Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Well, Perdita, thank you for joining me today.
[00:00:02] Speaker B: Thank you for having me on, Gary. It's a pleasure to be here.
[00:00:05] Speaker A: For sure.
So, yeah. Getting this thing started, would you be able to give us a little bit about who you are and what you do? Exactly.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Sure.
You know, I'm a writer. And what do I write about? I write about my interactions with the other side.
It took me a long time to claim those experiences.
And, I mean, I'm not a psychic or a medium. I'm a very ordinary person in my spiritual life. And yet I began realizing that we all have access to resources that we don't often tap into helpers on the other side. And that came, you know, that. That information came through when I was felt particularly bereft and in need of help as often as it often does.
So.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: Okay, Getting right into it.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:00:58] Speaker A: Now, are these akin to things like spirit guides?
[00:01:02] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, here's the thing. I'm a pretty earthy and practical person. I'm a cook. I'm a mom. You know, I take care of my animals. I love the natural world. And.
And when I talk about helpers and I think about the other side, I like to keep things as simple and earthy as possible, possible as close to what I experience in nature.
And I literally call on those I've known alive who are now on the other side for help. I mean, I began by calling on my mom and my dad and my grandmothers. Then I began calling on friends and pets and neighbors and teachers and all kinds of people. And I began to notice over the years and the decades that I called on them by name. And they showed up when I asked for help. They showed up when I called on somebody specifically that I knew and loved, sometimes who I was mad at.
They showed up and brought me help. And this was a very private, almost embarrassed spiritual practice of mine. I didn't, you know, I'd been a Zen student. I had. My husband was a Buddhist teacher. He left Buddhism and went on to expose all the crimes, financial and sexual, the Buddhist teachers and, you know, I mean, and we are sort of questers and seekers and tried all kinds of various practices and things.
But this was a very. This really arose out of my necessity as a young mother of two children, overworked and overtired, as so many of, you know, young parents are.
And it slowly blossomed into an experience of the other side that was really quite profound.
It was.
I wouldn't have described it to anyone. I wouldn't have said, you know, when I go to Sleep at night. I am calling on all the dead on the other side. And I mean the dead, not just my, quote, biological ancestors. I mean, roadkill. I mean, I. I call on everyone. I don't leave anyone out, and I don't leave anybody beings out. You know, if I find a brachiopod from 350 million years ago, fossilized in stone in my backyard, that's an ancestor I call on.
And so I was calling on them. And it felt very real and yet very private and very personal, like I didn't understand what I was doing.
And then I had an experience, Gary, that was the kind of breakthrough moment for me.
My daughter was 16 and she became very sick. And I'm a doctor's daughter, so I have. I had a lot of faith in medicine. My father was a very angry, upset emergency room doctor, overworked and overwhelmed and existentially angst filled that he took out at home. I mean, to give you some idea, this was in the days before cell phones and pagers. And he would answer our home telephone like this every single time. Forgive my language if you would, but I need. This becomes important later. He would answer the phone, Jesus H. Christ, what is it this time? And there'd be a friend of mine on the other end and go, hi, Dr. Finn, can I talk to Perdita or you?
And he was just so upset. And I don't think as a child I took in what his life was like, that when he was called to the emergency room, it wasn't a stranger lying there mangled from a car accident.
It was the wife of his best friend or it was the child of a friend, you know what I mean?
He was really dealing with a lot.
In any case, he was dead when my daughter got sick.
And I was pretty mad at him. He had died the year before and I'd found out that he'd cut all the children from his first marriage, one of whom I am, out of his will.
And even though I thought things were better between us and I felt really mad at him, I felt bereft and angry, and I wished he was there. And I knew if he were alive, he would find the guy. It's always a guy who could make my daughter better, and it wasn't bad.
And so we went to all the best doctors and spent all the money we had, really, literally every penny we had.
And we couldn't get my daughter better. We couldn't even get her diagnosed.
Every doctor we went to said, there's something really the matter with this kid. And I Don't know what it is.
And I had a 16 year old daughter who'd been on the track team and running for plays and happy as a clam the year before, lying in bed, telling me she didn't want to be in her body anymore. She was in so much pain and I didn't know what to do.
And at one point I left her with my husband and I went to the gym and I'm there and a friend said, how are you? And I just broke down and started crying and she said, you gotta go see this psychic I know. Oh, I hate Woodstock. You know, I don't need to psychic, I need a doctor.
And she said, no, you gotta go see the psychic.
And I tucked the information into my back pocket and went home. And there was my daughter and she was in agony. She said, my bones feel like they're made of glass. Why do my bones hurt so much?
And I didn't have an answer. I had nothing.
And so what the hell? So I went into town and I went to the store this woman had told me about.
And I walked into the store I'd never walked into in town. And it was filled with weird clothing and weird shoes and weird objects and this tiny little woman, she was about five feet and ethereal. I mean, maybe she weighed 80 pounds, sort of floated out in a haze of gauze with purple spiked hair, looked at me and she said, oh, your kid is sick?
I said, yes. I start to cry.
Come on, come on, come sit down. Now, I now know that this is very untypical of her because she. I wrote a book about her called the Reluctant Psychic because she was very reluctant about her abilities. And she gestured me into this back room and I sat down on this little stool covered in hello Kitty decals.
And she looked at me and she said, huh? She said, I don't like bad language. She said, I really don't, but your dad is here and he has something to say and I have to tell you what it is.
He said, jesus ain't fucking Christ, Perdita. What is it this time?
[00:07:46] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:07:47] Speaker B: And I screamed because it was that moment where I had been in relationship with the dead for, I don't know, almost 20 years at that point. And there was a part of me that didn't think it was real, that I was making it all up.
And that was the moment it became real for me.
