask for help.
So I thought, who can help me solve this problem? I come from a lot of writers , a lot of great artists in my family. I'm like, who's the artist who can really solve this problem? And out of the blue, I remembered my middle school art teacher, okay? Richard Mello, Dick Mello. And Mr. Mello - robust enthusiast of a guy and he, the art room was at the center of our middle school and he kind of presided over it a little bit like Jabba the Hutt, but in this kind of totally loving way.
And he also was the DJ for all of our middle school dances and the advisor to the newspaper. You know what I mean? He was like, he was like the power source. And he, you know, he was a great art teacher. But he was a great maker of events, and life force, and joy, and he popped into my head. I wonder if Dick Mello is still alive. He had died on that day, a year ago. This happens to me all the time. Like, someone pops into my head, I go, oh, okay, okay, so he's showing up for me, confirmation. So I go, Dick, please, Mr. Mello, come on, we can do better than this. So I write my team back and say, you know. I think we need something, you know, the words kind of come to me, you know, that's nice and friendly.
And a week later they come back with that cover. I mean, yes, it was a good creative team and there's a marvelous artist, Charlize Day, they brought in from England. But the magic happened and also my anxiety came down. Working with the dead is the best anti anxiety medicine I know. Everybody's so anxious in our culture. We think we're in charge of everything.
Megan: Oh, I love that story. Yeah I can vouch for the cover, and I love that it's like even the book itself is infused with this sort of magical Coming to be and actually I want to read a quote from that. This is about midway through your book, you wrote "each and every one of us has psychic abilities, but most of us were conditioned as we grew up to tune out the messages we were receiving from the other side. How do we relax our sensory gating so that we can recover our natural intuitive powers?" I wanted to hear more about what you mean by sensory gating and how we can relax some of that to let more of this in.
Perdita: You know, this is a real interest right now. You know, that's why people are so interested in psychedelics, isn't it?
They want to relax and open up the gates of perception, the doors of perception. And my family says, you must never do psychedelics, Mom . It's too much. You're too much already.
And the fact is, I don't need them. And you don't really need them. You know, we don't need to rely on them. You know, if you're going to have to do ayahuasca every weekend, something's not working. You know what I mean? You want to get so you don't have to do it every week. You might need it once to show you what's possible.
It's very interesting to me, but sensory gating, you know, babies are having a psychedelic experience, right? I mean, if you've ever spent time with a baby, I mean, they're seeing it all. They're remembering it all. They're seeing it all. And slowly, the blinders are going to come up so that they can function in the world.
Language becomes both a way of connecting to the lived reality of the day to day, but also it's shutting down other languages we've known, right? So it becomes both a way of connecting and shutting down. And we become grounded in certain contexts of day to day life to function, right? There's a fantastic book about time travel I love that's about sensory gating, and it's called Time and Again by Jack Finney, and it's in this marvelous time travel story I'm fascinated by time travel. Time travel is not achieved through a machine, It's achieved through a state of mind. And so the idea in this book is that if all time is happening simultaneously, how do we access different times?
It is just our conditioning. And so they take this guy and they say, we're going to train you to think like someone from the 19th century. And you're going to wear clothes that smell and feel like the 19th century clothes. You're going to read 19th century newspapers. You're going to eat 19th century foods.
And they put him in this room at the Dakota, this old apartment house in New York that looks out on a part of Central Park, unchanged since the 19th century. And he's living this life, stuck in this apartment, trying to, like, pretend to be someone from the 19th century, which is what everyone's doing when they do cosplay, right?
We're all trying to, like, drop into another time of feeling and remembering. So it's a very imaginatively fun book. Then one night, it's snowing outside. He can't stand being in this apartment one more minute and the whole experiment isn't working and he walks out into Central Park and a sleigh goes by, then another sleigh.
He looks around and he realizes he's shifted time. So magical, right? But I think we can all do that. And how can we all do that? We don't necessarily literally drop in, but fiction writers do this. Fiction writers are psychic. Poets are psychic. Artists are frequently psychic, right? They're seeing visions, right?
They're seeing other things. And we open up our possibilities, our intuition. We begin to trust The images that we see. I wrote a book with a psychic, The Reluctant Psychic, and I spent a great deal of time with her. And I really wanted to understand. She is a being whose sensory gating is so open, it's very hard for her to function in the world.
As a child, she could not tell the difference between the living and the dead. And she terrified her parents. She terrified her teachers. Other children were frightened of her. The dead would come and hold her sometimes because she would be so scared and lonely. She's had a rough life, but she's like, you know, in a different age, she would have been in a temple and we would have all gone to her to ask for her help.
