In this episode, Perdita Finn shares her knowledge of empowering individuals to activate their own magic with the help of their ancestors.
Together, we talk about connecting with the dead, the battle against matriarchal wisdom, and reclaiming both the power of the rosary and the significance of our relationship with the unknown.
"Don't think of a soul as an object, as a pearl. Think of a soul as a long, long red thread creating the very fabric of existence woven together with other threads.” — Perdita Finn
Perdita Finn is the co-founder, with her husband Clark Strand, of the non-denominational international 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. In addition to extensive study with Zen masters, priests, and healers, she apprenticed with the psychic Susan Saxman, with whom she wrote The Reluctant Psychic. Finn now teaches popular workshops on Getting to Know the Dead, in which participants are empowered to activate the magic in their own lives with the help of their ancestors. She is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World and lives with her family in the moss-filled shadows of the Catskill Mountains.
we discuss —
LINKS
If you enjoyed the episode, check out —
Mentioned in the episode—
More about our guest —
Free Resources —
Discover your wild water archetype + upgrade your self care with our free Water Medicine Quiz
Stay Connected —
Subscribe to the home—body podcast wherever you get your listens.
This podcast is produced by Softer Sounds. ✨
In this episode, Perdita Finn shares her knowledge of empowering individuals to activate their own magic with the help of their ancestors.
Together, we talk about connecting with the dead, the battle against matriarchal wisdom, and reclaiming both the power of the rosary and the significance of our relationship with the unknown.
"Don't think of a soul as an object, as a pearl. Think of a soul as a long, long red thread creating the very fabric of existence woven together with other threads.” — Perdita Finn
Perdita Finn is the co-founder, with her husband Clark Strand, of the non-denominational international 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. In addition to extensive study with Zen masters, priests, and healers, she apprenticed with the psychic Susan Saxman, with whom she wrote The Reluctant Psychic. Finn now teaches popular workshops on Getting to Know the Dead, in which participants are empowered to activate the magic in their own lives with the help of their ancestors. She is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World and lives with her family in the moss-filled shadows of the Catskill Mountains.
we discuss —
LINKS
If you enjoyed the episode, check out —
Mentioned in the episode—
More about our guest —
Free Resources —
Discover your wild water archetype + upgrade your self care with our free Water Medicine Quiz
Stay Connected —
Subscribe to the home—body podcast wherever you get your listens.
This podcast is produced by Softer Sounds. ✨
My name is Grace, and you're listening to the Homebody Podcast. Welcome, everyone. I'm really excited to bring you today's episode. I'm here with Perdita Fenn, who is the cofounder with her husband, Clark Strand, of this nondenominational international fellowship called The Way of the Rose, which Was inspired by their book by the same title, The Way of the Rose, The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. And in addition to extensive study with Zen masters, priests, and healers, Perdita has also apprenticed with the psychic Susan Saxman, who, with whom she wrote the Reluctant Psychic. Finn now teaches popular workshops on getting to know the dead. And in those participants are really empowered to activate the magic in their own lives with the help of their ancestors. She's also the author of take back the magic conversations with the unseen world and lives with her family in the moss filled shadows of the Catskill Mountains. Perdita, I'm really honored and excited to have you on the podcast today. And is there anything else that you'd love to add to sort of framing yourself for the listeners before we dive in? Well, Grace, I'm really excited to be here and, you know, my book was published this week. It's been a labor of love over the past 10 years of collaborations with those on the other side and also with a lot of living supporters. But so it feels like the end of a very celebratory week for me. It's kind of dessert to be here. So Oh, that's so exciting. Congratulations. I know that's such a it's a big effort to get a book out into the world. So It is. I think I I don't wanna center all of our conversations on the way of the rose, because I know your work has really evolved towards working with the dead and psychic realms and all of those things, so I'd love to spend a lot of time there. However, my first encounter with your work was through the way of the rose. It was at the beginning of the pandemic. I was on social media at the time. I'm not anymore. And someone I trusted really shared the book on their feed. And so I was ordering a pile of books for that initial, quote, 2 week period, when we were staying home, and I had no idea what to from the book. I was skeptical. Like, I grew up in church, though not the Catholic church, and it wasn't really a place I was Going back to in any way, not even, philosophically, but your the book really unfolded in a really direct and beautiful way that touched me a lot. I'm wondering if you would share with us, for those who are new to your work, sort of how the rosary like Found you all in sort of the perspective or practice that it's really kind of grown into your way of being in the world. So first of all, I'm not Catholic. I wasn't raised Catholic. I'm not Catholic now. I'm not even Christian. I don't affiliate with any religion. You You know, people ask me what I am and I say I'm trying I'm an animal trying to remember how to be a good animal. And so that's really important for me to say. That said, and, you know, my husband and I have written a trio of books, and we say we write about the dark, The dirt and the dead. And the dark, he wrote a book called Waking Up to the Dark, about his encounters with the