The Only Go-Bag We Need

Collaborating with the Dead

Art by Nilanthia de Silva

Last night watching yet another post-apocalyptic television show I was struck by how no one in any of these stories has access to what they most need. Many have packed guns in their go bags, some have old cigarettes and granola bars still edible long past the expiration date in their rucksacks, and a few (okay, one) have a mythic comic book to guide them through the traumas of a world that has collapsed around them. But none of these survivors in any of these stories that proliferate our consciousness these days know that they have the dead.

Not as rotting corpses. Not as memories. Not as voracious zombies walking towards us in blasted out cityscapes. No. The dead as guides, protectors, healers, and companions.

Long before civilization gave us the illusion that we could manage and control all aspects of being alive on our own, thank you very much, we turned to our ancestors for all of our needs. They told us where to find the herds and the ripe berries. They brought us to shelter and warmth. They gave us dreams that showed us which plants healed and which eased the pains of the dying. They could read the messages of the dead in the oracles all around them—the birds, the wind, the trees. That conversation between the living and the dead showed us where we were and where we were going.

Once arriving in Grand Central Station on a Friday afternoon with a friend of mine who is a professional psychic we found ourselves in a frightening crush of impatient commuters. A door somewhere wouldn’t open and people were pushing against each other in escalating anxiety and fear. This was one of those crowds that felt like it might turn deadly in an instant. “Step to the right,” whispered my friend Fiona. I could, miraculously, and I did. “Step again,” she ordered. “Now reach out your right hand.” I touched the grimy wall of the station and, surprisingly, a door knob. “Open it.” The strange door in the wall opened and within a second we were standing under the sky on 42^nd Street. “How did you know to do that?” I asked astounded. “Some dead person showed up and told me,” she answered blithely, “And they also said there’s a good smoothie place around the corner.”

This same friend also showed me that we all have these abilities—although the culture we live in has conditioned most of us to suppress such intimations and intuitions. In the past such conversations with the unseen world might get you killed; these days mostly made fun of by your relatives when you are in the other room. Yet it is these conversations, and the channels to these conversations, that we most urgently need right now.

After all, the dead understand extinction and collapse. They’ve seen the fires and the floods, the earthquakes and the meteor showers. They’ve seen empires fall and whole peoples vanish without a trace. They’ve seen it all—the whole big picture from the depths of time. That’s where real wisdom comes from—the dark lands of the dead. Pack the dead in our go bags and we will always know what to eat and where to go. Most of all, we always know where we belong and to whom.

My book about all this, Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World, is coming out in September 2023 and I teach many different workshops empowering people to recover their own ancestral collaborations. Each day I am astounded by the unexpected wonders and miracles the dead bring forth in my own life and in the lives of those who work with me. Have I got stories to tell! And my prayer is that these stories inspire others to tell theirs about their adventures with the dead and that together we can shift the belief-sphere of this world we live in and feel less frightened and less alone.

I’m a writer so I think substack is a good fit for me and I will be sharing here the (many) stories of my adventures with the dead—the ancestors, the saints, the animals, and all of what my daughter Sophie Strand calls the “animate everything.” I’ll also share conversations with my (many) psychic friends and their advice about how we can all be channels for these messages from the other side. Sometimes, too, I’ll share book and movie suggestions that help us demystify the unseen world and make it less frightening. I am going to offer all of this for free.

But I’m also a writer trying to make a living as a writer so I will be offering a paid version of this newsletter as well which will be a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of my next book, The Body of My Mother: Beyond the Witch Wound to A World Renewed. An eco-feminist journey through deep time this intimate book offers both personal revelations about the multiplicity of mothers available to us among the dead and a historical exploration of why those relationships were attacked from the get-go by civilization. You’ll get to see my “dailies” as it were…the chapters that come and go and get rewritten and transformed into new insights, the reactions to what I’m reading (Otherlands by Thomas Halliday right now, Mothers and Others by Sarah Hrdy in the queue), the random insights, the aha revelations and all that goes into a book’s gestation, birth, and upbringing. There are two other books in line after this one (Circles Not Lines: Spiritual Community Beyond Patriarchy and Saints Alive! How A Team of Holy Helpers Can Transform Our Lives) and as often happens they may assert their need for some writing, too. When you are working with the dead it can be hard to predict what is going to happen next!  You’ll get to see all of it if you subscribe.

So, are you with me? If so, go outside right now wherever you are and pick up a little dirt from beneath your feet. That dirt is the bodies of insects, the bodies of weeds and trees, the bodies of stones that were once the bodies of oceans. That dirt is the body of the dead and the dead are bearing you up. You belong to them. And they belong to you. I hope you will join me for this adventure as we shift the belief sphere so we can put down our guns and our granola bars and take the hand of our ancestors.

(But I think we’ll keep the mythic comic book. I mean, if you haven’t watched Station 11 yet, please do. It’s superb even if they don’t fully grok how present the dead are. They almost do. They almost do)