Perdita Finn: Sitting with the wisdoms of darkness, death, and decay (ep422)
“Everything grows in the dark. Babies gestate in their mother’s wombs in the dark. Seeds grow in the dark of the earth. We can only see the stars in the dark of the night. And we’ve so banished darkness... People [talk] about walking towards the light. I would say, ‘what about walking in the dark?’”
What could it mean to heal our relationship with the dead, the decaying, and the dark in order to move towards more liveable futures? What possibilities might arise when we shift from cultural narratives of fear, discomfort, and disgust with these unseen worlds — to ones which honor the wisdoms that they may be able to offer?
In this episode, Perdita Finn draws on her book Take Back the Magic to invite us to find kinship and guidance from beings that have passed.
Through a renewal of ancient practices and rituals, Finn invokes the reclamation of our bodies, inner wisdom, and personal mantras that keep us whole and grounded during the troubled times of modernity.
Subscribe and listen to Green Dreamer via any podcast app and read on for our episode transcript.
About our guest:
Perdita Finn is the co-founder, with her husband Clark Strand, of the feral 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, spirit workers, and healers, she apprenticed with the psychic Susan Saxman, with whom she wrote The Reluctant Psychic. Her book Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World is an intimate journey through her recovery from these lost ways.
She speaks widely on how to collaborate with those on the other side, on the urgent necessity of a new romantic animism, and on the sobriety that emerges when we claim the long story of our souls. Her next book is The Body of My Mother.
Artistic credits:
Song feature: My Rebel Spirit by Adrian Sutherland
Episode-inspired artwork by Hazem Asif
Dive deeper:
The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary a book by Clark Strand and Perdita Finn
Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World a book by Perdita Finn
Otherlands: A World in the Making, a book by Thomas Halliday
Sand Talk, a book by Tyson Yunkaporta
Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age a book by Clark Strand
Expand your lenses:
To support our show and tap into our extended and bonus episodes, join us on Patreon today!
transcript
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Perdita Finn:
As modern people, we treat death like it's somehow an accident or a mistake.
Every living thing dies, every animal, plant, mountain, and rivers die, continents die, planets die, stars die, universes die, and everything sleeps. But everything wakes up again, too.
And when we're living in a relationship with the natural world, I often say that I am a practitioner of ecology, not theology. We know that the moon waxes and wanes. We know that the sun sets and rises again. We know the seasons turn. And we know that all of nature turns into vast cycles all around us. And that the understanding that birth, death, and rebirth, to live inside those vast cycles of comings and goings and reunions is to have a very different relationship to dying and death. I sometimes say to my children I hope I live a long time. I hope I get to hold a great grandbaby in my arms one day. And that's my prayer. But I don't know what this story is, how it's going to unfold.
I always say to my children, if I take off, it's because there's more I can do for you on the other side than I can do on this side right now. And yet I also want those I leave behind to know what my prayers are for my next life, that my life isn't over. My collaborations with my loved ones are not over. They're going to unfold differently, and I'll be returning.
My prayer is that when I am reborn, my parents next time around are going to know who I am. Not just know who I am in terms of my affinities and fears, but know me as Perdita. I want to hit the ground running. I think that we used to live like that. I think in the wonderful book, Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta, he talks about what it means to live inside a culture where your great-grandmother is also your child. It completely transforms the way you treat your elders, and it completely transforms the way you treat your children.
I'm talking about these great cycles when we live inside circles instead of dominant lines — straight stories that begin with Genesis and end with apocalypse.
When we let go of that merciless finality of the short story, it transforms our relationship to everything.
It transforms our relationship to birth. We know our elders, an extraordinary man I knew until he was 70. I've met him as a four-year-old child. He is now a child who's also my elder. We are all each other's mothers. We're all each other's children. So many changes and our relationship to death changes drastically. It doesn't have to be a mistake. It doesn't have to be a failure. And we're continuing differently. So, I often ask people, what is the prayer that you want the people at your funeral to hold for you for your next life.