She's a serious oracle and, you know, a real seer. What I realized talking to her about her process and watching her work with snapshots of the future, but that future - she's seeing a ten dimensional moving picture. And she's really good at grabbing those snapshots. But they're still just snapshots. So for instance, she told my nephew, I sent him to her as a birthday present when he was 18, and she said to him, Oh, you're going to work in the Ukraine. You're moving to the Ukraine. You're going to be speaking Ukrainian with Ukrainian people. He's like, what? I don't want to go to the Ukraine. He came back and said, yeah, she was really good. She said some things that were really interesting and helpful, but it was sort of this nutty stuff about the Ukraine.
Eight years pass, he gets a job as a social worker in New York City, and they send him into an area to work in New York that's known as, yes - Little Ukraine. All of his clients speak Ukrainian and he's having to speak Ukrainian. So she saw that, do you know what I mean? She saw the snapshot. She couldn't, she didn't understand the context of it at all. And I also think, you know, these aren't necessarily, the future is mutable. It's changing all the time. So I think that, I often say Oedipus, you know, Oedipus goes to the psychic, the Sphinx, and she says, you're going to marry your mother and kill your father. And Oedipus has a radical freak out, right?
Like this is the worst news ever. And so he runs away from home. He's in such a freak out state that he kills this guy he meets on the road. He marries this woman, you know, he doesn't know he's adopted. Big screw up Oedipus. What he should have done with this information is stayed curious and gone slowly.
He should have gone home and said, mom, dad, crazy thing just happened. What do you think this means? And his mother would have said, well, I'm not really your mother. And his father would have said, well, I'm not really your father, but you are adopted. So that means you're going to have to proceed very carefully, and the future might've changed.
We all have snapshots of the future.
9/11 is today, we're recording this on 9/11 . How many people saw snapshots of 9/11 before it happened? Many, many people did. I myself did. And I didn't include that story in the book and actually ended up getting exited out. But I've had precognitive dreams my whole life and I didn't know, many people do. And they're very common and yet we're taught to ignore them. And I got sort of frightened by them. And I had a dream once of nuclear apocalypse. I saw a nuclear missile going into a city about to explode, and it was filled with people. And in my dream, I get inside the nuclear missile with all these people, and they teach me this mantra they're all saying.
I'll keep that private because, you know, it's their business and mine, whatever. I've said the mantra ever since that day in 1996, because it was something they gave to me. And what I knew is that these people were inside this force of destruction, but they themselves were not destructive. There's some grace going on.
And I remember, you know, I write all my dreams down. So this dream was written down. September 11th, 2001, I'm up at the computer and the first plane goes through and I run downstairs. And, you know, in those days you turned on the television, you turn on the television and watch the plane go into the twin towers.
And I realized it wasn't a nuclear missile, it was a plane. And I'd been on the plane with those people. And they had given me that mantra, which I said obsessively that day, with them. But I know so many people who had dreams and visions before 9/11 happened, right? Now, Eric Wargo, who's a really interesting journalist, has written a book about precognition. And he says that we send our own memories back to ourselves, not to frighten ourselves. But to inform and guide us. I knew what to do that day because I'd been told what to do four years earlier, which doesn't need to just be in a state of prayer, and I'd been told what prayer to say.
Megan: That's an incredible story. I was wondering if there might be some 9/11 connection here when we were scheduled. Yeah. Wow. Thank you for sharing that. Does it ever become like too much for you? Do you ever feel like you need to shut it off? Like, all right, I'm not taking messages today. Or I mean, I feel like we're already, there's already so much to absorb, you know, materially, but then you've also got this, you know, channel that you're turned into. And I'm kind of joking, but for some people it does become too much. So how do you sort of work with that?
Perdita: Well, I'm less in control, I'm not in control anymore. I'm in the back seat. I think in the beginning I felt like, okay, maybe sometimes I'm sitting in the passenger seat, but I can still reach over and grab the steering wheel or put my foot on the brake.
But now I'm in the back seat and I'm having so much fun. And this is one of the things I want to say about working with the dead is, is how much fun I have. I've been writing about climate change for over 30 years. How is it that I can read all the climate reports, and I do, I really am pretty clear sighted about what's coming, and I'm still having so much fun.
I have a daughter who has an incurable illness. I'm still having so much fun. I have all those worries I wake up with every morning, fretting like mad. I have so many helpers. You know, is there ever too much love? Once love begins to flow to you and through you, it's so delightful and so glorious one wants to become a channel of love.
Writing has gotten easier and easier and easier. I mean, I do have too many books. The dead have really got me on a program, let me tell you! The writing, that's my medium. And, you know, some people, it's art. Like, I have a friend who does painting. Her name is Suzette Clough, and she's just, she does this thing called visual medicine, which is teaching people to paint with the dead. I mean the art that pours through her. You know, and another woman I know who's writing a book was speaking with the flowers. And your life changes. My life has changed very, very radically.