dark mother. Call her Kalli. Call her the black Madonna. You know, by any name you wanna call her is what we say, but she's the the dark womb of the cosmos. And then we wrote The Way of the Rose together, which was about our recovery of the rosary. And that's been a very long journey for me, and I tell some of that story in Way of the Rose and more of it in how I Discovered the rosary or the Hail Mary after I had an abortion. Mhmm. And not as a way of validating that experience, actually. And I didn't know how to make sense of the experiences I was having with these beads. And one of the things my husband and I have been very curious about for a long time is What is our spiritual response to climate change? These religious expressions have all grown up within patriarchy, within civilization, And they keep us trapped inside of those insidious paradigms. And how do we find a way out of them? So that we can get to some healthier, whole, or Place of relationship to the natural world. And that had been a real journey for both of us to back, back, forward, forward, dreaming, dreaming. And in the midst of it, I was praying the rosary, and I couldn't tell you why. I couldn't tell anyone why. You know? How can I explain how an ex Buddhist, You know, wild woman is praying these traditional like my little old Irish grandmother? But it turns out those little old Irish grandmothers and Italian grandmothers were part of a tradition that goes back not just tens of thousands of years, But hundreds of thousands of years. In fact, there are beads that have been found in Morocco that are a 120,000 years old. So they go back to our very origins as a species and making beads is pretty arduous work. To fashion a bead from bone or shell, It's time consuming work. So why are you doing it? Is it just adornment? But I would ask listeners, take a bead, Any bead, you know, if you've got an earring or a necklace on or a button, you can roll it between your fingers And just roll it between your fingers as I'm speaking and begin to notice somatically how you feel in your body, And you may begin to notice your blood pressure come down. Just that gesture of rolling between your thumb and index and middle finger bead. Why is that? It's because as primates, as animals, our first gesture It's not to let go but to hold on and to hold on specifically to our mother's nipples. And to get the milk, we roll our mother's nipple between our fingers so that the milk expresses and lets down. And the sweetness of the world, the nourishment we need comes from that gesture. So when people in times of crisis Throughout deep time, whether it was the Mount Toba eruption 70,000 years ago, which reduced The amount of people on this planet to 5,000 in the Horn of Africa or some other cataclysmic event of which there've been plenty. What did people do? Did they let go or did they hold on? They made beads and they held on. And the rosary as we know it today emerged out of the black plague in Europe. And it was a way For people who lived in villages that they've been living in for 8 to 10000 years to express their devotion to their Cosmic mother. Call her Mary. Call her Freya. Call her the colleague. Call her Anu. Call her whatever you wanna call her. She's mama And to hold on to her. And so my husband and I did a lot of kind of archaeological excavation on the history of the rosary showing That in fact, it was a kind of parallel spiritual tradition that grew up alongside Catholicism, But somewhat antithetical to it. And in fact, the church was always trying to kind of control and crush. And so we created this Feral fellowship of rosary prayers all over the world. That's the story of ours with the rosary. Also fascinatingly to me, Many psychics I've met, and I have many friends who are psychics, and I've met many because I wrote a book with a psychic. Pray the rosary, And they pray the rosary to open the portal between the worlds. It is a Method of sinning the veil. John Edwards has written a book on the rosary, the famous psychic. In German the word rosengarten means It has 5 meanings. 1 is a rosary. Another is a collection of stories. The third is a rose garden. The 4th is a woman's genitalia, and the 5th is a graveyard. And so that linking of beauty, sex, death, all coming together in this fertile dirt of the rosary is Why? It's such a you know, many people have prayed the Rosary of Visions. Many people experience encounters with those from the other side. It's very common. And That actually became my experience the more I prayed. I was actually talking to the dead before I began praying the rosary, but once I began praying the rosary, things got really wild. I'm sure it's like solidifying the bridge. Mhmm. I'm wondering if you could share a little bit about I don't want to take one's personal experience and necessarily extract it into Mhmm. The general if there is a general experience. But if there's a sense of sort of nowness in the air, it feels like around Sort of retrieving some of these, what have historically been, like, women's mysteries, religions, and practices, and it feels it has a very now feeling to it. At least for me, it does. Me too. And I'm wondering if you could potentially share any of your perspective or experience with that. For me, you know, you mentioned climate change earlier, which I think for me is very much connected to that. Well, the the word that you used is mystery. Mhmm. And we have been in the age of enlightenment since the 18th century. Right? It's the great forgetting, the great silencing. We have become addicted to light, clarity, answers, information, right, up up and away into our heads into abstractions. Maybe we can even get off this planet and go populate Mars. No one's quite sure how our microbiome is gonna survive that transplant, but Never you know what I mean? These these techno narcissists don't even know how their own bodies function. Mhmm. But The age of darkness, the dark ages are actually the ages of growth and spiritual connection and spiritual intimacy. You know, we put people in cells with the lights always on to torture them. People go mad if you don't turn off the lights. And yet now we live in a hyper