What if we could imagine that the story wasn't over, but the story was continuing? I think everything would change. And this isn't about death practices, about where we bury the dead or how we bury them. I think we'd also change that too. I think we were very frightened of the bodies of the dead. This past week a deer died in my yard unexpectedly, abruptly, a young mother deer. I'd known her all winter and she got trapped in my garden and got panicked in the fenced and threw herself against the gate instead of walking through it and broke her neck and, it just broke my heart, and some guys arrived to work at my house. They saw her there and they asked if it would be okay to take her and eat her.
And I'd been feeding her all year. I told them that they could take her. I don't understand the mystery of it, but she had come to feed them. I had fed her and now she was feeding them and we all feed each other. And I hope one day my prayer would be that my body could be laying out in the woods to be food for the coyotes and the vultures and the mice and the beetles and the worms. We've forgotten that we who eat must be eaten. And yet maybe we will be, I think when people used to call themselves the salmon people or the reindeer people or the buffalo people, it wasn't just this is what we eat, or what we feel an affinity for.
We knew that we died and were reborn as the salmon, deer, or buffalo that would feed our kin. And our kin knew that when they ate that food, they were eating their ancestors. And that transforms our entire relationship to death, to life, to eating, and most of all, it transforms our relationship to love.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah. Our worldviews very much also impact policy because I feel like there are different parts of the world where there are even legality issues around people being able to make their bodies “edible”, or yeah, like edible to whoever they want to gift their bodies to after passing. But all of this speaks to the power of cultural narratives our worldviews and how we relate to the world. And I also wonder if it's not so much that a lot of us have lost our engagement with the dead around us, but more so that we've lost a sense of relationship with the dead around us, as in inevitably death is all around us, this wood that my chair was made of the fibers of my clothes and so on.
So instead of the bodies of my dead kin or beings that I have a relation with becoming something that I then see as a gift or offering into my life. There are a lot of bodies of beings around me that I have no relation with. So, I wonder if it's kind of like the idea of interdependence or intradependence in that it's there and ever-present. But part of the problem has become that a lot of people in cultures of individualism, start to not be able to recognize that interdependence and that worldview of dissociation then shape their decisions and behaviors accordingly.
So then in the sense of death, it's not so much that a lot of people have lost engagements with the dead because it's inevitable, but more so a sense of dissociation and this urge to invisibilize or do away with and not see them and then of course that might then also impact our decisions and policymaking and behaviors and worldviews.
Perdita Finn: We're very lonely and we're very scared. And that's kind of what it means to be a modern civilized person. We're lonely and scared, and we're the species that traumatizes itself. And we feel alone. Look at it, we put babies alone in cribs and rooms themselves to cry it out. What animals do that?
Babies cry and they want to learn that someone answers their cries. Babies should be close to their mothers and should have their heartbeats regulated. And so even from the moment of birth, we are encouraging isolation.
One of the things I found that's transformative for people is not an ideology, not a belief system, not some abstraction in our heads, but a fundamentally simple and lived experience of rootedness and entanglement.
The way that I teach people to know the names of the dead and to know the names of the living, to know the names of the birds and the trees and the weeds where you live, and to know the names, collect all your dead. And I talk about the dead, not just ancestors, but, friends and neighbors and pets and animals. When I include my dead, it includes the hemlock tree I used to play under as a child near the library. It includes the woodchuck I found dead by the side of the road.
It includes all beings whose deaths have come to me in one way or another. And then to feel their reality, what I discovered is that when we ask the dead for help, not general help, not abstract help, but really specific concrete help in our lives, we can begin to experience the dead as actually present and available to us. And I had a student for whom this happened this week. I had given her the assignment, just ask for help with something silly and practical, something you have not been able to solve. And ask someone on the other side for help. And she couldn't think of what to ask for because we're trained not to ask.
And finally, she realized she had some problem with her house, and she hadn't been able to find anyone to help her fix this carpentry problem in her house for whatever reason. You couldn't find a carpenter, couldn't find a handyman. Everyone she called was busy or too expensive. And finally, she put her grandfather on it. She said, Grandpa, help me fix my house. And within an hour a friend of hers had called her with the name of a handyman out of the blue. Within two hours he was there, and the problem was solved for almost nothing. And what had happened was she realized her grandfather was real. And when her grandfather became real, all the dead became real.
