Ancestral Treasures

all that we need for the times ahead

[art: Gustuv Klimt “Tree of Life”]

With the temperatures rising, the bombs dropping, and the news each day more and more dire in all directions, it is not surprising that so many human beings are connecting to their experiences of ancestral trauma. We are, after all, the species that has traumatized itself—with slavery, subjugation, colonization, misogyny, and abjections of all kinds. Begin exploring the fates of various generations and we will, inevitibly find, addictions and abuses not to mention genocides and massacres. The story of civilization is nothing but an endless accounting of violence. Civilization is traumatic and traumatizing. How, after 10,000 years of accumulated horrors and woes, can we possibly heal ourselves, heal the wounds still bleeding and soften the scar tissue in our souls?

Only by remembering how old and long our story really is.

Civilization is not all that we are. Our species has been around for tens of thousands of years, primates have been around for millions of years, mammals even longer, life itself on this planet, a life our souls most surely remember, is billions of years old.

We have ancestors who were never traumatized, who remember how to revel in their intimate entanglements, who even now are waiting for us to access the many gifts they have bequeathed to us.

Civilization tells a short story—the rise and fall of nations, the life and death of individuals. But life tells a long story in which we are all coming and going and returning to each other again and again and again. Each of our souls is a thread woven into the vast embroidery of eternity. When we begin to pull on the threads of our souls we can feel the entire fabric of existence begin to shimmer within us. Yes, the story of each of our souls holds trauma but every soul also holds treasures.

The greatest healing from the violence of civilization arises when we claim the long story of our souls through deep time.

In this story our lives are not just the byproduct of accumulated horrors but the blossoming of ancient seeds. Yes, our souls have seen collapse and calamity, extinctions and annihilations, but we have also had lifetimes swimming in oceans of joy, millennia singing to the sun as it rises, eons of love and intimacy and belonging. The story of civilization is not the only story of our species, and our species is not the only story of our soul.

Within our intuition and imagination, our dreams and intutions each of us can access almost unimaginable gifts from lives past. We can feel held by ancestors—human and animal, plant and fungal, stone and water—who even now remember who they are and know who we really are. They hold the map that can lead us to the buried treasures within us.

If we call on them.

They are calling to us even now hoping to lead us back to the all the worlds and ways that we have forgotten.

[art: the paleolithic grandmother found at Dolni Vestonice]

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In February I will be offering a month-long journey into The Long Story of Our Souls. What if we could reclaim the inner knowing that we are always coming and going, departing and arriving, being born, dying, and returning to all that is? All Zoom sessions are recorded and sent to all participants. Find out more and register here.

This has been the free version of my newsletter. I also have a paid subscription—that includes excerpts from my current book-in-progress The Body of My Mother as well as a monthly zoom conversation about our collaborations with the other side.

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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. They are currently at work on their next book together Circles Not Lines: Spiritual Community Beyond Patriarchy.  To find out more about her devotion to “ecology not theology” visit wayoftherose.org

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. Perdita Finn now teaches popular workshops on Getting to Know the Dead. Participants are empowered to activate the miracles in their own lives with the help of their ancestors and recover their own intuitive magic. Her book Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World is an intimate journey through her recovery of 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.

She lives with her family in the moss-filled shadows of the Catskill Mountains.