lit world 247, a world where we think we can know the answers to everything, Where scientists figure out what things are by breaking them apart and studying the pieces that have been shattered. But the ancients knew that life is a mystery. They knew that behind us We're vast, dark mysteries that we have lifetimes behind us. Some of which we retain fragmentary memories of, but most of which is dark. And before us is darkness. And beneath us is the soil and the dirt of darkness, and our little blue marble of a planet Circles through what is mostly dark matter in the universe. But just because it's dark and mysterious Doesn't mean it's not that it's empty. In fact, it's fertile and alive. And our planet, Just like our souls are seeds in that darkness that are coming into bloom. You know, we put seeds into the darkness to grow. Babies grow in the darkness of the womb, and womb darkness It's very, very comforting and very healing, but it's also comforting to know that we are not alone in the darkness. And that's what my book is really about. Mhmm. What does it mean to step into the darkness? It's filled With mothers who've loved us from lives we cannot even remember, who even now are reaching out to hold us. I often say The opposite of God isn't goddess, it's everything. Mhmm. Everything is alive. And what beings on the other side remember is that we've all been each other's mothers. That's the wisdom. You know, wisdom is different than information. We live in the information age with very little wisdom. That is true. But wisdom knew the ancient was a woman with a dark face. It was the dark womb of the cosmos. It was Wisdom is dark. Wisdom comes from the inside out, from the feet up, from our roots deep in the ground. And, yeah, I think as women, we want women right now wanna reclaim. That was actively suppressed. You know? I mean, The war against the earth has been a war against women's wisdom. Yeah, it's been a really, I was listening to Some indigenous women recently talking about some of the visions that they had in their own practices, and these are people with no European heritage. They are indigenous to what we call the Americas. And but in their vision, they had such a sense of The wound that had happened through things like the witch trials and the wildest happened in specific locations To particular people that there's sort of like a cosmic wound that really occurred that kind of is also coinciding with the enlightenment in a lot of ways, and that we're in an era now where we're like, that sense of retrieval and healing and reempowering It's something that she's felt really called to to sort of, like, facilitate, even though that's not necessarily directly, like, her heritage in that particular way, which I found deeply moving and something that I feel kind of come right coming up to me as you in response to what you're to what you're saying that sends that desire of reclamation. You know, I think we don't know our history very well, and that that's on purpose. And, You know, the when people think of sort of witches or the witch craze, they're often imagining superstitious needy medieval people going around pointing fingers at each other, killing each other. In fact, they weren't. The witch race began on the eve of the enlightenment, and it was most active in the most Educated most scientific areas of the world. So the emergence of the Scientific Revolution brings with it this violence against women. In Germany, in England, in Scotland, and at Harvard. Let's be honest. The Salem witch the Salem witch trials Weren't about a bunch of hysterical adolescent girls trying to kill each other. They were about a bunch of theological men from Harvard Coming and murdering women in the new world. And I think it's really important to look at this violence because What happened in that 200 year period in the late 1500, 1600, early 1700 in Europe doesn't end. The war just gets translated to the new world. Right? And it becomes against black and brown women's bodies. Mhmm. It doesn't end. It doesn't stop. The experiments, the violence, the sexual torture, it's all ongoing. It's never stopped, but the recipients of that Violence have changed. And that's why I think it's really important for you know, my next book is actually explicitly all about this. It's called Beyond the Witch Wounds to a World Renewed. Because how do we how do we both acknowledge These entangled nightmares of civilization. Right? And move through them to something else without getting stuck in them. Mhmm. And for me, the way that we do that is very intimate and very personal because we have mothers, Ancestral mothers, all of us, who remember something else. We have mothers from before civilization right now waiting to guide us out of this patriarchal horror story. I guess what's that's making me tear up, which kind of leads us into your work with the unseen and working with the dead, in particular. And do you mind sharing with us some of the ways that connecting with Ancestors in that way has really helped in your own healing, but also I feel like it's also supporting A retelling or a reimagining of the world that we could live in? You know, there's so much to unpack here, so let me see From this conversation with it was juicy conversation we're having. To reclaim these old ways of these old women is not just about Shifting our focus from god is a man to god is a woman. It's a completely new belief sphere or an old belief sphere that we have to reclaim. And it it's a radical animism that remembers that we have many mothers, and we have many lifetimes. You know, I often say lineages are a lie because there are no straight lines in nature. Go back 7 generations and you have 200 grandmothers. Which one are you gonna choose from as most important, Or you're gonna let yourself be circled by them. So I sometimes say we don't have matriarchies or matrilineal lines. We have The mattress sphere that we live inside of. Someone says that sounds like a mattress, and I said, good. Because it's sleep and sex, and that's what we can Claim. Right? Exactly. Claim all that juicy wonderfulness that we most so desperately need to reclaim for ourselves. So long