And she began sobbing. And when the dead become real, the living become real. The trees are there to collaborate with us. The flowers are there to collaborate with us. Everything wants to collaborate with us. But we have to listen, and we have to ask for help. And we also must know we need help and that we're worthy of help. And when the world becomes real again and the dead become real again, I think everything changes, and fear begins to vanish.
I mean, if you ask me what working with the dead in this way, I begin my morning fretting and worrying. I'm a great worrier and I have children and pets and animals and friends, I worry about everything, and I articulate those worries and to each worry, I give it to someone or sometimes a team on the other side. And I begin my morning with assignments and connections and intimacy, chatting with everybody on the other side.
And I end up stepping into my day without anxiety and fear. And the thing that the dead will bring you is an unshakable foundation of faith so we can become an oasis of faith in these times of fear. We'll know if you go outside and you touch the dirt, wherever you are, I don't care where you are, if you're in the city, go touch the dirt near some tree planted into the sidewalk. Touch the dirt.
Dirt is made up of the bodies of the dead — dead insects, dead stones, dead ocean creatures, dead birds, dead beings, and dead plants. They all want to collaborate with us to help re-green and dream.
They want to help us with those green dreams of the planet. When we begin to know what we want help with, we also begin to know what other beings want. And what other beings want is not so different from what we want, which is healing and love and collaboration and joy and connection and intimacy and grandchildren. And they want the world to thrive and bloom. And what is it like to begin to collaborate with that world again? That's a little far from policy. I don't know. I'm not sure policy is going to save us, but I think the dead will.
Kamea Chayne: It's all connected ultimately. You've mentioned before that “we have been in the Age of Enlightenment since the 18th century, and we've become addicted to light, clarity, and information. What does it mean to step into the darkness that's filled with mothers who've loved us from lives we can't even remember, who even now are reaching out to hold us?” I am curious to hear you elaborate on our addiction to light, clarity, and information because I feel like so much is encompassed in this framing. And yeah, also just how does this relate to our socio-ecological spiritual crisis?
Perdita Finn: My full disclosure, my husband wrote a book about all this called Waking Up to the Dark, which is about our addiction to light. As a civilization is defined by its addictions and perhaps one of its worst addictions has been its addiction to artificial light. And that addiction has fueled our sense of primacy and progress.
One of the things that's fascinating to me about this quote, is that enlightenment is what it emerges out of and what must happen before it can fully come into being. And what had to happen was that women had to be murdered across Europe. I mean, one of the fascinating things about the European gynecide is it didn't happen in the Middle Ages of the Renaissance. It happened in the modern era. It happened from the 1500s to the 1700s. It happened on the eve of what we call the modern world. And it didn't happen, ‘in backward places’. It happened in the seats of education. It happened in the most educated areas of Germany, France, Scotland, and England.
The places with the best universities committed the worst atrocities against women. And the thing they most often accused women of doing was speaking to the dead. And that is fascinating to me. More than midwifery, more than talking to plants or talking to animals, it was talking to the dead that could have you sexually tortured and murdered. And that great silencing, of course, doesn't end, it just gets transferred to the Americas and gets enacted upon the bodies of black and brown and indigenous peoples here.
The modern world is built on that silencing of women and the dead and the dark. And we become fixated on information and our intellectual power. ‘I think therefore I am’, says Descartes, right? Just before he cuts out the vocal cords of animals he's going to dissect.
It’s the good men of Harvard who commit the atrocities in Salem. It's not teenage girls, it's educated men. And enlightenment has become this fantasy that we can live in our heads instead of our bodies, that somehow our bodies are bad, particularly women's bodies, and the bodies of brown and indigenous people are bad and dark places are bad, wombs are bad. We torture people by leaving the lights always on. And so many of our problems and issues come from light, which disrupts our hormones, disrupts our sleep, disrupts our dreams, disrupts our intuitions, and disrupts our lives.
