Take back the magic, p.9
Take Back the Magic, page 9
With Sophie’s birth, our lives felt impossibly charmed. Out of the blue, Clark was offered his dream job as senior editor of a new magazine about Buddhism. I was unexpectedly invited to help create an alternative high school with a team of passionate idealists just like myself. Finally, we were married by a justice of the peace during one of our hiking trips.
Like most babies, Sophie woke up early. On the weekends after I nursed her, I would often take her to the playground to let Clark sleep in. It was almost fall when we slipped out quietly one Sunday morning. I pushed her stroller down the empty avenues toward Central Park. Other than a few joggers and devoted churchgoers, we passed no one. The playground was empty when we arrived. I lifted Sophie out of the stroller and placed her into the baby basket on the swing set. Her fat hands gripped the black rubber. Blonde ringlets fell in her eyes. She squealed with delight as I pushed her higher and higher.
Soon another mother entered the park, with a little boy running in front of her. She chased him down and carried him over to the swings. She was an older woman, maybe a late-life mother or an early grandmother; it could be hard to tell in New York. She was very beautiful, with delicate, chiseled features and blonde hair tinged with gray. As she pushed the little boy on the swing beside me, we began chatting, as mothers do.
“Do you live on the Upper West Side?” I asked politely.
“I’m visiting my daughter from Paris,” she said. “This is her little boy.”
“He’s adorable.” Sophie squealed, and I gave her another push.
“I don’t get to see him enough,” she sighed. “I wish we lived closer.”
“But you’re not French,” I offered. I could tell from her accent.
“Oh, no,” she laughed. “My husband works in Paris, and we have a little flat right on the Île Saint-Louis. I’m from Virginia originally.”
“I thought you were the little boy’s mother at first,” I admitted. “You look so young.”
She smiled. “I have two grown children. My daughter lives here in the city, and my son works with Doctors Without Borders. Perhaps you’ve heard of them?”
Everything hushed within me. The swing creaked back and forth on its own. The distant noise of traffic seemed to disappear. The whole city seemed to disappear.
Distracted by the little boy beside her, Sophie didn’t realize I had stopped pushing her. I looked at this attractive older woman beside me, and I knew who she was. Paris. The Île Saint-Louis. Doctors Without Borders. It couldn’t be. But it was. How had I, so many years before, conjured her and this entire scene in a heartbroken daydream—my lover’s mother, the swings, my little daughter with the blonde curls? What could it possibly mean?
My mouth was dry. Barely able to speak, I asked, “I know this is very strange, but your son didn’t go to Williams, did he?”
She beamed. “Why yes! He did!” She told me his name. “Did you know him?”
“I did.” I felt woozy, but somehow remained standing.
“What an odd coincidence,” said the woman. “I’ll have to tell him that I ran into a fellow classmate. What is your name?”
“Perdita,” I whispered.
Now it was her turn to look startled. She blanched. “Perdita? Not Perdita Finn?”
I nodded.
“Oh,” she said quietly. I could tell from the inflection that she knew about the abortion.
“This is my little girl,” I said, feeling tears in my eyes. “This is my little girl.”
“It will make my son happy to know that. I know…” Her voice trailed off.
“Yes, please,” I said. “Tell him.”
We exchanged a few more polite pleasantries, but we were both so unnerved that a few minutes later we pushed our strollers out of the playground in opposite directions. Some days later, her son, my old lover, would call. Eventually we would share a cup of coffee and, for both of us I hope, an indefinable healing.
As a child, I had no knowledge of reincarnation. I didn’t know it was a possibility. Life happened. You died. That was it. A straight line from birth to death. Religious people added to that tiny linear sentence a particular end point with a heaven or a hell, a long tunnel and maybe a white light in the vast expanse of time. The Catholicism I studied was more interested in good works than the journey through the afterlife, and Zen concerned itself with the death of the ego, not the persistence of the soul.