live the mattress fear. But for me, that work feels very big, but also it's incredibly intimate. I call on the dead by name. This was a practice, and this is what I write about in my book, Take Back the Magic. It is a practice that grew out of A fight with my own mother. And she was an atheist. Not sure she wasn't just an atheist. My mother the best part of my mother was Disinterest in anything spiritual or religious. But she was a very vibrant animal and she loved to garden And grow things, and she made pate out of organ meats, and we had Borgonstrictors in our house, and too many cats, She had a kind of feral aliveness. It was really delicious, but she wasn't always a very soft or affectionate mother. When my own daughter was born, she also drank too much, which was really problematical. Right after the birth of my own daughter, which I read about in the book, she and I had a terrible fight. I I'm in a fight where I really felt like I I might kill her. You know, that it was it felt like imminent possibility. And I called my husband and, You know, we had a talk and I calmed down and I grew up in this house surrounded with windows. My mother Loved growing plants. It had lots of glass windows, and I realized all my life I'd felt faces staring in. Who are these women? These unhappy, miserable women who've all fought with their mothers. And, you know, one of our legacies of the witch craze Is that mothers were encouraged to turn in their daughters to the inquisitors to save their lives. Daughters were encouraged to turn in their mothers to save their lives. And we've forgotten what this has done to the relationship of mothers and daughters. My own daughter and I have worked very hard to hear we say that our intimacy with each other is our radical defiance against patriarchy. And it's really hard work, you know, in this culture. Be independent. Separate. Cut the umbilical cord. Don't be a helicopter mother. All these ways we wanna you know, we put babies alone in a room screaming, and I somehow that's gonna make them feel better about the universe. Right. It will help them go to sleep. Don't Don't even get me started. Yeah. Exactly. But anyway but my so my mother did that. The the fight began because my mother told me to let the baby cry, and I said forget about But I was feeling all these ancestral women, and I went up into my mother's bedroom where she was crying, and she had a wall Of all of her ancestors. And suddenly, I realized those were the faces that she, this non religious woman, Non spiritual woman was summoning the dead. And it was an opening for me and I began summoning the dead. And I call them the dead because, yes, I call them my grandmothers, my aunts, my cousins, my great great greats, whatever. But they're my teachers, my pets. The tree, the hemlock tree where I sat under as a child that got cut down, that too is my mother. I call on all the dead. I call on dead that I don't even remember the names of. You know, I got in my backyard and I can find even though I live in the mountains, the Ketzko mountains, there are rocks with seashells in them from oceans 350,000,000 years ago, And I call on those dead sea creatures to guide me. Mhmm. So when I summon the dead, I'm doing it very intimately, But I'm also expanding it beyond neurobiology and biological connection. That feels really freeing when I hear you say that because I think some people in ways that I've Heard and that can be kind of a real sticking point for them and being like, well, I don't have a great relationship with my ancestors, or I don't know who they are, or I don't know if they're supportive, or etcetera. Well, here's the thing about it also too. Religious authorities wanted to separate women from their power, Right? To gain control over them. And the the way that they did that was by silencing their conversation with the dead. This is explicit. Max Stacio, in her book Witches and Pagans, documents how often the priests are writing to the bishop saying, we can't get these damn women to Stop talking in the graveyards till they're dead. How do we get them to listen to us? Right? In her book, Witch Craze, which is the best book About the European witch craze. And Barstow documents that the single thing got got women most accused of witchcraft It wasn't midwifery. It wasn't herbalism. It was talking to the dead. Mhmm. And why If women are getting their power from below, how do we cut off their power at the base? We silenced the conversation with the dead, and it's been a propaganda campaign to make people frightened of the unseen world. Look at the ubiquity of horror movies in our culture. Right? These are all designed to shut down the animist conversation with the others unseen world. I say put me in a haunted house. I'll talk to the dead. Don't put me in a boardroom on Wall Street with reasonable men. Yeah. I feel like, you know, when you were saying, you know, shutting down the connection from below, I was just thinking of all the, I mean, I was also thinking of just like our literal connection to the electromagnetic field of the earth that is so blocked because we don't go outside without shoes or Because there maybe is no dirt where someone lives and they can only be on pavement, etcetera, and just how that's such, I mean, that's something that I feel very viscerally In my own life, it's something that I notice a lot. The world can be a challenging place, as you know, and water medicine is a transmission designed to reorient you back to the refuge and inspiration that you carry inside of yourself, no matter what's going on in the world outside. If you're feeling overwhelmed, disconnected, burned out, or like you're just going through the motions in your life, it could be an invitation to go deeper And let the soul of yourself seat back into your veins. Whether you're feeling creatively blocked, low energy, or just stuck in a rut, Water medicine can help you reconnect with your desires, heal from past hurts, and find more joy and resilience in your life and in yourself. People who have taken this course tell me that it changed their lives, that it's something that they revisit over and over again, and that it introduced