Small, Slow and Low

(getting ready for the day of the dead)

At the very first workshop I ever taught a veteran of many ancestral healing adventures asked me what “ritual precautions” I recommended. The question, quite frankly, startled me. Because in decades of collaborating with the dead I had never once thought to worry about either my safety or my sanity. In fact, the more I worked with those on the other side, the safer and saner I felt.

So I launched into a historical overview about how patriarchal authorities had explicitly tried to silence the conversation with the dead and begun a millennia-long propaganda campaign of superstitious mumbo jumbo and horror stories to keep people from their empowering guidance. After all how can the priests get people to listen to and obey the big guy on high (and his representatives on earth) if they are receiving rich and nourishing guidance from below?* The harm I have witnessed in this world, and I have witnessed plenty up close and personal, has always been initiated by the living. I even wrote a post once about the wisdom of Scooby-Doo. Whatever ghosts were haunting the amusement park or the shopping mall were always revealed to be flesh-and-blood scoundrels of one kind or another. Exactly.

Put me in a haunted house, I’ve often said, but don’t condemn me to a single day in a chrome board room on Wall Street filled with reasonable men.

As to people’s actual encounters with those on the other side that have been frightening, this is almost always because the dead have to work so hard to get our attention in the modern world. Certainly this has been true in my own life. Their more startling manifestations have receded as I have become able to receive their more gentle signs. Still, it is true that the living has so hurt and traumatized some among us that even after death we can remain terrified that somehow they can or will continue to hurt us. But the good news is they are dead. Sometimes we really do need to let ourselves feel relief when living monsters cross over to the other side.

But still, the student’s question stayed with me. Was I being too cavalier, too blasé, or even too naïve? Were there safety precautions that I was taking without even realizing it that I ought to share with those who might not intuit that they needed them?

As always when I have a spiritual question, I headed outside and got my hands in the dirt. It is always for me the growing things that hold the simplest and most important answers. How would they answer this question? What did they know about collaborating with the underworld?

The problems always come, of course, with our own human grandiosity. We want to be the most special, the most important, and create the biggest difference in the world. The end result of this experiment has been an absolute catastrophe for most of nature and it, honestly, hasn’t worked out so well for us either. That’s when the dirt offered to me it’s own guidance. Stay small. Go slow. Keep low to the ground.

And that is the advice I always give to people stepping on to the path of prayer with the dead. Build your own foundation of faith slowly and surely. Don’t ask for giant signs to “prove” to you that such and such is real before you begin. Don’t demand world peace or else. Don’t imagine that you are going to call on the dead, snap your fingers, and get a miracle. Shazam. Powee. Ta da!

Learn instead to move with the rhythms of the seasons and the currents of the ground. Plant your bulbs in the fall and know that the chipmunks will eat half of them but there may be a few crocuses come the spring. Put one seed in the hands of a single ancestor, water it daily with your tears, turn it towards the sun of hope, and see what happens, day by day, and year by year, and sometimes yes sometimes, lifetime by lifetime. Not every prayer is answered in a single life but all prayers are answered and each of us, in this life, is an answered prayer to someone.

So now, thanks to this earnest and thoughtful student to whom I am forever grateful, I always advise those working with the dead to go small, slow and low with this work. You cannot be too small, you cannot move too slowly, you cannot be too close to the ground.

Which brings me to the young woman who, in a class I offered this summer, decided that her first ask from the dead would be for …. (drumroll please) … wood chips. For her garden. She’d been having a dickens of a time finding any at the local gardening supply stores in her area. And there was a drought. And she had trees and bushes she wanted to tend. And she was just exhausted with calling around for something that should have been so easy to get and for some strange reason just wasn’t. She put an old uncle who she’d love on it. I mean the worst that could happen was absolutely nothing. Except within an hour she heard the rumbling of a giant truck pulling into her neighbor’s driveway. She peeked out the window to see what was up and saw that, yes, indeed, it was full of, you guessed it, wood chips. But not for her. She went on out and got the man’s name. I mean, she still had to order them and pay for them and get the guy to deliver them but her problem was solved.

We build our faith one woodchip at a time. Slowly. Simply.

So today as the leaves fall to the ground and the pumpkins ripen task someone on the other side with a simple ordinary humdrum request…and see what happens. Nothing fancy. Nothing life-or-death. A parking spot. A human being on the other end of the phone. A cancellation. A handyman who actually shows up. A car bill that’s less that you thought it would be. A paycheck that’s a little more.

We all send out these prayers every day anyway. Please let me make the bus transfer. Please let my bloodwork be okay. Please let the check go through today. All we are doing when we work with the dead is acknowledging that they hear these prayers and will assist with them. Because they will.

And slowly we will realize, as I did, that we have nothing to fear from the other side, that the ritual protection we most definitely do need is the dead themselves. They are our protection from the living, and the ritual is asking them in each and every moment, intimately, by name, for help.

Start today. Small. Slow. Low

Let’s see what’s begun to happen by November 2^nd, the Day of the Dead. Let’s see what’s begun to happen by the Winter Solstice in December. Let’s see what gardens have come into bloom by next spring.

*for more on how the conversation with the dead was silenced see Max Dashu’s Witches and Pagans and Anne Barstow’s Witch Craze both of which note how this particularly activity was targeted and demonized by those in power.

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This is my FREE substack and in honor of autumn I’ll be offering a lot of how-to and let’s-play posts over the next few months. Of course you can also read my book Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World which is now out and about in the world. AND you can sign up for my paid substack for a monthly zoom conversation about this work. AND I am offering two workshops in October.

Ancestral Collaborations is my introductory workshop on how to make miracles happen with the dead. I’ll be offering it the first weekend in October at a special low, my-book-just-came-out, price ($99) for anyone who wants to jump into this work with me. You can find out more about here. All sessions are recorded and sent to all participants.

For anyone who has taken any prior course with me I am offering a more intense look at how to problem solve with the help of aspecial team of the dead. Ancestral Intimacies is limited to 30 participants so if you are interested, be sure to sign up soon. You can find out more here.