The Paper Folds of Our Souls

we are all time travelers

We all know the feeling. Don’t I know you? Haven’t I been here before? Deja vu. On my hike up the mountain near my house there is a narrow stretch of the path—steep and wooded, cascading in rocks to a cleft of streams and moss to my right that I have walked, in dreams long before I moved to the Catskills. Sometimes I am just “there” in this place, in my thoughts, feeling it, dropping into it, knowing exactly where I am and not entirely when I am. I think sometimes I have walked on this path in different lands, in different times. I think I will always be walking on this path.

In Jack Finney’s novel Time and Again time travel doesn’t need a machine—just a state of mind. Because time and space are not, as we experience them, linear, but, the physicists tell us, folded over each other, layered like the ancient sea bed striations in the bluestone of my mountains, like paper in an origami creation. If that is so, if all time is happening NOW, what keeps us inside our experience of the present is only a web of associations and experiences and sensations. Our names. Contextual information. Certain sights and sounds. We have been conditioned to acknowledge one present reality but many are available to us simultaneously…in special places, in particular moments.

What if the future, the past, and the present are all now?

Time Loops by Eric Wargo is a well-researched exploration of people’s experience of pre-cognition, or what he describes as sending ourselves memories from the future to our own pasts to guide us in the present. As someone who has had dreams that “came true” all my life, I found this book profoundly reassuring. But when I was in psychoanalysis in my twenties, however, when I was flooding myself with such memories and perceptions, I was expected to psychologize them rather than unpack their many, vital messages. They didn’t need to be interpreted so much as claimed.

I had, for instance, a dream of apocalyptic destruction that my then psychoanalyst assured me was about the mutually assured destruction of my parents marriage. In it I was inside of a nuclear missile about to be detonated over the skyscrapers of New York City. There were windows in the missile and I could see the chrome and glass of these tall buildings. And the missile itself was filled with people—who had nothing to do with the violence about to be unleashed, who were all praying, who gave me a prayer, a mantra, that night to say that I said ever since, syncing it to my heartbeat.. I wrote the dream down as I do…and ten years later when I watched the planes fly into the Twin Towers I finally knew what I had seen. I ran outside to my pond and said the prayer those souls had given me for this moment over and over again. Beside me, in the milkweed, a monarch butterfly emerged from her cocoon and began to dry her wings in the sun.

Many people forsee such catyclismic events. Aberfan. The JFK assassination. We are all seers and psychics. We are all sending ourselves messages from the future—but the world we live in has mostly taught us to ignore them.

Does that mean, however that the future and the past are written in stone? Does that mean we are helpless before destiny? Is fate a story that has already been written and cannont be changed and through which we move like a puppet on a string?

Not only can we imagine the paper folds of time but we can imagine the ever unfolding folding in not one direction but ten thousand. Time and space are fundamentally dynamic, kaleidescopic, always creating and recreating out of what was into what might be.

The story is always now and yet always changing, transforming, and becoming something else. In Kate Atkinson’s brilliant book, Life after Life, an ordinary English woman lives one life ten thousand different ways, each choice she makes creating a different unfolding. The brilliance of the book, and I won’t give away its greatest genius, is that there is no ultimate “destination” but rather a continual blossoming of more and more possibilities. There are so many ways that love can express itself, can find its way home. Nature itself is always changing and yet also eternal.

As I walk that narrow mountain path, a salamander crawls into a patch of sunlight. Tomorrow the mountain laurel will begin to bloom. In the fall, the oak leaves will cover the forest floor. The stream will turn to ice. And then it will melt and freeze again. How does the water flowering out of the spring in the mountainside, water that fell from the clouds a million eons ago, experience time? How does the stream dream?

To feel the depth and width of time all around us and within us is to also to know how miracles happen—outside of the linear inevitablities of cause and effect. Outside of the logical, rational certainties.We pray to our ancestors and we know our ancestors are us, here now, walking this path. We pray for our descendants and we are praying for ourselves. Always in the time travel stories the adventurers go back to the past to rescue themselves.

Magic happens in the secret folds of time and space when one place is also another place, one time another time.

We will navigate this burning world by summoning the wisdom of what we have known in the past and the wisdom we have recovered in the future. We will dream ourselves into the future so we know how to guide our feet on the long story of our souls through eternity. We will know where to walk today because we are also walking there tomorrow.

Share with me in the comments your own time loops, moments of precognition, dreams of the future, and experience of the paper folds.

---

Starting on June 5 I will be offering my six-month intensive on working with the dead: Time Travelers. This is the most intensive journey I offer and requires having taken at least one other course with me. Ancestral Collaborations is available to purchase and view on recording. Enrollment is limited to 20 people.

From the summer solstice through the Day of the Dead into the darkest of days we will travel back through the human story, back through the ages of the earth, as we explore together the multiplicities of lives that weave through our souls—and the most ancient ancestors waiting to guide us. How do we untangle ourselves from civilization, from anthropocentrism, from the merciless finality of a single human life? How do we claim the treasures of our ancestors, all our ancestors–our plant and animal mothers, our paleolithic grandmothers, our own incarnational wisdom from eons past? Over the course of our intimate adventures together we will each create an ancestral oracle deck—to guide us into the future. We will deepen our practice together with daily rituals, ancestor altars, ancestral collaborations and working with the dead in all aspects of our lives. We will practice reverie as a lost art, keep dream journals, and step through the portals of our lives into the lost lands of magic and miracles. Find out more here.

Perdita Finn is the co-founder, with her husband Clark Strand, of the feral fellowship The Way of the Rose, which inspired their book The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. They are currently at work on their next book together Circles Not Lines: Spiritual Community Beyond Patriarchy.  To find out more about her devotion to “ecology not theology” visit wayoftherose.org

In addition to extensive study with Zen masters, priests, spirit workers, and healers, she apprenticed with the psychic Susan Saxman, with whom she wrote The Reluctant Psychic. Perdita Finn now teaches popular workshops on Getting to Know the Dead. Participants are empowered to activate the miracles in their own lives with the help of their ancestors and recover their own intuitive magic. Her book Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World is an intimate journey through her recovery of these lost ways. She speaks widely on how to collaborate with those on the other side, on the urgent necessity of a new romantic animism, and on the sobriety that emerges when we claim the long story of our souls. Her next book is The Body of My Mother.

She lives with her family in the moss-filled shadows of the Catskill Mountains.