Dead Reckoning

Navigating in the Dark with the Ancestors

[art: Sarah Taylor]

Dead reckoning was a form of navigation for those times when you were at sea without landmarks and even the stars were not visible to guide you across the waters. No maps. No sextant. No electronics. Just where you were and where you might be headed. You took your bearings from wherever you were and from where you’d come. It wasn’t exact but it got the sailors of old across vast unknown oceans to new lands.

It’s where I find myself every day. In the dark. With only the dead to guide me.

In truth we are surrounded by darkness on every side. Not just the darkness of a starless night or a gray day with too many clouds. The darkness that lies behind us and before us, the vast unknowable mysteries of our souls—where they’ve been and where they are going. We make sense of our place in the spheres by the moon, the sun, and the other planets but in truth most of the cosmos is dark matter and our little blue earth is surrounded by darkness on every side.

Where are we really? Where are we truly going? How do we get there?

I bring these questions to the dead with my heart as my only compass.

Each morning as the sun shines through the trees into my bedroom I take stock of where I am. What is worrying me today? What concerns do I have about my children, my home, my health, my partner, my pets, my friends, my extended family, my community, and the land upon which I live? Those concerns—which are responsibilities and devotions—bind me to this earth as surely as the roots of a tree connect it to the ground. They tell me where I am, today, which in dead reckoning is the only calculation you need.

Each of these concerns, worries, anxieties, frettings—call them what you will—connect me to my own life and to the other side. I turn to my dead to help guide me towards unimaginable solutions, unexpected magic, real miracles. They can see in the dark. They have the perspective I do not—of the soul’s long story through deep time. They see the big picture. The see within the mystery. They are the mystery. Seeds germinate in the darkness of the dirt. Stars shoot across the darkness of the night.

I was worried last week about the cover of my upcoming book, Take Back the Magic. The art department at my publisher had generated something that felt generic and disconnected from the actual subject matter of my story. I called on my husband’s grandmother—a force to be reckoned with—to embolden me to speak up to my editor about what I really wanted. Then, for reasons I can barely explain, I remembered Richard Mello, my middle school art teacher.

He was a giant of a man—in body and spirit, who held court in an open-aired art room at the center of our building. Everyone loved him, and for all different reasons. He brought forth from each of us creativity we didn’t know we had. He also advised the school newspaper, which I edited with him, and was the DJ for our dances, sitting up on stage, and encouraging our early teen bacchanals. I had a sense he could get me a cover that had popular appeal. Mr. Mello, I said, I want a cover that captures all that my book is, that’s better than anything I can imagine.

Within a week my editor was back in touch. They’d hired an English artist, Charlotte Day. Did I like what she’d envisioned? Absolutely! It conveyed the deep green magic to which I am devoted. [but I’m not allowed to share publicly yet] Better than that, everyone I should it to loved it. I could not have imagined this land to which I had arrived. I had been sailing in the dark. But Mr. Mello knew where we were headed and he knew how to get us there.

Dead Reckoning.

There will be times in our lives when there is only darkness. We will know defeat or despair. Or perhaps the lights that blaze through our modern world will at last blink out. The grid will go down and the internet with it. No more google maps. How then will we find our way?

If you’ve learned how to navigate with the dead, you will be ready for those times.

You cannot imagine the lands you will sail to when you begin working with the dead. Most of the cosmos is “unexplored” by our imaginations. But the dead, all the dead, know what is out there and know where we belong within those mysteries.

The dead will guide us where we need to go. The dead will bring us home.

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This is the free version of my newsletter. There is also a paid version which includes exclusive weekly content from my next book The Body of My Mother: Beyond the Witch Wound to a World Renewed.

Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World will be published on September 12, 2023 and is available for preorder here (although they don’t even have the cover up here yet…)

I offer a number of workshops on collaborating with the dead. The next is Mothers of Magic and Mystery about accessing the solace and the wisdom of our primordial mothers. You can find out more here.