them to Layers of their longing and aliveness that had been blocked for years or perhaps never even visited. Water medicine is a course designed to help you find your flow and reclaim the wild water within you because the world needs you, and perhaps more importantly, you need you, all of you, and overflowing with your life. If something inside of you feels like a yes, then head over to home dash bodies.comforward/joindashwaterdashmedicine, And you can use the code listen, all caps, to get a discount just for our podcast community. If you're not ready to take the plunge but you still feel curious, Head over to home dash bodies .com and take our short quiz that pops up on the homepage to get started on your water medicine journey completely for free. And you can find all of this and more in the show notes below. That's home dashbodies.com, and you can use the code listen at checkout. Grace, you're in Atlanta. Right? I am. I have a great deep connection to Atlanta. You know? I don't know. Tell me. Oh, I speaking of that land, well, my husband my husband grew up there. Oh, really? Yes. And I tell this story in my book. This is sort of but the land calls us. You know? Land is very powerful, and the land calls us and the dead call to us. We all are where we are, everyone listening to this, because the dead of that land have called to you for reasons we may not even understand. Right? That's true. And, so my husband grew up there. He did leave when he was 18. He had to get out of the south as fast Good, but it wasn't that. Anxieties. I understand that impulse. Atlanta was a different place in those days. Mhmm. But when I was 10 years old, my mother took me to see Gone With the Wind of All God awful movies. Oh, wow. And, you know, it was in the old days when you could only see a movie on the big screen because they'd reissued it. And I was 10 years old, and I came out of the movie. And I was obsessed with Atlanta. And I went to our little local library and said, can I have some books on Atlanta? And they're like, no. You know, we can give you a book on the civil war or whatever. And I wanted to go to Atlanta. I kept saying to mother, can we go to Atlanta? My mother was like, no, you know, we're not going to Atlanta. And It was this wild obsession. And when I was 10 years old, my husband was 15. He's 5 years older than I am. We discovered the day we met that when he was 15, he moved to Atlanta. Mhmm. And it was as if my soul Was looking for him. And when we finally visited many, many years later, we went back on a trip with his family. I realized I had been dreaming into this land to try and my soul at night had been trying to find them for so long. That's so beautiful. It's like trying to pinpoint Time, which is space, you know, like, where you all would converge. That's really beautiful. I love that. It makes me earlier, you said the mattress Sphere and something that's really emerged not to go like too deep, but maybe we will of like time is just a sphere and it's something that we can connect Through and that we're living, like our past lives are our simultaneous lives, right? And that these are things that we can Strengthen links and cords to, or not our pathways to, through the roots of above and below and through our fields and prayers, etcetera. And so that's what I was thinking when you were saying that. And even just like the conversions of YouTube In Atlanta, that moment was just felt like it was really kind of rerouting or gridding something. You are in Atlanta, and I come up in that sort of you know what I mean? That and it's not just A place name or a place, it's a whole ancestral realm that's there calling to us, connecting us. You know, people are very interested in the mycelial networks of fungi. Right? Mhmm. Because I think it's that sense that we are woven together in these great circles of belonging. You know, I sometimes say don't think of a soul as an object, as a pearl. Think of a soul as a long, long red thread Creating the very fabric of existence woven together with other threads. Right? And that fabric exists In the 10 dimensions. And that's the mystery of it all, right? We don't know how our souls are entangled with other souls, but we can feel it. So you meet someone and you go, I've met you before. For sure. Right? Absolutely. And you go to a place and you go, I've been here before. We have a dream and it's like, it's my mother's house and it's my dorm in college both together. You know? Right. For sure. Because time and space are like origami. They're not like a line. Yeah. And it feel like time is it's a real that reality is move. It's a live writhing thing. And I feel like something that stands out to me a lot about, about your work and your work as A pair and even like the reluctant psychic, etcetera. You know, it takes a lot of courage to just share transmission. It takes a lot of courage and vulnerability to show up that way in the world. I feel like in particular As a woman, I think still there's a lot, like, you know, if we're like, oh, this man transmitted this thing. We're like, now he's an occult leader. We like Braze and, like, buy all their stuff, but then if it's a woman, we're still like, oh, that's silly. That's just like a silly thing that you think or whatever. That's not really how the world works, so that's not what's coming or that's not what we need to do. And so I first wanna just say it takes so much heartfulness to show up in the world that way and to And I don't take that lightly. And also, I love the titles like reluctant psychics. So I'm wondering if you would tell me a little bit about Just how the reluctance also meets the gift, meets the courage, in that way of just showing up. Well, thank you first of all for acknowledging the vulnerability of this moment for me, which means a lot to me. You know, sometimes friends would say to me, how are you feeling about your book coming out? Are you Excited. And I was like, I'm terrified. Terrified. I'm in a state of abject terror. I actually erupted at one point before the book came out. Summer in this rash from head to toe, and I said, oh, I'm on fire. You know? Like, that's how what it's doing to my body right