And I said to her, to my father, can he get me to a doctor?
And she said, he just did.
I'm going to help you get your daughter better and he says, you should go to the gym more often. Which my father would.
And so I began a relationship with this woman. I ended up writing a book with her. I studied with her.
It was. It was. And what I learned is that, I mean, she was a very remarkable being.
She had, from. She had as a child to train herself to tell the living and the dead apart.
We would walk into a room together, and we were actually out in Hollywood because our book got optioned out in Hollywood. And we had a kind of fun adventure out there. And she would sometimes grab my arm when we walked into a room and say, tell me how many living people are in the room so I can get oriented.
[00:09:00] Speaker A: That's wild.
[00:09:01] Speaker B: Yeah. And so to be with her was extraordinary.
I don't do that.
[00:09:07] Speaker A: Jeez.
Is she still around?
[00:09:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: I'd like to talk to her.
[00:09:13] Speaker B: She's amazing. She's quite.
She's quite amazing.
[00:09:17] Speaker A: Yeah. Sounds like your guru.
[00:09:19] Speaker B: You know, my real guru means teacher. Right. My husband wrote a book called Meditation Without Gurus. And I'm not big on living gurus because I think when we give our power to the living, we often get in trouble. Financially, sexually, personally. We often surrender our intuition to them.
And I often tell people not to go to a psychic without first accessing their own intuitive powers.
But my gurus, my teachers are the dead.
And, you know, the great thing about having the dead be your teachers is they never ask for money.
Yeah.
They don't get you into compromising sexual problems.
They tend to solve your sex problems. So, you know, so I really put a lot of faith in the dad, and I've learned everything I've learned from them. They've been tremendous. What happened? This was 16 years ago that this happened, and I really began to increase my relationship to the dad and to study with them officially, in a way, and to feel that relationship activated.
It was. It's been very profound. I've learned so much, and they have so much. They have everything to give.
[00:10:33] Speaker A: Thank you for sharing that.
Yeah.
Did you have something else to say?
[00:10:38] Speaker B: No, no. I mean, I can talk forever. I. You know, I've got the Irish gift of gab, so just shut me.
[00:10:45] Speaker A: I feel you.
Well, that was a powerful story. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that.
But let me ask you this one. How would one know when they are in the presence of the dead or the spirit? You know, what comes through?
[00:10:58] Speaker B: I'm going to give you two examples. Okay. One is that the simplest way, the way I most like, and I find most people like, and I do now teach workshops to help people access the dead is that if you ask for help and you get the help you asked for, you begin to realize they're real.
So if you say please, please. I'm praying to. My grandfather was a car mechanic. Can we get the car fixed for under 200 bucks? You know what I mean? Like, that's the kind of thing I go to the debt about all the time, you know, oh my gosh. Can you make sure our tax bill isn't so terrible? Can you make sure the car payment, you know, can you keep the car rowing the road another year and it happens and you feel a sense of gratitude to that person. And that gratitude is its own proof. Now that's not proof you can offer up to the wider, you know, disbelieving capitalist, ecocidal culture we live in and say there proof the debt are real, but it is proof that we can hold in our own hearts.
[00:12:02] Speaker A: Yeah. Say personal proof.
[00:12:04] Speaker B: Yeah, it's personal proof. It's faith.
And we build that faith.
A kind of grain of sand by a grain of sand. But there is another truth. And sometimes the dead try to get our attention and they want our attention. They love us.
All the dead love us. And they really do. It's been my experience.
And so my son, he's 29 now, but when he was in college and he was in those days, he was pre med and he was Mr. Science, you know, rebelling against his kooky mama and trying very hard to be a, you know, ordinary boy and dismissing everything. Now the ancestor altar you see behind you abuts the kitchen.
And he. One summer, I think after his sophomore year, he was home and he was alone in the house.
All the windows were shut. It was a quiet day.
He was making a sandwich in the kitchen.
Nothing was happening. I. And for no reason at all, every single one of the photographs, and there are over a hundred photographs behind me on the ancestor altar, fell off of it and not one of them broke.
And he couldn't explain it, he couldn't make sense of it. And it terrified him. You know, this is his own little personal Blair Witch moment.
[00:13:22] Speaker A: Yeah, that's freaky.
[00:13:23] Speaker B: Yeah, really freaky, right? He's really scared. And so I come home about a half an hour later and he's sitting there just staring and going, mom, mom, what does it mean? What is it an omen? What is. I said they love you. They want your attention. They've been having a really, really hard time getting your attention.
I think when the dead want our attention, they sometimes have to be a little scary.
They have to do things, you know, they turn the lights on and off, or they show up in our bedroom as we wake up out of a dream, or they come to us in a dream or.
But the more we engage with them in a relaxed way, daily, casual, intimate way, the less dramatic they have to be.
So I like when they're less dramatic.
He does now, too. And now he calls on the dead all the time. It's part of his. He has now as an ancestor altar in his home.
Really?
[00:14:18] Speaker A: Wow.
Yeah. I always ask for signs, and it usually works. Can you give me a sign today?
[00:14:26] Speaker B: They will give you signs, but sometimes the sign is the help.
Sometimes the sign is the relief. Sometimes the sign is the bill isn't as bad as you thought. The diagnosis isn't so terrible sometimes, you know, and a lot of times we miss the signs. Sometimes the signs are so subtle. And so, you know, the dead speak quietly. Usually nature speaks quietly.
And, you know, the two are often very synonymous. For me that the more I become attuned to listening to the dead, the more I'm able to hear the language of the natural world. And the more I hear the language of the natural world, the more I can hear the language of the dead.
[00:15:05] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
That's powerful.
Yeah.
It's like they're speaking their own language.