I held Sophie when we got home as she drifted off to sleep for her nap. I wanted her close, my girl with the blonde curls. I knew that she had tried to come to me once before and I had said no, but now she had come back.
When I told Clark what I thought, that this baby was the same soul that had come to me at the same time of year so many years before, he didn’t need any convincing. He’d had his own intuitions about the sense of reunion we were all experiencing. “She was impatient for you, wasn’t she? She loves you so much—but she needed the right father, too. You knew that.”
My abortion had been devastating, but that didn’t mean it had been a mistake.
Much later, my psychic friend Suzan Saxman would confirm this. “It happens all the time with miscarriages and abortions,” she told me. “I’ve never seen an aborted soul angry with what’s happened. Maybe sad, maybe disappointed, but not angry. They usually understand when the timing’s not right—and they often try again. It’s too bad people don’t know that. It could change our whole conversation about abortion.”
Clark and I had found each other. Sophie had found us. The universe abounded with unexpected blessings and inconceivable joys. I had spent so much time agonizing over thoughts of karma and sin. Now I saw that even sin and karma were part of some vast, unknowable cosmic equation that would, ultimately, add up to healing and love.
For months I reveled in the wondrous mystery of it all. One weekend, a friend lent us his cabin high up in the Catskills, far from any human habitation. We drove up a bumpy, dirt road deep into the forest as the sun began to set. By the time we got out of the rental car and eased Sophie out of the car seat, the darkness was all around us.
As we walked toward the cabin, Sophie in my arms, a light by the door flicked on. Sophie held up her finger, pointing, and squealed with wordless wonder. On the screen was a giant moth and on the back of the moth was a skull. A white skull.
“A death’s head moth,” whispered Clark beside us. “I’ve heard of them. But I’ve never seen one before.”
We stood there in a shallow pool of light, staring at the moth.
A question, sharp and precise, pierced my heart. Whatever vast, unknowable forces had brought us together, couldn’t they just as inexplicably fly us apart?
I didn’t know then that even as Clark and I were first meeting at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, across the street from the café a man was sculpting above the main portal to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine his own strange vision of the Apocalypse. I didn’t even know in those days that St. John the Divine was the author of the Book of Revelation. I didn’t know that almost every day I walked down Amsterdam Avenue the artist was chipping away at stone to reveal buses plunging off the Brooklyn Bridge, the masses howling at Wall Street as a tidal wave of water rose over their heads, the Twin Towers toppling over. Who was the one-eyed figure, ten times bigger than the scenes of chaos beneath him, who gazed out imperviously at the world beyond? Why, amid the destruction, was the giant head of a baby also emerging from a strange vulval flower?
Clark, too, never noticed the end-of-the-world scenes coming into being right in front of him, even though he often chatted with the sculptor himself over coffee and cigarettes. He remembers the man showing him his sketches. He even went over to the stone yard to watch the man at work, and he remembers thinking that the stone carver was a wild genius, a mystic visionary, some blasted dust-covered character out of a fairy tale, but he never thought to ask him about the Brooklyn Bridge or the Twin Towers or the baby head. At that time, before the turn of the millennium, it was all still imagination, the stuff of fantasy. It didn’t have anything to do with ordinary life. Clark remembers the man was slight with strong hands. He remembers the man’s name, Simon Verity, but it would be twenty years before he thought about what that name literally meant. Simon was the Rock. Verity was the Truth. Just as Clark and I were getting to know each other, the Apocalypse was being set in stone. The Rock of Truth.
Dear Dad,
With your love of manly feats, I’m sure you knew about the famous mountaineering rescue referred to, simply, as the Miracle Belay. On K2, a Himalayan peak even more difficult to ascend than Everest, five intrepid climbers who were roped together all fell during a storm into a bottomless crevasse. The sixth, Peter Schoening, hung onto a narrow ledge with his ice ax. The snows swirled, and he was losing his grip as his expedition mates dangled above the yawning abyss. With iron-willed determination and superhuman strength, Schoening pulled, strained, and heaved, defying gravity and rescuing them one by one from oblivion.