Everything grows in the dark. Babies gestate in their mother's wombs in the dark. Seeds grow in the dark of the earth. We can only see the stars in the dark of the night. And we've so banished darkness.
And it's so intertangled with our fear of the unseen world and our fear of women and women's bodies. I mean, people are always talking about walking towards the light. I would say, well, what about walking in the dark? When I walk, I love to walk in the dark. My husband and I love to walk in the dark. We often go walking at night. The thing I love about walking in the dark is you really must feel your feet. You must feel the earth beneath you.
And much of our fear of the dark is our fear of human beings in cities, in ‘civilized’ places in the dark, and the terrible things they do to each other. It's not our fear of the dark out in the woods. Out in the woods in the dark, it's lovely. I once bumped into a bear, we kind of startled each other, but then we were all okay with it.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, I've personally been very fascinated by darkness and reframing narratives around darkness. I was reading about dark adaptation and how even researchers are now looking into how spending time in total complete darkness or just darker spaces in general, activates our different senses and also makes people less afraid of uncertainty and the unknowns because it forces you to engage your bodies and receive and register the world in different ways, in ways that are kind of suppressed by our more mainstream ways of living. Just towards sunset, turning on all the lights and never really experiencing darkness until it's time to turn the lights off to sleep.
But what would it be like to engage with darkness more, not just during sleep as a passive way of engaging with darkness, but like when we're awake and just experiencing the world in darkness?
Perdita Finn: So this all resonates with me. And you should come to our house. Because people are always sort of astounded. I said we don't fix lights when they break in our house. And the other thing is it changes your relationship with the sun. Because when you live in darkness, and for most of the time on this planet we've lived in darkness, we've learned your relationship to the moon and the stars and the sun is so different, right? You feel in relationship to them. And that sunrise in the morning feels so beautiful and so delicious.
And yet deep darkness, we've also lost, because we've lost darkness and we've so privileged clarity and vision, we think we can know everything. It's part of our human supremacy, isn't it? That we don't live inside the mystery anymore. To live in the mystery. Most of what happened to our souls before we were born into this life is a great mystery. Most of what will happen around us are great mystery also. We sit on a planet inside a galaxy, most of which we don't know. Most of the cosmos is dark matter. 80 percent of the cosmos is dark matter and we don't know what it is. And there's something about, I try to encourage people, if you want a mantra, how about ‘I don't know’? And what is it like to say ‘I don't know’, but I can feel my feet on the ground, and I trust my feet to find their way to the next step. And I can trust touch again.
And we live inside this disembodied pornographic culture, and it's certainly not making us feel happy or kind to each other. The lights are going to go out. We know that, right? They're going to go out. I have every faith in it. Will we know how to see in the dark when that happens? And will we trust the dark when it arrives? It always arrives. The sun always sets.
Kamea Chayne: Engaging with your work has reminded me of our past conversation with Dr. Vanessa Andreotti when she talked about needing to sit with our shits. When I look at our present times and dominant cultures, there does seem to be a sort of urge to bypass or repel things like decay, decomposition, the dead, and the dark.
And I lived with a composting toilet for two years having to haul around and deal with and compost my waste. And I do want to get back to having that setup because even though it wasn't the most pleasant or convenient thing, I think having to engage with the process of compost, whether my waste or rotting food compost, or having to engage with darker spaces at night with limiting electricity or having to sit with and engage with dead plants and animals. I can't even describe it or put it into words, but I think all this discomfort that a lot of mainstream society tries to do away with, I think it does something to the human consciousness or sense of relation and responsiveness to the world.
So, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on what impacts it might have for people to bypass these messes and often unseen yet integral parts of life. And more broadly speaking, what you might have to share regarding a mainstream society that seems to be death-phobic or being scared of or uncomfortable with the dark, the dead, the decay, and all the shits.