[00:15:16] Speaker B: They are.
[00:15:17] Speaker A: I think it's a language of synchronicity, right?
[00:15:19] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely.
And you feel it, right? You feel it when you get. Begin to have. Oh, I'm having all the synchronous experiences. You know, when you're kind of walking the path. Right. You can. Things start to fall into place and. And they do show up. You know, numbers repeat and names repeat and signs show up and things begin to.
[00:15:39] Speaker A: Numbers? Yeah, numbers. That's. For me, it's like numbers of specific places, specific times. That's just like.
Seems too good to be true.
[00:15:48] Speaker B: Have you ever seen the wonderful movie I Origins?
[00:15:52] Speaker A: No.
[00:15:53] Speaker B: You know, it's made by the woman who did the oa and it's a. I don't know if you ever saw that television show. It's great.
Anyway, it's a great movie about reincarnation and this scientist who comes to believe in reincarnation, and he keeps having these synchronous experience with numbers. And it begins to be almost. You know, the other side is trying to get his attention.
And the only way they know how. He's a numbers guy. They send him numbers.
[00:16:19] Speaker A: Yeah. For me, it's like at this point, I'm either Schizophrenic or I'm really on the path because I see it every day, all the time, and in places, in circumstances that it's just like what? It's always new. It's in certain things that just pop up. It's like, how, how is that? It doesn't make any sense. But personally, as you said, personally, it does make sense. You know, like there's some kind of like personal story to it.
[00:16:45] Speaker B: Serendipity, coincidence. Yeah, it's almost the way I often describe it is it's when life starts to feel like it's rhyming, right? Like everything's.
Oh, the life is rhyming. It feels right. And you know when it feels wrong, when it feels like nothing is rhyming and you're in a bad poem, you know, maybe it's time for a different path.
[00:17:06] Speaker A: Yeah, it reminds me that I'm in a story.
It's like, oh, I forgot, you know,
[00:17:11] Speaker B: I sometimes I talk a lot about storytelling and I'm a great fan of storytelling. I come from a family of storytellers.
I come from Irish storytellers, my husband from Southern storytellers. My daughter's a very famous storyteller. And you know, the stories were. We love telling stories. And one of the things I love is being about working with the dead and is that they're always teaching me how to tell stories in new ways. Stories about myself that are different than I thought.
Stories about them, like.
So I'll tell you. Like my bro, my brother is pretty angry at my dad about, you know, the old eldest son cut out of the whale, you know. So he tells the story of my dad, the asshole, right?
And that's a really well worn story. My dad was dead for a long time. My dad.
[00:18:01] Speaker A: That's a good title.
[00:18:02] Speaker B: And I could tell that story and I start to tell that story in my book. I can, I could go on for a long time telling you that story.
But when I began working with my dad, my. My dad after he showed up in the psychics room, my dad has turned out to be the most generous person in the whole world.
That enraged, upset, overwhelmed ER doctor who felt like he never got his, who felt like all the toys were his and it wasn't enough, has suddenly changed on the other side. He's still personality still the same. He still swears a hell of a lot, but he, but suddenly he's generous and loving and you know, I began asking him for financial help because he cut me out of his will. And so I would ask him for financial help, And I would get the exact amount I'd asked for, and it would be unexpected. Royalty check or an unexpected job or a little bit, you know what I mean? Like, it was always unexpected.
And I began to tell a story about my father that wasn't about him being an asshole, but was about the immigrant son who had to go to med school because there was no choice. If you were the first kid to go to college of immigrants, you had to become a doctor, right?
And he had wanted to be a writer, a poet.
But you can't make a living as a poet, right? You can't be the successful suburban, you know, patriarch if you do that. And so he had to give up his dreams, and he was bitter about it and resentful.
And then I started to pray to my dad. I said, I am a writer. Help me make a living as a writer.
And I began to be able to make a living as a writer.
And then my brother's son, he's a jazz bassist. And my brother was like, oh, my God, he's never going to make a living. I said, well, we'll just pray to dad, help him help Danny make a living at the arts. Dad's the patron saint, and making a living at the arts, he couldn't do it, but now we can. His progeny can.
You know, my nephew is now traveling all over the world, going to all the top jazz. He's really successful. I mean, he works his butt off. He's a very talented musician, but he's making a living. And part of that is my dad. So the story I tell about my dad is my dad is somebody who did not have the support he needed or wanted to be the artist he wanted to be. And so now he's incredibly helpful with that from the other side.
That's true often of the dad, you know, So I call on my father. I still call on my father for help medically. He was a very talented doctor, famously talented. So I do call him for help medically, but mostly I call on him for help with the things he loves about making art.
And that's true of all the dad, you know, sometimes I call on them what they're good at, and sometimes I call on them for what they sucked at.
You know, the patron saint of plumbers isn't a guy who was a good plumber. It's a guy who died in a sewer in the 1100s. His name was Vinnie Ferrer. Saint Vinnie Ferrer, he's the patron saint of plumbers, but he died in a sewer. You know, so he's who you call on when you need your toilet fixed.
[00:21:36] Speaker A: So would you say that the dead want us to continue their story?
[00:21:42] Speaker B: You bet.
They want us to write a new story about them.
They want to write a story that's not about.
You know, one of the terrible things about the way we live as modern people is we're stuck inside a very merciless short story.
And that story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And we have only one life to get it right. One life to make sense of it things, one life to experience mercy, justice, love, but for our ancestors. And, and that short story is mirrored in the kind of Judeo Christian story that begins with Genesis and ends in apocalypse, right? And it. It's like, you know, we're shuttled down this conveyor belt to be dropped off, you know, in the. In the bin of heaven or the bin of hell. And it's a pretty. It's a pretty awful story to be inside of.