Unfortunately, a lot of people approach their ancestors with the feeling that they must rescue them from the abyss of their dysfunction, or risk being pulled over into annihilation themselves. They cannot cut themselves free—and yet they are impossibly burdened by the extraordinary effort needed to do this lineage healing. They are being dragged down by family histories of abuse and addiction, violence and depression, sorrow and silence.
Shall we talk, Dad, about your own father—orphaned, full of rage and resentment? Or perhaps your mother’s family, working long hours in the mills and drinking too much and learning to protect their self-esteem with mockery and sarcasm? Shall we talk about the Irish and the famines and the religious repression and the poverty and the whole sad tale of being a colonized people?
Of course, the whole story of civilization is nothing but a tale of woe. If we trace back any of our ancestors, we will all find ourselves, soon enough, appalled at the horrors our people have inflicted upon each other. Every “civilized” human being has a genealogy of trauma.
As we confront the fact that our entire species may soon vanish into the crevasse created by our long history of ecocidal insanity, it is very easy to feel overwhelmed and defeated by the enormity of the work before us. What are we to do to heal these generational tragedies?
The entire endeavor seems to demand heroic effort.
Except we have forgotten that the dead weigh nothing at all—and they have already fallen.
The dead have been released from the tyrannies of linear narratives. What they can offer to us, if we let them, is the healing wisdom of the soul’s long story through deep time, where everyone is connected and entangled. They can help us witness the reality that no one is ever let go.
I pray to you in all of your complexity and possibility to guide me through the world that is coming. I pray to those ancestors who wanted to ascend to the heavens to guide me back to those ancestors who sought their wisdom deep in the earth. I pray to the ancestors who lived through the calamities of eons past to show me how to be resilient and resourceful during a coming age of collapse. I pray to the vanished giants of the dinosaurs, you who were once the mighty masters of this Earth, who transformed into birds after your own extinction event. Show us how to become small again, teach us how to sing again, and help us to grow wings so that we, too, might one day have no need of ropes and ice axes. Help us remember how to fly.
Collaborating with the Dead
Working Together
None of us needs to manage life on our own. Our ancestors are standing by to help us overcome obstacles, seize opportunities, answer our yearnings, and make the impossible possible. They long to be involved with us again, and they have resources we cannot imagine.
To give them an assignment is to offer them the possibility of an ongoing, blossoming relationship. The tasks that we give to the ancestors are opportunities for them to show us they are really there. We call on an old uncle who had been a mechanic when we are trying to buy a used car. We invite a beloved grandmother to help us pull off a family reunion without a hitch. When I need things to grow, I ask my mother the gardener. We ask the dead to watch over our kids, help us with our work, and get us out of jams. Our ancestors called on the dead for help with everything—from finding food and medicine to seeking shelter and warmth to reuniting with loved ones. We, too, can seek the help of those who have gone and call upon their generosity, their interests, their talents, and their expertise. When we do, we will experience the lived reality that no one is ever lost to us and no one is ever alone.
I’m not used to asking for help with anything—what kind of jobs can I assign to the dead?
My sister-in-law has an old-world sense of hospitality. Everyone who arrives in her home is handed a cup of tea and an assignment for getting the meal ready. One guest is washing lettuce, another is cutting potatoes. Someone sets the table, and a young man brought by a cousin is situated on the couch with an elderly relative in need of a patient ear. The argumentative father of the new boyfriend is sent on an errand to the store in the next town over. Some of the jobs invite greater intimacy with her—some are quests that protect her from having to manage a difficult personality. But when dinner is finally served, everyone will feel part of the festive collaboration. It is my sister-in-law’s ingenuity and inclusivity that makes all this possible, and it is this same spirit that we can bring to our relationships with our ancestors.