Perdita Finn: My husband and I say we write about the dark, the dirt, and the dead. And I always say, I don't want to leave anything out. The mess, I want to embrace the holiness. The mess is where things grow, right? And the natural world looks like I love praying too. And there's this corner up near the town where I live that there used to be a gas station and like many former gas stations that left a polluted toxic area, and nobody wants to grow anything. So now it's just a lot of broken cement and graffiti. But all these plants have moved in, Ailanthus and Chicory and Dandelion. They look at this mess and they say, okay, what are we going to do here? What are we going to grow? Let's get going, gang. And how do we play with the mess? Nature is messy. Nature is not pure. Nothing grows from purity.
And civilization has been obsessed with purity from the get-go, right? Because purity is about control and it's about that, the body is so messy, and usually it's women's bodies that are the messiest, right? I mean, one of the things I've been doing a lot of research on lately is when human beings first begin to create art. It's clear that the first art comes when women, when they're menstruating together, would go, they'd separate themselves from the community. They'd all be menstruating at the same time. And they'd take themselves away from the community so they wouldn't attract animals with their blood. And we find the first artist, those wonderful ochre handprints and the tectiforms of dots. The male scientists coming in couldn't figure out why there were all these 28 dots on the walls of the case.
They were surprised to discover that the handprints were mostly women's hands. And so those women, their menstrual blood, we treat menstrual blood like it's the worst waste of all, right? It's an unmentionable. And it was our first artistic substance. We knew that it wasn't making babies, so let's make a world with it. And we took it and we painted our bodies and we painted the cave walls and we began to paint worlds into being, made magic happen with that blood.
Eventually, and this is fascinating, I just discovered this, it seems like when they stopped using menstrual blood and started to use stone ochre, vultures would paint their eggs with ochre, that is red clay, to camouflage them. And so, I suspect that watching the vultures, who are, very symbolic, one of the oldest symbols of that kind of Kali goddess energy, creator destroyer, they began also mixing their blood with red ochre to create cave art around the world. So, the messiest substance, the substance that's considered the most impure is where we learn to make things from. I sometimes I am obsessed with the horrors of our penal system and of what we do to prisoners to torture them and put them into solitary confinement. One with the lights always on which drives people mad. It's the worst torture.
And then the other is that there is no nature, right? And frequently when people are put in that situation, they'll say, oh, they took their feces and smeared them across the wall, as if somehow that justifies torturing these people this way because they're sort of barbaric or monstrous. But I sometimes thought, I have this idea like, no, they're trying to make life happen. They're trying to make dirt happen. They're trying to make something grow in this awful sterile environment. And that impulse is not a sign it's their reaction to the horror and the torture to try to figure out how can I make dirt to make something grow here where nothing is growing so I am very pro shit and pro blood and pro mess and pro-growth pro compost.
Kamea Chayne: The title of your book is Take Back the Magic and that can sound abstract for people just coming across it and, in many ways, perhaps it is an invitation to tune into our less nameable or less ‘intellectualizable’ ways of knowing and being. Something that honors our intuitive and spiritual senses. But what does magic mean to you and how might it offer us guidance or remembrance, especially during these troubled and difficult times?
Perdita Finn: Well magic to me is completely organic and completely natural. We think of magic as technological, right? It's going to be something it's going to be some 3d techno exciting thing out of wizardry that happens, our communications are magic our airplanes and our transportation our magic our health care is magic, but the truth is that we have forgotten what real magic is. I'm so fascinated by the fact that placebos work something like 50 percent of the time, and yet we don't study them. That's magic, right? Sugar pills work.
My father was a country doctor, and he used to keep sugar pills because they worked. He would say to someone, this has been in the old days, the pre-bureaucratized days. He'd take them out to someone and say, 'I shouldn't give them to you, but I'm just going to.’ There's a lot of theatre involved, right? And a lot of trust-building. We had real relationships with these people. And he'd pass them the sugar pills. And two weeks later, they'd come and say, doc, those were amazing. I'm all better. And they would be all better. Eventually, the communication systems are going to fail. The technology is going to fail. There aren't going to be airplanes and cars and the drugs are already failing. And we'll need to remember the old ways of collaborating with the plants, collaborating with the unseen world to make magic happen. When I say magic, I see magic, and miracles happen to people every day. Every single day people write me, and they say, ‘Oh, this works’.