And it doesn't mean that hardship has disappeared. I've gone through some very hard, dark places, but I've always felt companioned, always felt guided. And I know that I can go through really dark places and the dead will be there showing me where to put my feet.
Megan: Yea, I mean, they have an awareness and a way of being that's so much different than, you know, your therapist or like the people we love in our lives, but they just have the same limited perspective that we do.
And I don't feel very advanced or far in my own journey with the dead, but I have enough glimmers, you know, that I want to keep going. And I think your story is one that is really inspiring. It is safe and so joyful to let go of more of that. And just, yeah, I guess, I don't know, I don't want to put, give you words, but it sounds like it's just sort of becoming a channel for something much larger that wants to come through you.
Perdita: Yeah. And also, I'm not frightened of the dead. The dead are so nice. Even the monsters are nice. They really are. I mean, I don't fear the dead. I do fear the living. The living are a piece of work. The living are exhausting, right? The living are so much work. We are so much work because we have forgotten how connected we all are, how intimate we can be.
And I do think that We're entering a time that can be very frightening. There are a lot of things to be frightened of right now, whether it's natural disasters or, you know, economic woes or the lack of community and family and intimacy that's so prevalent in our modern culture. And the antidote to fear is always faith and love.
And that's not a trivial thing. That, how do we slowly, daily, daily, build a foundation of faith? And love within us is impervious to fear. How do we become oases of faith?
Megan: I'm curious, this is like kind of a small question, but it keeps coming up, So I'm going to ask it anyway. I'm curious about like offerings to the dead. You know, it sounds like just wanting a relationship is primary. You mentioned that as like the first just know them, but like your friend who helped you with the book cover or, you know, your former teacher, like, what's your response then?
Perdita: I told you a story and I said his name out loud on this show, right? That's a gift. That's the offering. That's a gift. You know, we, when someone dies, Oh, I'll hold you in my memory. And that feels like really like terrifying. Like everyone's going to forget everything. Like it's a blessing.
It's a blessing. But people don't forget stories and they don't forget names. I'm fascinated by the cult of the saints in medieval Europe. No one remembers that St. Anthony was a famous theologian, but a thousand years after he died, people are still calling on St. Anthony to help them find stuff. Right. Like they still know his name. And so you tell the story and you tell the story, you know, someone else listening to this is saying, well, I'm having a little trouble with my art project. I think I'm going to call on Dick Mello for some help. Right. Yeah.
So the offering is a story and it's The telling, but I do also make offerings. So you see my ancestor altar behind me, it's probably an ancestor wall. I always offer my mother her favorite perfume before we begin. She wore a, you know, you know how women of her era wore, had a scent. So I always offer her scent.
And then I always pour her a little bourbon. She loved the bourbon, maybe too much. I give her the good stuff. And I always buy the good stuff for her. Tobacco used to be an offering to the ancestral realm, right? That's what it was used for. These wonderful smells that would invite the dead close. Incense was invented to call the dead in.
My daughter, who just finished a novel about Mary Magdalene, used to burn spikenard and smell spikenard, which was the smell of Mary Magdalene, to call her in. You know what I mean? Like, so offerings, the dead don't have bodies, but we can use our senses. Sounds, prayers. I mean, I teach people a lot. There's a lot of lost lore about this stuff. Like, what is it? Mantras. are summoning spells for the dead. How do we offer them mantras and prayers that they may remember or sounds they loved? We offer them their favorite foods. I often offer, I will make a meal that was a memory. We, you know, we remember favorite recipes, right?
In many traditions around the world, you set a place for the dead at the dinner table. You know, you, you leave a, you open the door for Elijah at Passover. You pour Miriam's cup. We make space for the dead in our lives, and there are many, many ways to make space for the dead. We can go on pilgrimage. You know, I've got my grandfather on a project right now.
His name was Valentine. Valentine was a failure at love. He had three wives. It was all, all marriages ended in, you know, disaster. And I put him on my daughter's love life. And if he delivers, st. Valentine, he hasn't yet , but I will go to his grave - and it's a real schlep to get to his grave. But that's one thing I often offer, you know. I worked with a lot of, my daughter's trying to sell her book, I live in a town where a lot of famous editors had lived and writers, so I went to them all and asked for her help with the publishing deal.
And I promised them all a drink of whiskey and a rosary if they got her book published. And when they did, I had to go around with a bottle and I poured out wine and I'm praying for everybody. But you know, it's been a blast. It's fun. It's fun to go on pilgrimage. I love going on pilgrimage. I always have adventures when I go on pilgrimage.
