Lost in the Long Story

a healing dream song for apocalyptic times

My name, Perdita, means “lost.” My father, who christened me often reminded me that it meant not just lost but damned and “what else were you going to call a child born in the twentieth century.” My mother would quickly jump in to say that I had been named for a character in Shakespeare’s late romance The Winter’s Tale in which a princess lost on an island is returned to her homeland and blesses her mother’s old age. When I read the play, I found it infinitely more complicated—with a violent abusive father who banishes his family and a murdered mother brought back to life by her returned daughter. My husband on meeting me, noted the Shakespeare reference, kept thoughts of damnation to himself, and remarked, casually, that in medieval mythology Perdita was the name given to the lost island of Paradise.

[medieval map to Perdita]

I grew up watching Gilligan’s Island in our crummy little tv room off the kitchen on a tiny black-and-white television, which taught me the plot of Hamlet (really), to fear quick sand, and somehow tapped into almost mystical feelings I had as a child of feeling marooned in my life with a group of people (my family) who were utterly unlike me. Eventually in therapy I would talk about this a great deal.

Later on in life I would realize that I had always had a yearning, as so many of us do, for belonging—for kinship, connection and intimacy with other beings, not just human beings but the entangled souls of all that are, have been, and will be. Watching the astronauts on their lunar adventures as a child (also on the crummy black and white tv) I was terrified that one of them might become disconnect from their rocket ship and drift out alone through space, untethered and utterly lost. Lost in Space. That was another show popular at the time, I think because we had begun to feel, as modern people, completely disconnected from the fabric of the cosmos.

How can we find our way back home?

The dream songs and song lines of ancient peoples, the stories they told of the land and to the land of their ancestors, wove them into belonging. They walked and told stories of who they’d been so they’d know where they were and where they were going. But what happens when we have lost our stories, lost our lands, and lost our ways? How do we get back to the garden then? How can damnation become paradise in an instant?

Which brings me to my recent experiences watching, finally, on Hulu, the old television, that I had never seen until now, Lost. My husband and I have been watching it over the summer, astounded by its mysteries and ultimately its embrace of non-linear time and the mysteries of the long story of our souls. We had heard terrible things about the ending of the show, about its disappointments and failures, but began having a hunch, somewhere around season 4, that we would nevertheless find the mystical remake of Gilligan’s Island satisfying. And we did. Profoundly, gloriously satisfying—about how the long story feels, how in the long story, the good guys and the bad guys are always changing places, how paradise is damnation for one person and salvation for another, that there is always enough time for redemption and mercy, how the long story of our souls is ALWAYS a love story.

We found it a profound meditation on how technonarcissism and the quest to control and harness the mystical powers of the earth risks killing the very life force of this planet and that the solution is always the same, to bring yin and yang back into balance, to muddy the binaries, to return the cosmic lignam to the womb of the world (sorry for the spoiler…but, still, you will have to watch all 121 episodes to get it.) \

Most of all, in all of its gloriously watchable network tv silliness, it captures the experience of dream time, where all time is happening now. We know in our dreams that a place can be three or four places at once (it was kind of my mother’s house but at college on a tropical island, ya know?) and that we are travelers when we sleep through the long stories of our souls, collecting our own ancestral memories. Time, tell us the quantum physicists, has many dimensions all folded over each other like a piece of cosmic origami. Haven’t I been here before? Don’t I know you?

We’ve all been here before and to belong here, to know we belong here, we have to recover the soul memories of having been here, and the soul knowing that we will always be here. There is no escaping the island. There is no planet to colonize when this planet IS our body and our soul.

When Clark and I met each other, we remembered the long story of our souls. And yes, you’ll have to wait for the sixth season to watch it happen on Lost…I’ve heard people criticize the show (spoiler alert), saying, “You mean they were just dead all along?” and on the one hand, we can answer with a simple “yes” that entirely misses the point which the show is trying to give us an experience of: we are ALL the dead. We are all dead. And we are all alive, alive in a new way when we remember that.The living are the dead. The dead are always coming back, we are all returned to each other. In the natural world resurrections isn’t a singularity, it’s a ubiquity.

When we remember the long story of our souls, when we know in our bones that we are all returning to each other, we finally know what belonging is and damnation becomes paradise. Apocalypse is a bad story told by a people who can only envision their lives as a conveyor belt which will, with industrial efficiency, dump them into the bin of hell or the bin of heaven. But life is stranger and more mysterious, more imbued with grace and mystery.

If Lost has a “message,” and it is much more dream than parable, it is about the mercy of the long story. It also reminds us that the most trustworthy guidance through those mysteries will always be the voices of the dead and our own hearts. The most trustworthy character, Hurley, says at one point in the last season, “Dead people are more reliable than alive people.”

We are more reliable when we remember that we are also the dead, when we experience the mysterious paper-folds of time and space and the strange wonders of our souls long stories.

Anyway. Wow. What a great, wild television series. I have come to love the long epic saga-stortyelling of these series lately. Sense8. The OA. We are trying to find our way back to the garden, the dream time, the generous stories of rebirth and reunion and we will do it be telling the stories that help us remember who we really are, have been, and might be.

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I am teaching my foundational workshop on working with those on the other side Ancestral Collaborations on Zoom September 20-22. All sessions are recorded and sent to all participants. It is about how to work with the dead, transform fear into faith, and claim the long story. Join us! You can find out more here.

This has been the free version of my newsletter. There is also a paid version ($10/month) which also include a monthly Zoom conversation on our collaborations with the other side.

Perdita Finn is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World, the forthcoming Mothers of Magic: Recovering the Love at the Heart of the World, and with her husband Clark Strand, The Way of the Rose.