When you bring me your miracle, you’ll see what I'm talking about. Bring me the knot you thought was un-tie-able and offer it up to the dead and see what happens.
Or it might be something as simple as I don't think I can solve this problem. Offer it to the dead. See what happens. And then tell me whether magic is real. Don't believe me. Try it out.
Kamea Chayne: Perhaps this is part of the problem, but I find it difficult to see people at climate conferences or political meetings or decision-making spaces talking about magic or intuition or our relationships with the dead or taking anyone who brings these invitations up seriously.
So, what would you like to share regarding how we talk about things that are difficult to conceptualize and intellectualize because they do exist more so in intuitive and spiritual realms that we don't even fully understand ourselves? Like you said, ‘I don't know’. And that might be embodied differently by different people as well. And that also may not be able to be fully put into words.
Perdita Finn:
Part of the great ‘I don't know’, the great mystery, is I also don't have to be in charge. And I know I'm not in charge. I don't want to be in charge.
There’s a saying in 12-step groups that, our best thinking got us here, which was for example, addicted and hopeless. And our best thinking has brought us to a world on the brink of extinction. And I sometimes think that the entire natural world, the plants, the animals, all the other beings that are, look at us and go stop for Christ's sake, just stop. Stop everything.
And I think we are going to be stopped. And I pray we are, I align with them with that. I often ask people, what are you praying for? Are you praying to reform and fix this ecocide catastrophe? Are we praying for it to collapse? Because that may not look like we imagine it looks. Sometimes you pray for healing, and you get very, very sick indeed.
Sometimes you must know that life isn't a straight line. It's a great circle and those circles are regenerative and merciful but sometimes the short story looks very different than we imagine. I don't think any policy is going to prepare us for what's coming and I do think they're marvelous people doing marvelous things and collaborating with the natural world in ways that are surprising and beautiful I pray that we get set right as a species. I mean, and I think we will very soon. I think there are forces much bigger than us underway that we, and we need to be a lot humbler. I don't see civilization stopping of its own accord.
I want to collaborate where I am with the natural world and know and be ready for enormous changes that are coming. I talk about learning to ask for help from the dead. But I learned to ask for help from the dead when my daughter was diagnosed with an incurable genetic disorder. And when you're a parent and the medical system has failed you and there is no hope then you learn about prayer and you learn that you can walk through the darkness of a minefield and find your way to small daily miracles that make a difference. I always say: you want to learn how to survive climate change?—go talk to the people who are surviving climate change. They're living in garbage dumps; they're living in refugee camps. And believe me, they believe in magic.
Kamea Chayne: Well, we are ending our main discussion here, but I would love to hold space for you to share anything else that's presently lingering on your mind that I didn't get to ask you about, as well as your calls to deeper inquiry or sensing for our listeners.
Perdita Finn: Well, we got very serious here, but I think one of the things that has happened when we begin to collaborate with the unseen world is we also begin to have more fun. I don't think we have a lot of fun anymore. And the dead are tremendously fun. And I think one of the things that will make a difference is pleasure and to not feel so anxious and not feel so alone and not feel so frightened.
I think when people feel free of these tremendous burdens and anxieties they have and this tremendous isolation, the world wants to have fun with us, too. It wants us to fall in love. It wants to fall in love. We've forgotten how the world wants eros. It wants rejuvenation. It wants pleasure.
I hope people can know that their mothers and their grandmothers and the trees and their pets are there for them each day in very small practical ways and that that can transform everything to know they're real.
Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, we are ending here, but we will have references and resources from this episode linked in our show notes at greendreamer .com. And for now, Perdita, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's been an absolute pleasure to explore. Yeah, a lot of these topics that should be explored more. For now, though, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?
Perdita Finn: I always like people to find their wisdom from within. You have more wisdom within you than you know. You've had more lives within you than you know. You've had lives as plants, as animals, as other beings, and each of those lives has collected and composted wisdom within you that you can access when you begin to access your relationship with the other side.