Megan: Oh, that sounds very fun. Is there anything else you feel like is important to share, either about what's in the book or just on your heart right now?
Perdita: Well, just that each and every person who's listening to this has someone on the other side holding a blessing for them, holding a gift, a wish fulfilling jewel that they're offering to you.
And all they need you to do is ask for it.
Megan: Beautiful. Yeah. I know everyone listening would benefit from just those little nuggets of support and validation. Yeah. And I love how you talk about and write about that what might come back is could surprise you or it's not going to come in ways you expect, but to be on the lookout for these ways of sweetness coming in.
Perdita: Yeah. As I always say, thank goodness, my prayers to marry my high school boyfriend were not answered.
You know what I mean? Like the dead know what's best for us. Sometimes we don't, but they'll bring us, you know, I took, I wrote all these young adult novels. I couldn't get any of them published. You know, I felt like I was hitting my head against the wall. But the moment I stopped hiding and started really writing about what I really cared about, everything became easy.
Sometimes you feel like you're hitting your head against the wall, but the dead, that doesn't mean that, the dead aren't a vending machine. They're not like, You know, spitting out the candy bar you've asked for, they're inviting you to look around you to see things you never knew were possible. And sometimes, you know, the other thing is, and I write about the long story of our souls.
Sometimes we pray for healing and we still die as everybody dies, but we don't know what happens in the next round. How many blessings were born? How many answered prayers came to us in this life? And my book also writes about that because I do believe my, you know, my husband and I both have a lot of access to our past lives and we don't think we've been together for a long time, but we did find each other in this life.
And I do pray I find him in high school next time around. Wouldn't that be fun?
Megan: I love that. Thank you. So where can people find you, the book, your workshops? Give us all the details and I'll put all the links in.
Perdita: Sure . I try to make my work available in a lot of different ways to people. So I, I'm on Substack on takebackthemagic. com and I have a free Substack, I write every week on it. I write a lot. Like I said, the dead are pouring through me, so I write a lot. Big conversations going on. I also have a paid sub stack where my newest books, all those books the dead are making me write , I share with my audience. And that paid sub stack includes a monthly conversation about the dead.
So you can just come to that. I offer a lot of different workshops. And they're on my website. TakeBackTheMagic. com. I'm on Facebook and I'm on Instagram and I'm very approachable.
Megan: Great. I'll put all of that in the show notes so it's easy for people, but thank you so much. This has been so rich. I've been so blessed by your book and I feel like I'm just on the precipice of like really going further thanks to some of these like very helpful perspectives and stories.
So thank you. A million times, really.
Perdita: Well, thank you, Megan. And I want to ask you a favor. Is that okay? Before we go, I am on my, you know, publicity stint this Fall with, you know, lots of podcasts and, but I'm asking if you would send somebody to my publicity team from your dead. Is there anyone whose name I can write down?And I'm going to create a list of all their names and do a ritual with them on the day of the dead.
Megan: I love that. Yeah. The first one that comes to mind is my grandfather, Harvey Hayes. He was a lot of fun. And I think he would bring some sort of dark humor to the experience.
Perdita: Thank you for Harvey Hayes. I will write his name down. And if you think of it and can send me a photo of him, I'd love it because I'm going to do a whole board with all their pictures. I'm having a Mark Twain fest right now. And so dark humor is much appreciated.
Megan: Okay. Yes, I will. He'll love that - being on your team. Oh, thanks Perdita.
Okay, I hope you loved that episode. Thank you for sharing this space with me and Perdita. I really encourage you to check out Perdita's work. She has lots of accessible workshops. Her substack is wonderful. The book is incredible. Please get it. My jaw was open like most of the time.
Just the stories are so rich and mind blowing. So if you liked this episode, you are going to love her book. I also want to remind you that if you want to Put this work into the ground in your body with other people, with me, join us at Ancestor Speak on October 28th. It's going to be a really, well, I don't know what it's going to be, I can't say for sure.
My intention is that it is a really magical experience that, similar to the summer solstice retreat, just really clicks us into the power of this season and I'd love to do that with you. You can also pitch in to support the show at buymeacoffee. com slash Megan Leatherman. I hope you take such good care.
I will be back with you next week with another really juicy conversation. I hope you're well and I'll see you on the other side.
Show Notes:
If you enjoyed this episode, please help get it to others by subscribing, rating the show, or sharing it with a friend!
To connect with Perdita, visit:
*takebackthemagic.com
*wayoftherose.org
*Follow Perdita Finn on Facebook and Instagram
*Take Back the Magic on Substack for essays and gatherings on working with the dead
For more information about Ancestor Speak, click here: https://awildnewwork.com/ancestor-speak
To chip in financially and support the show, visit: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/meganleatherman