now. And I worked with it. Got it. Got the message. But, yeah, it's very vulnerable and very scary to, you know, god knows if my family is gonna read it. Right. Even more terrifying. Even more terrifying. But, you know, the what is the reluctance? The the pull of the conventional. The whole, the homogenizing. Right? Mhmm. And, you know, it's we live in this Culture, this relentless, oppressive, there's one way to do things. There's one way. And I wanna say, you know, nature shows us that it glories in diversity. I mean, nature is diverse, And it's always striving. It doesn't want 1 kind of apple. It wants a 100 kinds of apples. Mhmm. It's more interesting. It's more fun. Mhmm. And so can we sort of celebrate that uniqueness? But, yeah, as a woman, it's very, very vulnerable. You know, in the book I wrote, The Reluctant Psychic with Susan Saxman, She's an extraordinary woman. She changed my life, but her own life has been a real challenge. You know, she has struggled to separate the living from the dead. She can't always tell the difference about Musou. And she's an oracle. She would have been put, You know, in a temple in the old days and cared for and loved and treasured, and people would have come to her To ask what, you know, what do we do next? Yeah. You know, and instead she's selling secondhand clothes and doing tarot readings for$20 Mhmm. When I meet her. Mhmm. Right? Yeah. Exactly. It brings me back to this, you know, the word mystery, and something that's really been landing a lot for me lately is how, You know, the things that might be the most powerful things to know, going back to wisdom, are actually hidden things, or things that are hiding behind funny stories, or silly habits or secrets or jokes or riddles, and so that people who can't handle the power of the thing are like, oh, look at that foolish thing over there, and then they move on. And so there's, like, a protection thing in with it too. It's a dance, really, but I feel like that's something that I've really been sitting in the revelation of lately. Oh, I love that. Yes. I agree with you a 100%. In fact, I've been having a deep dive Into the work of Mark Twain right now who I don't know if you know this about him. He felt the most important book he ever wrote was his book about Joan of Arc, Which is such a weird thing. Like okay. Nobody none of the documentaries or movies about Mark Twain will ever mention the book that he considered his masterpiece. Enterpiece. No. I'd never heard of it. No. No. Not that it's a great book, but but he devoted his life to it. He hated religion. He hated France, and he was devoted to Joan of Arc, and I have been doing a deep dive on his reading, you know, in his autobiography, he Says, I've been born more times than Krishna. And he was a precog. He had precognitive dreams and experiences. He could see his own death. He saw his brother's death, his Daughter's death. He was clearly having tremendous psychic experiences and psychic intuitions and Yet he's writing. He's a humorist writing funny stories. I'm going and doing a deep dive and realizing, oh, he's hidden Easter eggs in these books. It is just like I with this my husband and I read about the rosary. The rosary was where? Some people go, oh, I don't wanna do that Catholic prayer. I go, oh my gosh. It's the most radical pagan thing you've ever done in your whole life. And they'll even go like, oh, I don't wanna say the Hail Mary. It's a Christian prayer. And you go, the Hail Mary was where Our grandmothers hid their devotion to the triple goddess. They wrote that prayer. They didn't even write it. They said it. And it was a way of hiding their devotion to the triple goddess in plain sight. Mhmm. And so a lot of times, I I'm fascinated, for instance, with folk practices of the saints because a lot of old lore is hidden there. A lot of old magic. What's one or some of your favorite nuggets that you've discovered in that that joyride? There's so many. I've got a whole book about this thing. That's Another book I'm working on, but slowly. But say Saint Christoph Mhmm. You know, people have Saint Christopher medals in their cars, and they're there to protect you, you know, If you're driving in your car, right, you know, just superstitious little saint. And he got discredited by the Catholic church as not being a real saint, as being just a Folklore sing, which is always the most interesting tell. For sure. So Saint Christopher, the story of him is that he's a giant With a dog's head. Already, you can see he's half animal and half human, like the old gods of old who are often What do you call terrier morphs, half human, half animal? Remembering that we're sort of always moving between the animal and the human, the plant and the animal. We're not one thing. We're everything. Who carries the Christ child, which for me is always kind of the life force of the planet, not Jesus is a singularity, but life is a great green wick of power that exists on this planet. He carries that Christ child across the river. And that's why because he carries him, you put him in vehicles. I just research. He's connected to Anubis Who has the head of a jackal who carries people from the land of the living to the land of the dead and back again? So he is the vehicle for as we move, our souls move from one lifetime to another. So I pray to him every day. I pray to saint Christopher in 2 ways. 1, I pray to him that that my kids just don't have a car accident. So, yes, I pray to him in the traditional way, but but I also pray to him thinking about my soul in the vehicle of this body. So if you think of your body as a vehicle for your soul, caring is through life. Right? So this is what I pray to him every day. Protect all beings from this vehicle. Protect me within this vehicle. Help me to use this vehicle to do good. Let me never miss the beauty of the world through speed. Guide me to my destiny. So I say that every morning, and I think of my children in their cars and their old clunky, you know, secondhand Subarus. And I think of me in this body. So Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. It's, as soon as you said dog, I was like the newest and that I love that