It makes people feel like their lives are wasted, their failures are useless.
But what if we lived like our ancestors did, inside of circles instead of straight lines where we had many lives to get it right?
Many, many, many lives.
Many incarnational experiences.
And so look at a Mozart. Mozart is born, and at age 4, he writes his first concerto.
Okay, that guy comes into this life, hits the ground running, but we don't know how many lifetimes he spent as the worst student in piano class.
We don't know how many lifetimes he spent not even able to sing on key, but trying to. We don't know how many lifetimes he was born as a crowd, not a nightingale. You know what I mean? Like all of these, all of the debris, all of the compost of our past lives allows the birth of certain prayers in certain moments.
And so no life is a failure.
No life is a failure. And I'm a great believer in this.
Every soul, every single soul on this planet. I'm not talking human souls. I'm talking every soul is immeasurably long, has been here since the beginning and is here out of love and has all different ways to access that love.
[00:24:16] Speaker A: I'm getting chills from this one.
[00:24:18] Speaker B: Good.
That's not me. That's dad giving you the little prickles.
[00:24:23] Speaker A: Yeah, they're here with us. There's more than two people here.
[00:24:26] Speaker B: Do you have anyone on the other side you call on? Gary?
[00:24:29] Speaker A: Yeah, my grandmother. She passed two years ago and I see. So this is getting a little into it. She was in the hospital room that she passed in was 505. No, sorry, it was five. It was the fifth floor in the 55th room. Right. And she died at 505.
And ever since then I see 555 or just fives everywhere. Everywhere. Just in ways that I can't even imagine.
And it was only since her death. Right. Like, I didn't see it before that. So I see that as the sign from her. And yeah, it's mainly my grandmother. I always. When she was here with me, I said she was like my second mother. She was like my guardian angel.
And I think her power exemplified after she died because my life changed drastically within the last two or three years. Like I've just been. I felt like a timeline switch, you know, like she became a part of me in some way. So mainly. Yeah, it's actually just mainly my grandmother.
[00:25:23] Speaker B: What was her name?
[00:25:25] Speaker A: Phyllis.
[00:25:26] Speaker B: Phyllis. Well, I invite her in and I'm grateful for her. And now I feel the chills, you know, these grandmothers.
[00:25:34] Speaker A: She's a powerful being.
[00:25:35] Speaker B: Yeah, I can feel it. I can feel her. Do you ask her for help with things?
[00:25:41] Speaker A: I think so. It's mainly just like, honestly, just gratitude. Mainly. I just say thank you and I feel this.
Yeah. I just feel like she's a part of me. I don't know how else to explain it. Like she became a part of me. And I just say thank you because she helped me a lot when she was alive. And I feel as though she's helping me even more so in ways that go beyond physicality. You could say now that she's beyond physicality.
[00:26:04] Speaker B: I always say to my kids, you know, there's going to be a moment when I check out and it's going to be because there's more I can do for you on the other side than I can do on this job.
[00:26:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
Yeah.
[00:26:14] Speaker B: You know, my sister checked out unexpectedly this past December and it was really hard.
But we've all. And it's actually going to be her birthday on Sunday and we're going to all gather and talk about how we're going to ask her for help, what we need from the other side. She was a great. My sister was a great gift giver. She had no money, but she would find gifts. You know, she'd find you the book you loved best at the thrift store, or she'd find something by the side of the road that was exactly what you'd always wanted. She was. She was a finder and a gifter and.
And so we're all going to think about what gifts we want to ask from her on the other side, but, you know, I do invite you with your grandmother. You know, I'm. I'm a mom, and my kids are older now, and there's nothing I love more than when my kids call up and ask for help.
Like if my son calls up and says, mom, how do I make the chicken?
I love it. If he calls up and says, mom, I'm a little tight this month. Is there any way you could help out? I love it a little less, but I'm also grateful that I can help out.
And if he calls up and says, mom, I'm having a hard day, can I just listen? Can you just listen? That I love most of all.
But we can do all of that with the dad. We can bring our smallest problems and our biggest problems to them.
And I begin my morning that way.
I literally begin my morning by thinking about what all my problems are, and then I offer them to various beings on the other side.
[00:27:46] Speaker A: When she was alive, I always had this stubborn attitude of never asking her for anything, but she would always give me everything. So I think I still have that. You know, I don't want to ask.
[00:27:54] Speaker B: Everybody does. Gary, it's not just you. You know, I teach a course called A Year of Living with the Dead. And the hardest thing for this group of people to do is ask for ordinary help.
You know, I think we feel like we ought to do it ourselves. We have this, you know, can do culture. I can do it myself. I don't. You know, we train babies to cry it out in their cribs and not ask for help. We're such a crazy culture, right?
[00:28:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:24] Speaker B: You know, babies are supposed to cry and they're supposed to experience their cry is bringing, you know, food, water, help, love, whatever they need.
And so we're taught not to cry. And so I think the dead. One of the things the dead helped me with was teaching me how to ask for help again.
And certainly extremity. You know, when my daughter got sick, I had to exhaust the money, the western medical system and everything before I began asking for help.
[00:29:02] Speaker A: Yeah, as you said, it's very deep rooted in us to pull yourself up by the bootstraps, especially in men, especially,
[00:29:11] Speaker B: I mean, I would say especially in women. But I think we all get our different flavor of it, Right.
We own different flavor of toxic independence, right?
[00:29:21] Speaker A: Toxic independence, yeah.
[00:29:24] Speaker B: It's my dream for men to be able to access this help from the other side, and women, too, but really to know how.
How loved we are, how much we Belong like your grandmother.
You know how much you think your grandmother loves you?
I assure you, it's 10,000 times 10,000 times more than that.