Over time we will find our own creative ways for working with the dead. Initially we may come to them with urgent needs—a child in the hospital, a loved one looking for work, an addiction that just won’t quit. But over time we may become more and more comfortable asking for their help with literally everything in our lives. Help me get a real person on the other end of the phone. Help me not lose my temper. Help me get through this day, this hour, this moment.
Not only does modern life teach us to be independent, it also demands that we rely on money for most of our needs. But the dead rely upon an economy of prayer, and with it they can bring to us all kinds of miracles and magic.
How do I know which jobs to give to which ancestor?
If someone was remarkably talented or successful in life, it stands to reason that they can offer us help with a similar endeavor from beyond the veil. The award-winning chemist will whisper into our child’s ear during the test. The virtuoso will help us with our performance. The thoughtful grandmother will send us spiritual care packages when we are lonely. When those I love are sick, I tend to call on the doctor and nurse friends of my father’s I knew growing up, putting together a ghostly medical team to work behind the scenes.
But it is also true that those who failed at something or were frustrated in life have something to prove. The man who was never able to publish his own poetry is determined that ours will win the literary prize. The woman who could not escape domestic violence will guide us out of an abusive relationship. The local ice cream man who wished he’d had the resources to go to medical school will bring a healing sweetness to the doctor’s visit.
We must trust our own intuition. We will know what feels right if we check in with ourselves.
What if it doesn’t work? What if they don’t give me what I want?
The dead are not a vending machine. We don’t put in the coin of our request and wait for our candy bar. The answers they offer may surprise us. After all, from the other side of the veil they have a perspective that is unavailable to us. Part of the reason we call upon them is that we know they can see the big picture and the long story.
Can we break down our request? Instead of asking for instantaneous healing, we may need to request to find the right doctor, the right medicine, and even the day-to-day courage to manage a difficult treatment.
Do we need to add some additional helpers? Perhaps there are others among their ranks standing ready to assist. Is there anyone else we want to add to the team? My mother had a group of women she worked with on political matters in our small town—they were called The Ladies Committee. They knew that it often takes a whole regiment to win certain battles. I call on all these women, now dead, whenever I have big projects underway.
Most of all, we must trust the timing. We live within very simplistic notions of linear time. But the dead have all the time in the world. How many unexpected blessings in this life are the answered prayers of lifetimes past?
The Difficult Dead
Let’s be honest. We feel relief when some souls are finally on the other side of the veil, where they can no longer harm us. Many of us have known monsters of one kind or another who made our lives a living hell. While we are under no obligation to work with them and while we have no responsibility for their healing, they may actually be ready to atone for their crimes and make amends. Death releases us from the shortsighted preoccupations and mistakes of a single life. These souls often feel tremendous regret about their behavior. We don’t have to do anything to help them with those feelings, but they may have a lot of motivation to help us, to atone for their hurtfulness. I often invite people to make peace with those on the other side who enraged them and even terrified them. But we don’t need to contort ourselves into some artificial state of forgiveness. Instead, we can give the dead the work of atonement, and if they deliver—when they deliver—we will experience the radical revelation that healing is always possible.
Do we still need to be scared of those who hurt us in life?
Those who are gone are gone from the physical world. They cannot hurt us anymore. That is what we must always remember. The living can be truly horrifying to each other. But the dead have no inclination to harm. Over and over again I have seen the difficult dead offer healing to the living.
Rosemarie, an aging flower child in her late seventies, came to one of my parties honoring the dead and announced that she had a special job for Hank, her stepfather. Rosemarie had never married—and that night she told us why. Her father had died when she was twelve, and her mother had remarried Hank. “He started messing with me right away,” she confided. “Even tried to pimp me out to his friends. So I had to get out of there. I never went home again. It wasn’t safe. I never felt safe anywhere. I hated Hank for what he did to me. He destroyed my life. But I’m telling you right here, right now, that if he can find my man, I’ll let bygones be bygones. When I’ve got the love of my life in my arms, that’s when I’ll forgive him.”