connection. Exactly. Right? Yeah. That hiding in plain sight, I think is a really common sort of folk survival tradition and Something that's really become a part of me sort of reclaiming some things about myself that feel powerful or things that I would normally Like, the way that we don't necessarily appreciate things that come naturally to us or things that we're good at. And one of those things for me is is beauty and a a phrase that's really been helping me Claim a lot of things. Beauty is enough. It's enough to make something beautiful and magic and delicious. That's enough. It doesn't have to mean anything else. It doesn't have to, like, You know, and that's enough. And that's that's been a really revelatory thing that's been sort of coming into my body because a lot of my life has been spent like, well, that's not enough. It has to be about this other thing. It has to be about this. It has to be smart. You gotta back it up. You gotta find a sort. All these other things. And so beauty is enough. And I'm wondering that's sort of a precursor to framing, you know, this connection, I think, between creativity and what we would called spirituality. You know, like, for you, I would imagine that a lot of your writing process, it's about research, but there's also a lot of, like, Channeling involved with a lot of those things. You know? And even around what to read, the sort of the way that creativity and spirituality, whether it's making bread or making Songs or hosting a dinner or making flowers is sort of connected to the bridge, so to speak. And that's not really a question, but I wonder if you would riff on that. Well, first Well, someone in, The Way of the Rose community said recently, I'm I'm sorry I can't remember who, she but she said, I know I'm on the right path when it's beautiful. Mhmm. It's true. The way of beauty is the reassurance and the longing for beauty. And I can go in a lot of different directions with this. So is it okay with you if I go wild and dig with it? Yes. Please be wild. It's Well, one of the things I'm fascinated by is when devotion to the lady arises by whatever name you wanna call her, so does beauty. Mhmm. The troubadours start singing. The tarot card decks emerge with all these beautiful images. Right? Suddenly, creativity, the divine Devotion to the lady makes things beautiful. And she just the way nature is you know, you take a Concrete wasteland. And you let nature get going, and nature's gonna try to figure out how do we make this beautiful? So a dandelion or some chicory is gonna poke up through the concrete. And then the kudzu is gonna come in and say, Alright. I can eat the heavy metals and get things going here. Right? Like, I love watching that slow, We'll make it diverse. We'll make it beautiful again. And I think that that creative impulse, that desire to come in and make Things beautiful, it comes from the mother, comes from the earth, comes from her womb, comes through us. You know, since I began writing with the dad, like, I have too much writing happening. But I do I actually teach a course, a long course, Which helps people begin, and they work in our artistic medium as we worked with the dead. Mhmm. And it is astounding what begins to happen when these collaborations occur. Like, the music, this art, the We do an event on the solstice, and I invite everybody to. You should come. It's like it just it's just wild. And, of course, that's what the the the great artists, the poets, the novelists have always known. That this was a you know, we call it the muse, call it the muses, call it whatever you want to call it, But it's a collaborative enterprise with the other side. For sure. I love whenever I watch, I love watching documentaries about just like famous artists. And there's always a part like, people who've really just, like, done something that Changed how we think about their medium or whatever, and they're always like, the songs are just up there. You just catch them. Like, there's always a reference to something where he's like, oh, you just You gotta catch it. You gotta, like, pull like, there's this sense of, like, they just pulled it in. My daughter and I are both lovers of Bob Dylan, And I live in Woodstock, New York, you know, where he did you know, worked with Big Pink and the band and everything. So he's you know, Bob Dylan is everywhere, But we've always been devoted to him. And one of the things we love are the interviews in the early days when they're asking him questions about his process. And he just goes, I don't know, man. I just show up. Like, he he doesn't know. Do you know what I mean? Like, he doesn't know. It happened to him and through him, and he made himself available to it in a lot of ways. You know? Yes. He was an omnivorous listener of music. In fact, people So, like, he stole everybody's records and, you know, he was he was he was priming his vehicle for this experience, And then it happened to him. And people would ask him what it was like, and he couldn't even talk about it. Speaking of the mystery. Mhmm. Right? Yeah. Yeah. It's just there. It just came. I just heard it, and then I you know, it's a really beautiful flow. Yeah. Which doesn't mean you don't have to put in your work to be a good antenna for that reception. For sure. You definitely do. I feel like Is there anything that you feel like you would love to share with our listeners that you feel like I haven't made room for? Or Well, one of the things that I try to always tell people is, you know, the sum total of my work is really simple, which is the debt are real. All the debt are real, And they really wanna help you. Mhmm. And that that is a you don't have to take my word for it. Begin saying their names. Begin asking for their help. You know, I think one of the things we are taught not to ask for help. We're taught as those babies in a room by ourselves to scream ourselves to sleep. Not that anyone's gonna come and answer our call, but the dead will answer your And they really will. And maybe it's as simple as a parking space in the beginning or maybe it's as simple as, You know, the blood work being better than it was last month. And maybe it's really profound