[00:29:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
Gonna make me tear up here, Verdita.
[00:29:55] Speaker B: Sorry.
I can feel her heart.
[00:29:58] Speaker A: No, I feel it.
Yeah.
Wow.
Okay. Let me just take a quick sip of tea here.
[00:30:11] Speaker B: You know, I had a grandmother who was my father's mother. She was a. She was a.
She was a stingy lady. She had raised, you know, a ton of kids in the Depression, you know, eking out everything, right.
When she died in her little house, every. Every bit of string, every bit of wire had its own little Mason jar in her basement.
You know, she didn't throw nothing away, because who knew, right?
And in one jar, inexplicably, it was filled with unbroken wishbones from chickens. Washed, dried, cleaned, and put in this Mason jar. And she'd never made any wishes.
She never asked for anything for herself.
And she'd also never given them to any of her 36 grandchildren. She'd never said, hey, how about making a wish?
And I. That. It haunted me, that jar of wishbones of my grandmother's. Like, what was going on? I mean, what was going on? And I thought, the world is filled with unasked for wishes.
Like, wow, you know, and there's a famous story of. In 1830 in Paris, the Virgin Mary appeared to this little nun called Catherine Le Baret. And when she appeared to her, Catherine was very kind of quiet, unassuming person. Nobody ever even knew this had happened to her until after she died. The stories about her were told. The Virgin Mary had all these rings on her fingers, and from a few of the rings, rays of light were shining.
And Catherine asked her, she said, why do a few of the rings have light shining, but most of the rings don't?
She said. And the Virgin Mary said, those are all the miracles people forget to ask for.
[00:32:01] Speaker A: For.
[00:32:03] Speaker B: Those are all the miracles people forget to ask for.
[00:32:10] Speaker A: Why do you think we have to ask is? Because it's like you can't infringe in our. Our free will, our intentions.
[00:32:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's part of that. And I think the asking is part of the dance.
It's a dance step. It's of intimacy.
I mean, I think the dead give us a great deal we don't even acknowledge.
You know what I mean? Do you have food to eat today?
Thank the dead who grew that food, whose bodies became that food? Do you have a house over your head?
You know, do you have a car to drive in? Do you have somebody's hand to hold sometime, somewhere in the day, somebody to pick up on the phone, thank the dead, clothes to wear. The dead bring us so many blessings. We don't even acknowledge our ancient hunter gatherer ancestors.
I'm very interested in paleoanthropology, which I've studied a great deal before civilization, when we moved in small communities across the land, following the herds, following the seasons, when life was lived very intimately with nature.
Everything was a prayer.
You had to ask to find food. You had to ask to find the herbs that would be the medicine you needed. You had to ask to find shelter. You had to ask to get the fire going at night. You had to ask the dad that you run into another group of people because you were sick of this group of people and who are you going to date? You know what I mean?
You had to ask for everything. There. No, there was no money. There was no, you know, we live in an economy of money.
And so instead of asking for things, we buy things.
But if we didn't have an economy of money, we would live in an economy of prayer.
And that was the economy our ancestors lived in.
They asked for help from their ancestors.
Help us find a herd of deer, help us catch a deer, help us make the deer taste better than it did last time we caught one and cooked one, you know what I mean? Help us find some nice mushrooms to add to the deer to make it taste yummy, you know what I mean? Like everything. You couldn't go to the grocery store, so you're constantly in conversation with the ancestors. And so I try to live my life, my modern American life, inside of that gift economy of prayer.
[00:34:28] Speaker A: Beautiful.
Yeah. Ask and ye shall receive.
[00:34:32] Speaker B: Exactly.
I am convinced my own feelings about Jesus and I am not affiliated with any religion, nor will I ever be affiliated with any institution, institutional religion. And yet I'm a tremendous admirer and student of the teachings of Jesus in Yeshua. And I'm always convinced he was trying to teach people how to be hunter gatherers again.
Like, you know, give us this day. Our daily bread is the prayer of the hunter gatherer.
Don't stockpile food for the apocalypse. Go outside and look at what there is to eat today.
Trust the earth feed you.
[00:35:10] Speaker A: Exactly. That's the Bible passage that probably going to butcher here. But it's like, look at the.
Look at the. What is the.
I don't want to butcher it here, you know, it's like, look at the flowers of the field.
[00:35:21] Speaker B: They grow not, neither do they toil. But even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. And it's true. Go look at a flower. I mean, my God. Or go listen to a bird sing. I mean, you know, we look at. We think. We think we're so amazing in our song and our art and our dance and. And the whole world says, you know, we'd love to teach you to sing again.
We'd love to teach you to make art again.
We'd love to dance with you. You know, the trees are out there dancing. They say, come dance with us.
[00:35:51] Speaker A: Come dance with us. They just want us to dance along.
[00:35:54] Speaker B: Exactly.
Yeah. I mean. And, you know, one of the things that I also love about paleoanthropology is, you know, one of the ideas is like, our Stone Age ancestors were living this kind of brutal, hard, difficulty, difficult life.
It's not true.
In. In that lifestyle, you probably, quote, worked an hour or two a day collecting food.
And the rest of the time. What was the rest of the time for socializing and making art?
They had incredible art. They had incredible musical instruments. We have stories that go back 100,000 years. They had storytelling, so.
And it was a life of seeming leisure. Right.
And yet we live this life of toil and hard work. And my father thinking he can't be an artist because he has to go out and go to the hospital every day.
[00:36:48] Speaker A: Yeah, it's inertia.
[00:36:49] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:36:53] Speaker A: Yeah. And we think that's how it's supposed to be. Right.
