How Did I Get Here?
(another post in my ongoing series on The Long Story of Our Souls)
Why this life? This moment? These circumstances? I cannot possibly have signed up for THIS—this clusterfuck, this trauma, this deprivation, or this calamity. Which of course makes me wonder if there is some reason I deserve what horrible thing is happening to me. I mean I must have been a petty tyrant in some overlooked corner of history, right? Or maybe this is all good for me, a character-building lesson-learning karma-delivering shit storm of an incarnation?
I have a friend who jokes that somewhere in the bardo realm she started way too many contracts without reading the fine print. “Sure, sure whatever works. I’m sure this is fine.”
How did I get here?
We just don’t know.
The problem with answering this in any way definitively inside the short story of a single life is we end up trapped in some fundamentalist viewpoint—whether its karmic or Christian. We must have done something bad and we are burning off our karma. We are enduring suffering to be worthy of the heaven awaiting us so we will patiently enjoy the horrors of our matyrdom.
But if we could see the whole big picture from the perspective of the long story we might have an entirely different idea about what is happening and why. To live inside the long story of our souls is to live inside the mystery.
Thirteen years ago my husband and I found a dog on our road, starving, matted and covered in burrs, terrified of our touch. We called all the shelters, posted notices on messaeg boards, contacted the area police and all the local vets. We washed and fed this cocker spaniel, talked to him and assured him that no one was dropping him off at any pound ever. He had found us and we would let ourselves recognize that. Oh, but it was a lot of work. He’d never been house trained and cockers aren’t particularly continent in the best of circumstances. He quickly became very attached to me and howled inconsolably if I left the room or the house. He moaned and groaned if anyone else tried to touch him. He whined whenever we ate and he ate anything—paper dropped on the floor, old boxes, trash, crap, kitty litter. He had skin problems and ear problems and bowel problems (on top of the incontinence.) Our vet was pretty sure he was puppy mill dog, badly bred, bought at a pet store, abused and abandoned. This little guy had had a rough life.
Why?
It’s a mystery and the only star in that expanse of darkness is love. So we loved Oliver even when he made us crazy, accepting the assignment the cosmos delivered to our door. The other animals adored him. He made the last days of our old gentleman of a dacshund lively and funny. The cats slept on top of him. Our daughter’s Havanese, when he came on the scene a few years ago, decided he was his longlost soulmate and kissed him relentlessly. These last years he has lost all of his anxieties. He loves to be kissed and cuddled by everyone. He never whines or howls anymore but wags his tale happily at whatever being enters the room.
Still we have vowed never to rescue another animal. We have rescued A LOT of animals—geese that needed to be chelated due to heavy metal poisoning, paralyzed ducks that needed to be carried to the pond for daily rehab, innumerable cats, tailless chipmunks, the list goes on and on. But we’ve reached our limit.
Now our cocker spaniel is very old and his health, never good, is much worse. He wears diapers, his leaky ears resist all treatments, and he’s developed tumors all over his body, that weep and grow, like the old leper in House of the Dragon. He can hardly walk. We do a lot of laundry. But he still wags his tail with such joy whenever anyone comes into the room.
What is the right thing to do? I don’t know. It’s a mystery. What has this life been about for him, for us? I don’t know. It’s a mystery. If I don’t know the story, how do we turn the page? I don’t know.
I say to him any number of times a day, “You found us and you will find us again.” He looks at me with these deep brown eyes full of absolute faith in my love for him and I have no idea what to do. I wish I could see the long story of his soul.
I remember one of our rescued cats, Mushu, who was also a lot of work—diabetic, prone to parasites, and after a heron pecked him in the third eye, kind of a weird guy. (I won’t go into the details but it involved an overactive libido in a fixed feline…) He certanly didn’t seem like an angel or a bodhisattvah or a god in disguise. But here’s the thing about the spiritual messengers in the old stories…they never come in the outfits we imagine. One horrible day he died beside Clark as Clark wrote the last words to his book Waking Up to the Dark. It was the darkest day of the year, the winter solstice, and Clark finished the biggest scariest book he’d ever written and this cat exhaled beside him and died.
The mystery of Mushu. The mystery of our dog Oliver.
Our mystery.
How did we get here? What are we really doing here?
I sometimes ask myself how many prayers from other lives has my life answered. I have always had enough to eat, a roof over my head, access to an education. Maybe I had lifetimes praying for just such necessities. I have often felt, too, so many soul reunions—with my husband, my children, so many of you I have met through this work. How long have I prayed for those returns? Right now I am looking out the window at hickories and maples swaying in the breeze. These mountains, this land, I sense have been calling me home for eons beyond my imagination.
With the perspective of age I can see, too, how certain disappointments and failures also led me to the things I really wanted. The unpublished children’s novels I wrote made me hungrier and hungrier for success with my writing, gave me a lot of writing experience, and also pushed me into areas I might not have ventured had I any success with other genres. Phew. Great. Got it. But how many other obstacles and problems were meant to get me somewhere that I’ll never see in this life or maybe not even the next. Isn’t there a possibility that none of it will make sense in this life? Absolutely.
I can tell a story, I suppose, where I explain the myriad ills of my cocker spaniel’s life, give it a theme, tie it up with a bow but in truth I just don’t know.
I’ve known mothers who have lost children say they don’t know how they will ever get over it and all I can say is that they never will. They will hold that loss within them even when they don’t remember it. They will know that all can be lost and cherish what they have even so, even so, even so.
How did I get here?
There is water underground sings David Byrne in Once in a Lifetime his ecstatic song about the soul. It’s all water underground. It’s a deep dark river of mystery.
To sit inside these mysteries is to know just how much we don’t know about ourselves or anybody else for that matter. All we can do is show up for each other. Love each other no matter what.
Please keep me in your prayers if you would as, over the next few days and perhaps weeks, we try to decide “what’s best” for Oliver. How do I possibly know what’s best?
Perdita Finn is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World and the forthcoming Mother Spell: Summoning the Love at the Heart of the World. With her husband Clark Strand she is the founder of The Way of the Rose and the co-author of the book of the same name.
She teaches popular workshops on collaborating with the other side. She’ll be teaching online with the Shift Network this summer (Holy Helpers: How an Ancestral Team Can Transform Our Lives), in person (at last!) at Omega in August (Ancestral Magic) and at Kripalu in November (Mother Magic.) She’ll be offering a full slate of online workshops in 2026.
Monthly Magic is a feature of my Paid Substack. It’s an opportunity for community and conversation around our experiences with the other side.
One of my ‘baby’ sister Shari’s favorite songs was/is Once in A Lifetime.
And you may ask yourself: “well, how did I get here?”
She asked herself often, especially during the eight years in between the accidental death of her 12 year old son and her death at 47 from liver failure - her self-medication of the traumatic loss and grief at her son’s death.
There have been moments in the 19 years since then where I rail and scream at The Is for taking her from me. It’s less now, the wailing… but I still sing with Byrne and my sister… How did I get here? and My God, what have I done? Sometimes with a big grin on my face.
A treasured grief counselor and consciousness guide once replied to my satirical statement “I would never have agreed to be born had I known, etc.”— of course you did, Donna. I think so too, now.
So here I am — The Is experiencing that pain is not punishment, and pleasure is not a reward.
Forgive my goofy serpentine tangent, Perdita. I love what you write about us all. 🫶
We don’t know. Like you, I became the guardian of the strays like the diabetic cat who was never under control, even with insulin, to the one with congestive heart failure. All I can say is that we love them to the nth degree and pray that we release them in right timing. With love.