Beyond Reincarnation
to reclaim the belonging of deep time
[featured artist: Suzette Clough of Visual Medicine]
Over five million years ago a wall of water poured from the Atlantic into the eastern plains of what would become the Mediterranean Sea. The water rose across the land, in some estimates by thirty feet a day. In just a few months this great wall of water pouring down, known as the Zanclean flood, subsided to a trickle. The world had changed.
What of the creatures—the plants and the animals—whose worlds disappeared beneath this new sea?
When human storytellers spoke of the great floods were they only recalling the inundations of the melting Ice Age 8,000 years ago—or do our very souls remember changes and cataclysms seemingly lost to time but embedded in the very foundation of our being like seashells turned to stone? I walk into my backyard and pick up a rock and see the elegent spirals of an ancient brachiopod reminding me that while I live in the mountains, these mountains were once an ocean delta, carved by waters rushing to the sea. Has this land haunted my dreams because a thousand years ago I walked amid these stones? Or was I once a chestnut tree, part of a felled forest, a vanished grove, a species now almost extinct, who grew deep roots into this land and grew this soil with my very leaves? Or perhaps I have not been here for 350 million years since the tides lapped against the shore, and I was then very small indeed, settling myself forever into the sands that would become bluestone, the very ground beneath my feet. Perhaps my soul was once held in the spirals that are this fossil I now hold in my hands.
We all contain multitudes. It is the first law of the conservation of energy and matter: nothing goes anywhere. But it is also the first law of the cosmos: everything is always changing, everything is always becoming something else. We have all been here before but we have not only been human beings before. In the vast epochs of deep time, the time of life on this planet, we have all been so many, many different bodies.
When I speak or write about the eternal return, I rarely use the word “reincarnation.” Of course it’s exactly what I’m talking about—how our souls return to bodies, to an incarnational experience, again and again and again. Except that when many people use the word, they are imagining only a very limited human experience. I was married against my will in medieval times. I was once a priestess in Egypt. I was burned as a witch. Unfortunately, such limited connections are usually meant to either confirm a sense of our own specialness (because as modern human beings so few of us, disconnected from nature, feel special or worthy) or our special victim status (because as modern human beings we have all been traumatized, in one lifetime or another, by the violence that is civilization.)
But “civilization” is a very short story (8,000 years + or -) in the history of our species and barely a single letter or a vowel sound in the long epic (billions of years) of life on this planet. It’s not just that we’ve all been here before, it’s that we’ve always been here and always will be. If that does not make us feel special, as special as any other soul on this planet, then we have no idea who and what we really are. If we feel traumatized, perhaps we need to reach back into the wisdom of lives and selves that remember ways of being long before we cut ourselves off from the generative guidance of our own long stories. We are more strange and mysterious beings than we can possibly imagine.
Sometimes I emerge from a night of dreams like a deep sea diver surfacing again into the air. I cannot translate all that I have seen and known beneath the ocean into the language of this one kind of English-speaking primate. But I know those depths are within me and I can summon them even so to guide me through my days and through times that feel ever more cataclysmic.
Our souls remember the waters rising, the meteors falling, the continents colliding. Our souls remember that we died and were reborn, that species vanish and new species emerged, that the world has always been turning and changing through the epochs. Most of all, though, our souls remember each other.
When we recover the long story of our souls through deep time, what we really recover is all of the beings who have loved and cherished and known us through the ages. Every one of those souls—from brachiopad to chestnut tree to homo sapian—had a mother, and every one of those mothers is waiting for us to call on her for help, for succor, for consolation. I step outside and know that the dirt beneath my feet holds the bodies of mothers who remember me even when I do not remember myself, holds the hearts of mothers who called me to this land so they could help me recover the treasures hidden in my soul, holds the dark wisdom of goings and comings, departures and reunions.
Whatever is coming in the near future to our day-to-day lives, to this idea of civilization to which we’ve become overly attached to and identified with, to our planet, it will involve change. Sometimes those changes will be impercetible and slow, sometimes, like that wall of water rushing across the land five million years ago, they will be sudden and unexpected. But whatever happens we have within our souls just what we need to navigate such moments—and to find each other, again and again and again.
I am offering seven week journey into the mysteries of The Long Story of Our Souls through The Shift Network, beginning on July 14th. If you register early, you will also get a bonus conversation between me and my daughter Sophie Strand on what it was like to grow up in a family that not only acknowledged such memories but encouraged exploring them. Also included will be bonus videos with author Kate Below (author of Word Witch), taking us on a writing adventure into the animate everything and historical fiction writer Hadas Knox on the wonders of time travel.
please check out the work and workshops of featured artist Suzette Clough.
Perdita Finn has been a seal, a chestnut tree, and all manner of bi-valves. In this incarnational reality she is a writer, a woodwife, and a witch. Her books include Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World, Mothers of Magic: Summoning the Wisdom of Our Ancestors, and with her husband Clark Strand, The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. She lives with her blood kin, her soul kin, her fur kin and her odd kin in the Catskill Mountains amid moss and fern, bears and bobcats, old stones and the old ways.