[00:36:57] Speaker B: Well, you know, one of the great liberations was watching my son. You know, he thought he had this idea he had to be a good boy. You know what I mean? Like, he was going to go and get a scholarship. He got a great scholarship to college, and he was going to do this way. And he's got more and more miserable. And, you know, he unfortunately had to have parents who kept saying, why don't you just drop out of college, for God's sake? Just drop out. You know, he wouldn't.
He would be like, I got to do this. I got to do that.
Until he was in. After he graduated, in such a state of despair, like, who am I? Where am I? And we kept saying to him, what's your dream? What's your dream?
And he almost. He was so furious at us at that question. He kept saying, like, tell me what to do.
And we kept saying, no, you tell us what you want to do.
Who are you? What do you want?
And the amazing thing to watch is it was a big struggle to let go of these conventional ideas. Of who he was supposed to be and what he's supposed to be. And he began to tap into what he wanted. And he said, I want to grow food. He said, I can't be a doctor. I hate. He hated pre med. He hated the other kids in pre med. I mean, I think he would have made a great. If you could have interned him with a country doctor, he'd be the guy everybody went to. He's a healer. He's. In his whole being, he's a healer. But he hated the kind of rat race of pre med.
But he said, I want to heal people with food. I want to teach people to grow their own food that's really healthy and life giving.
And now he has a business where he goes to people's homes and he teaches them how to become food, have food sovereignty and food sustainability in wherever they live.
[00:38:42] Speaker A: Amazing.
[00:38:43] Speaker B: And he does it for himself and for us and for me.
He gives me orders every day about what I have to do in the garden.
And. And he's. He loves it. He's ecstatic. Do you know what I mean? You look at him and he's just.
It's not going to work. It's hanging with his plants and he loves it. And he work, he goes in and he helps families and he teaches the kids about how to grow things. And how would it. How do you create a wild garden that feeds you in your. Around your home?
[00:39:15] Speaker A: Yeah. I think we all have that pull, that pull towards service and.
Right. Service in our own way. In our own way that only we could provide to the world.
[00:39:26] Speaker B: And everyone is different. Right. And if everybody follows their heart, what they want, we'd all be taking care of each other.
[00:39:35] Speaker A: Yep, exactly. That's the dance that we're supposed to dance.
[00:39:40] Speaker B: Yeah. And it isn't the same for everybody.
You know, my daughter writes books. She writes stories that keep people alive, you know, and that's her way of doing it.
[00:39:51] Speaker A: You said she's famous.
[00:39:53] Speaker B: She is.
Her name's Sophie Strand. Everybody reads Sophie Strand.
[00:39:59] Speaker A: I don't know, I'm not gonna lie. But I'll look her up afterwards.
[00:40:01] Speaker B: Yeah, she writes great books. You might want to have her on. She's a lot of fun.
[00:40:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I'd love to.
[00:40:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:05] Speaker A: Cool. Well, shout out Sophie.
[00:40:08] Speaker B: Yeah.
He wrote a book about Jesus and Mary Magdalene that people love.
[00:40:12] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
[00:40:13] Speaker B: And let's bring her on.
It's a great book. It's called the Madonna Secret. And it set.
She. She went deep into the ecology of Second temple period Palestine. She said people like she said people think it's like a desert. And she said in those days it was a rainforest.
And what was it like to really live there by the Jordan river? And to be there and those plants and the smells and the animals.
So it's a very beautiful book.
[00:40:43] Speaker A: Wow. Okay.
[00:40:45] Speaker B: Very sexy. I'm just warning ahead of time.
[00:40:48] Speaker A: Okay, now I can dig that.
[00:40:50] Speaker B: We call it the Sexy Jesus Book.
[00:40:53] Speaker A: Okay, now, I vibe with that.
[00:40:56] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:56] Speaker A: I mean, this is just a tangent, but I don't. I get suspicious of, like, a spiritual.
Spiritual theology. Ideologies that also repress sexuality, you know, I don't trust any of that. Like, come on, man, we're all sexual.
[00:41:11] Speaker B: Here's the thing. They don't ever repress sexuality. They push it down and it comes up in some perverted, horrible way. We know exactly. We know this. We know that. All the priests and all the llamas know. Yeah, I'm. They're all doing something awful to little kids somewhere. Right.
My puppy has decided to wake up. I'm sorry, I bring her on board, if that's okay.
[00:41:34] Speaker A: For sure.
Have another guest.
[00:41:36] Speaker B: Yeah, I might just bring her on if she doesn't quiet down. I'll bring her on. Yeah, she'll quiet down in my lap. But. But as for what you're saying, Sorry about that. She's only 12 weeks old and I thought she could make it, but she.
[00:41:50] Speaker A: What's her name?
[00:41:51] Speaker B: Her name is Namu, which means devotion in Buddhism.
[00:41:55] Speaker A: Amazing. What kind of dog is that?
[00:41:57] Speaker B: It's a Havanese. They're Cuban. Silk dog.
[00:41:59] Speaker A: Oh, she's cute.
[00:42:00] Speaker B: She's actually. She's actually adorable. I think she just wanted to star. But in terms.
In terms of what you said about Eros.
Eros is life force. Right. What is everything in the world praying for? What does it want?
Well, the mountains are praying for rain. The trees are praying for rain. The rain is praying to touch the roots.
I mean, the bee is praying for the flower and the flower for the bee. We're all praying for each other. You know, the deer are praying. Everybody's right. Now it's spring, it's Beltane tomorrow. I mean, that's what Beltane was about, that moment of love, right? That souls long for each other.
[00:42:38] Speaker A: And Beltane is May 1.
[00:42:40] Speaker B: It is Beltaneous. May 1?
[00:42:42] Speaker A: Is that what they call it in Irish? Beltane.
[00:42:44] Speaker B: They do Beltane. And it was the festival of. You know, it was a fertility festival. You wanted.