healing you need to happen with somebody living in your family. But the dead will show up and, you know, my book is about how I healed with my father after he died Because he showed up for me after he died. Mhmm. And he made amends. I was really angry at him, And I wasn't trying to forgive him. I was just he was dead, and I could be mad. I wasn't gonna kill him anymore with my anger. Mhmm. And he showed me that he was there, and he showed me that he got it, that he'd seen the mistakes he made, and he started making amends to me. And so none of our relationships with those on the other side are over. They're ongoing. There are new stories to tell. We can tell new stories about our parents, New stories about our ancestors. We don't have to stay stuck in the wounds. Yeah. I feel like there's a way that, I guess I wanna ask before we we come to a close, the sort of disconnection between us Healing, doing what we need to do to thrive, be a channel for beauty and magic. Heal is connected to the healing of humanity and the planet and paradigms, etcetera. And I'm wondering if there's a way that you understand That relationship or maybe you don't think there's a relationship there. Oh, I do. I think it's crucial. We're all gonna die. Everybody. Let's start there. Okay. It is the thing as modern people, we most wanna pretend is not true. Mhmm. Right. Death is seen as a failure. Like, you know, you read now about these tech guys who are gonna figure out some way to live to a 175 and But they also wanna don't wanna sleep anymore either. Like, I don't know about you, but sometimes getting into bed after a long day is the most delicious thing in the whole world. And I love going to sleep. And as far as I can tell, there's no difference between at a certain moment dying and going to sleep. And we get to wake up to a new day or a new life and a new canvas with which to work. That feels like a mercy to me. But everything dies. Trees die. Rivers die. Species die. We die. Planets die. And everything without exception is reborn. Mhmm. The only sobriety From the patriarchal horror story is the lived experience of the long story of our souls. We have to know we've been here many lifetimes before patriarchy, and we will be here many lifetimes after. Will we be human beings as we imagine human beings right now? I don't know. But life on this planet is what matters. Life itself is what matters. That green whip of life force, that erotic life force is what matters and when I feel it within me, I know it won't die, that it endures. And we have to know we're gonna be reborn to the world we've made. No No one's getting out of this. If the world's a mess, it's gonna be more of a mess when we were reborn. You know, I do an exercise in one of my workshops where I ask people to write a letter to their future mothers in their next life. What would you say to this person? And what if you meet a child who might be your future mother today? What if your future mother is living on a garbage pile in Mexico City or India? Can you imagine that? So if we can begin to live inside, not the short story of a single life, but the long story of our souls, We're gonna behave radically differently today. Mhmm. For sure. It absolutely does. Yeah. No, thank you for sharing that perspective. I appreciate it. I would love for you to tell the listeners where they can find you on the Internet where they can get to find more about your work, your workshop, where you like people to connect with you. So there are lots of different ways I try to make myself as available as Possible. You can follow me on Facebook and Instagram at Perdida Finn. I've written a book, Take Back the Magic, Conversations with the Unseen World that's For sale, you know, wherever you buy your books. And I have a website, take back the magic.com. And I offer a lot of workshops. You know? Like I say that, you know, the dead are real. They wanna help you and collaborate with you. It's like Saying you make bread, you just take flour and water, mix it together, and throw it in the oven. Sometimes there's some lost art forms to getting the sourdough riser going, and so we have a lot of conversations on that. Take back the magic.com. I also my husband and I have a very thorough fellowship, The Way of the Rose, which you can find on Facebook, and we also have website wayoftherose.org. We offer prayer circles. They're a 100% free. And not only are they free, we're writing a book called Circles Not Lines, Spiritual Community Beyond Patriarchy. And it's those communities, there are no experts, masters, teachers, gurus. And to ensure that, there's no money involved. Everything's a 100% free. There's no promotion, marketing, or advertising, even of our own books. It's the friend zone. Mhmm. We say we value circles of friendship, not lineages of power. We don't even have buildings, no building font. There's no money. And the other thing we don't have is public causes. We don't have any agenda. Our only agenda is that everyone find The seeds that have been planted in their own hearts and begin to help them grow and we encourage each other to all do that, To grow a garden in your heart. Beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that. If you're listening, we'll have all the links to Those Internet locations below in the show notes, you can check those out. And, Perdita, thank you so much for joining me today and just for sharing so generously. I really data. Grace, I have to thank you. This has been one of my most fun conversations ever. You I just feel like you just tapped right into the things I care about most in the whole world. That's always my goal. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a few moments to subscribe to the show, leave us a review, and share the episode. These small tasks help our independent podcasts so much. Be sure to also check out the show notes below To learn more about any resources, guests, or sponsors that we shared with you today, our intro and outro music was created by artist Erin Palavic and Jared Kelly. Our podcast logo was created by Elaine Stevenson, and this show is produced by Softer Sound Studio. Thank you for being here. Be well. Peace.