What the Dead Help Me Hold

life, death, and the mysteries of not-knowing what happens next

The single forget me knot gifted to me by a friend three decades ago has become fields of blue surrounding my house. The lilac that never wanted to bloom is covered in blossoms, filling the air with my favorite scent. This has been an extraordinary spring in our mountains, an ecstatic super bloom with every plant and tree stepping forth in magnificence.

It has also been a great summer for the spongey month caterpillars who burst onto the scene just as the last of the green leaves unfurled. Walking through the forest you can literally hear them eating as the nibbled remains of oak and maple leaves fall to the ground. They haven’t had a year like this, apparently, since 1988—but the jubilee of the spongey moths is not a time of celebration for the trees, some of whom will not survive the devastation.

Some things are blooming and some things are dying. Same as it ever was.

But it has been a really hard spring for our family. I have been feeling like shaking my fist at Our Lady, the saints, and all the dead I have prayed to for decades. "I can't take anymore!" And they look at me and seem to say, "We can. Give it to us." So I am, as I do, assembling teams of helpers, praying for relief, cleanign up my ancestor altar, finding new frames for the dead, calling on new saints, anything, anything at all, because I feel so out of control and powerless. “C’mon,” I say, “Can’t you answer my prayers NOW?”

Prayers are always being answered for someone. But some days our prayers are not answered, or are not answered in the timeline we want or image or even, and even, and this is the hardest truth, the lifetime we are in. Our lives are filled with answered prayers we don’t even recognize, blossoms we take for granted, reunions we don’t even acknowledge are reunions.

For how many generations did the spongey months pray for their people? For how long did they emerge from their sticky cocoons unable to find another spongey to love?

The reason I pray to the dead is I trust their timing. They have all the time in the world, after all, and they also see the big picture and the long story. I pray to the dead because, I have to admit, how little I know, how little I can understand, and how vast the mystery is of the soul.

How can we hold sorrow in one hand and joy in the other? How can we revel in the flowers and the spongey months and the oak trees who will not make it through this season? How can we bear witness to the daily despair (children dying everywhere, forests disappearing, the oceans extirminated) and the daily joys...the weed cracking the concrete, the sudden glimpse of the moon through the clouds, the prodical son returned home?

We have to hold both and it is that tension that we feel in our hands and our hearts. It is what allows us to be present each day to ourselves and to the world. Recently my husband remarked that their are those who cannot bear witness to all that our daughter is managing medically—and because of that they cannot really experience the sparkling wonder that is her being. To know her, to know anyone really, we have to be able to hold both the blight and the blossom, the sorrows and the joy, and the radical mysteries of deep time.

Today a child is being bombed or sold or starved. Today a flower is blooming. Today my prayer isn't being answered. Today yours is. It's all true. It's all simultaneous. It's all a mystery.

THIS is why I pray in circles with friends...because we need other beings to help us hold the depths of these mysteries. THIS is why I call upon the dead each and every day when the world and its tragedies feels almost too much to bear. Let me circle myself with the living who can hold both, with the dead who can hold it all. We are entangled souls....throughout vast lifetimes. We are all praying together, with the flowers, the trees, the spongey moths, with all that is.

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My introductory workshop Ancestral Collaborations (four 90-minute recordings) will be available for purchase for another week. I will be offering the course on Zoom again in the fall.

My six month Solstice Intensive (June 19 - December 18) TIME TRAVELERS still has a few spots available. Please reach out with any questions.

You can find out more about my books, my work, and my online courses at takebackthemagic.com.

NOTE: Monthly Magic, the online conversation I offer to paid subscribers will be meeting on June 23rd this month due to the Feast Day Celebrations for Our Lady of Woodstock.