[00:42:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:42:49] Speaker B: You wanted every. You wanted the crops to grow, the animals to breed and the human beings to make babies. It was, you know, and that was kind of the feeling of that.
I mean, I often say, my husband and I say we believe in ecology, not theology.
I don't, I'm not so interested in these theological hoo ha. I am interested in what nature is doing and wanting and saying and, you know, what do we want? We want to be cuddled. We want to be held. You know, that's what says, I'm fine as long as I get a little cuddling. Yeah, most people are the same, I
[00:43:22] Speaker A: think I love a good cuddle.
[00:43:25] Speaker B: I know we all do.
[00:43:29] Speaker A: Yeah, a good cuddling. And also a continuation, as we spoke of, of the story. Because nature never ends. That's the thing. Nature just keeps going, keeps creating, keeps just finding its way into new areas. Right. Think about when you see a route inside some place, like coming out of a sidewalk. How did it do that?
[00:43:49] Speaker B: Yeah, sometimes like when I'm going into New York City and I'm. You're going through some horrible expressway area, you know, in New Jersey and the Meadowlands. But you'll see all of these routes coming up at the side of the highway, crumbling the asphalt. And I want to go. You go, guys, you go. Go to. You know what I mean?
[00:44:07] Speaker A: Like, yeah, that's the magic of nature. It always finds a way and it never ends.
[00:44:12] Speaker B: It never ends. And, you know, people forget that, you know, we, the natural world has gone through these cycles of extinction.
And there's this beautiful book, it's called Other Lands. And it's about how when certain extinction moments happen, nature has the space to be more creative than usual.
So when the dinosaurs got extinguished, that created space that these weird little mammal rodents, our great grandparents, began to like, come out from the bushes and get a little bigger. Right. That was us, you know. Yeah, but I think we've always been here, I don't think.
I think that we change shape and I think we, you know, we've all been many, many other things other than human beings. My son, the one I told you about, I had a dream one night. And in the dream I was swimming in the ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, along dunes, a beach, and the water was very rough, and my son was swimming behind me and I was worried about him and I looked behind. Now in real life, he was the captain of the swim team in college. He's very good swimmer and a lifeguard. But I was very worried about him in a dream.
And I looked behind me and I thought, oh, he's fine. He's two years old, he's Fine. I woke up and I thought even a 2, he was not a good swimmer. I don't know what that dream was about. So I brought it to him. I said, I had this dream about you last night.
And he looked at me and he said, oh, mom, that's when you and I were seals together.
[00:45:54] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:45:55] Speaker B: And I said, of course. And he didn't mean that like as a metaphor.
He meant you and I have been seals together. And of course we have, he and I, ever since he was little. We go into the Atlantic Ocean together and we're the two, they can't get out of the water.
And we've had lives together as raccoons, as seals, as trees, as fungi.
They've all been so many different things. And we'll all be so many different things together.
[00:46:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:46:26] Speaker B: You know, my prayer, you know, is, you know, I talk about knowing what you want on a day to day level. We ask what we want, you know, for this or that practical need.
But what do I want when I approach my own death?
I want to come back with those I love.
I want my husband and I to find each other again.
I want my children to find each other again.
I want my friends I love to love each other. I want to keep coming back.
[00:47:00] Speaker A: I think that's what we all want.
[00:47:02] Speaker B: Right?
Well, the wise Gary, you are a very unusual person. I can tell.
I wish there were more people like you.
[00:47:14] Speaker A: I got you.
Yeah.
The wise only want that you're saying, the unwise want. What do they want?
[00:47:23] Speaker B: I think some people think they want to get all the toys before they die.
[00:47:26] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
Power.
[00:47:29] Speaker B: Power.
It doesn't seem to make anybody feel particularly happy.
[00:47:36] Speaker A: Just an illusion of happiness.
[00:47:38] Speaker B: It's not happiness or joy.
And they just. You know, there's a. In Buddhism, there's a term, the hungry ghost.
The being that eats and eats and eats and never feels satisfied.
And that isn't a being on the other side.
That's a lot of modern human beings.
[00:47:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
Oh, man, this is good. This is really good.
[00:48:03] Speaker B: Well, I'm glad.
[00:48:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm glad you came on here. You're a special being. I really feel it.
[00:48:08] Speaker B: Well, I feel it in you too. I feel very.
What, so it was your grandmother who set you on your quest about consciousness and the spirit?
[00:48:19] Speaker A: I was on it before then, to be honest with you. But she, I would say when she did pass, everything changed. And I just had these opportunities and just as you said, serendipitous things that happened that weren't happening before.
So. Yeah. And this is the ironic thing is she didn't believe any of it when she was alive. She was like, who is this? What crazy stuff that Gary's doing? You know, she was old fashioned, Old fashioned American.
And now I think she understands a little bit more.
[00:48:47] Speaker B: Of course she does. Same with my dad. My dad was, you know, an atheist, right? Yeah, but, you know, but I think he believes. You know, I think what we believe in when we die, I think what we take through with us is the love. Right? I mean, that's how much we love each other.
[00:49:05] Speaker A: Exactly. That's the only thing that really matters. That's the only thing that is our truest essence. That's the thing that was once a seal or, you know, a tree, or was once.
You know, the thing that transforms and evolves through all these lifetimes is that love. And it always finds its way back to its lover.
[00:49:28] Speaker B: It always finds its way back to its lover. We're always seeking our beloved and our beloved. But I don't think we have one beloved. I think we have so many. You know, I mean. I mean, I say this as someone. My husband and I, I think we've had so many lifetimes together, and I just pray. My prayer for my next life is we find each other as teenagers. I don't want to mess around next time.
We have a lot of time in this life and we find each other fast in the next life. But.
But I also know that, you know, my mother's been dead for over 20 years. And, you know, I. I've had. My father's been dead for 16, and I've. I've gotten to see that it's possible to find them again.
You know, we find each other again.
[00:50:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I really believe that to somebody listening, that has no idea may seem like a hippie pipe dream, but that really is the truth that one can understand about this whole thing, this whole reality that we are in. It's like it's all about love. I know that's the biggest cliche in the book, but it is the truth.
[00:50:32] Speaker B: So I'll tell you a story. You know the Dalai Lama. Everyone knows the Dalai Lama, right? When the Dalai Lama dies, just before he dies, he appoints someone. It's called the Regent. And the Regent, he gives to the region a few signs so he can find him his next incarnation. So when the last Dalai Lama died, he said, you know, there's going to be a blue door between two mountains. There'll be a goat in the yard.
That's where I'll be.
So the Dalai Lama dies. The regent goes out, he's looking around for like a year and a half. Finally, one day, he comes around a bend in the road, and there's the blue door between the two mountains. Lagotte and New York goes into the house. Yep. There's a little boy there. He was born, you know, not, you know, just after the dalai Lama died, 49 days later, right. Boom. So he brings out a bunch of malas, you know, rosaries, and he puts them on the table, and the little year and a half old boy grabs one of them and says, mine. And then he puts out the eyeglasses and he grabs. Put the eyeglasses on and says, mine. And. And that's how the Dalai Lama gets identified.
Now, in Tibetan Buddhism, this is a way of preserving money and power.
But this used to be what we did for each other in communities. This was the job of grandparents.
Who are you? Who were. And. And who are you? We should be asking of every baby born, who are you?
How do I know you?
[00:52:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:52:01] Speaker B: What, you had a story before you came into this story?
[00:52:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:52:07] Speaker B: How would we treat children differently if we were looking for them to tell us who they are?
[00:52:13] Speaker A: Yeah. Rather than telling them who they are.
[00:52:15] Speaker B: Exactly. That's it. That's it. Right.
Oh, so, you know, my atheist father, the one, you know, swore when he picked up the phone when I was a very little girl, he would come home in the middle of the night, like two o' clock in the morning, and he would bring me downstairs and he would make us bowls of cereal and. And he would put cream in the frosted flakes, which is delicious, and extra sugar. And then we'd sit there and eat these big, sweet, sugary bowls of cereal together. And he would tell me stories about, like, a polar bear that lived in my closet and all kinds of great stories, and it was so magical.
And.
And then, you know, I didn't realize that it was my father coming home, having watched someone die or not being able to save someone's life, and needing a child with him to make him feel better. Right. Like, just. And to feel like there was some sustenance and he needed.
So it was a very. You know, I had some tenderness about that as I got older, but when I was in my 40s, he came to my home in Woodstock, and I had found this little broken statue of the Virgin Mary when I was a child and in my mother's things, and I'd never seen it before, and I put it up on the family altar, and my father came in and he saw this broken statue, and he said, where did you get that? I said, I found it in Mom's stuff. My parents were long divorced. And he said, you used to sit in front of that when you were two years old and pray to her in a language I didn't understand.
I said, you never told me that.
And he said, it so scared me.
It was scary.
And my father had been terrified of that devotion.
And so he had tried to distract me with stories and cereal and sugar and, you know.
And what if he could have recognized who I was? My father named me Perdita, which means lost, which is an intense name. Right?
[00:54:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:54:28] Speaker B: And it was as if he kept me lost for a long time.
Took me a long time to feel found by the dead, by those on the other side.
And I. I, with my own children.
Every child I've ever met will tell you who they were. They will.
Or what they're about.
[00:54:53] Speaker A: Well, I think you were lost so you could become found in a way that is greater than you could ever imagine.
[00:55:01] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:55:01] Speaker A: You know what I'm getting at. Yeah.
[00:55:04] Speaker B: So, also, in a strange way, the name then becomes a gift because it sets me on a quest, not just a prayer.
[00:55:11] Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah, like you wouldn't have been on that quest if you weren't lost in the first place.
[00:55:17] Speaker B: Sometimes they're villains in our story who are there for a reason.
[00:55:20] Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah. I always like to say, batman wouldn't be so cool if he didn't have the Joker.
[00:55:25] Speaker B: Exactly. Oh, don't even get me started on the Batman and the Joker.
I have so much. I could talk about it.
[00:55:34] Speaker A: Save that for another episode.
It's the Batman podcast.
Awesome stuff, Brida. Yeah. Oh, wow.
I think that might be a good note to wrap this whole thing up at. But I could talk to you for hours. I know that for sure. And, yeah, we could definitely do this again in the future if you want.
Yeah. I think that's a good note to wrap this up at Lost and Found.
[00:55:59] Speaker B: Lost and Found. That's what we'll call it. Lost and Found. Well, Gary, you're just a pleasure to talk to, and thank you for your presence and work in the world. I'm really grateful for it.
[00:56:07] Speaker A: Well, thank you. Yeah. This was amazing.
I don't have anything else to say. Do you have anything else you want to say before we.
[00:56:12] Speaker B: I'm set. I think I'm going to take this little girl out for a walk and glad she was able to quiet down once I got her in my arms.
[00:56:19] Speaker A: Amazing.
Well, thank you for joining me today. This was an amazing conversation. You're an amazing human being. Keep up the awesome work, and I wish you all the best.
[00:56:27] Speaker B: Thank you so much, Gary. Bye.
[00:56:28] Speaker A: Bye.
[00:56:28] Speaker B: Reach out if you want to talk again.
[00:56:31] Speaker A: All right, she's out.
Peace and love, everybody.
