These from Perdita Finn:
49 Days
This is the traditional length of time that a soul spends passing through the Bardo realm, a liminal space between the worlds, between one life and another. This is true in Buddhism and less obviously in Christianity, where it is the same amount of time that elaspses between the Resurrection and the Descent of the Spirit, events that have not been allowed to offer their wisdom about rebirth and reincarnation, despite aligning wtih ancient understandings of it 49 Days.
In his book The Magician’s Nephew, C. S. Lewis imagines the Bardo realm in two different ways…one as the interconnected attics above the house of London which the children climb through dropping into each other’s homes as if by magic and also as a wood filled with ponds, each of which leads to anothe world, another life, each with its own experience of time.
The Bardo is the in-between place, the place we visit in our dreams, dropping into memories and visions of past and future lives. The Bardo is where our soul goes to collect itself before descending again into a body.
There are 49 Days between The Day of the Dead and the Winter Solstice.
We are each in a Bardo realm now, a liminal space where, if we choose we can access the wisdom of countless lives behind us and the guidance of countless lives and worlds before us. This is the time before the rebirth of Advent.
How will we be reborn? Where will we be reborn?
The Day of the Dead is not a “day” it’s an initiation into this time where we can access the sobriety of the long story.
Life is not a little line from birth to death, a sentence with a period at the end. Life is an entangled experience of comings and goings, departures and reunions. Every house in Lewis’s version is there to drop into. So is every world.
The gift of the long story the wise men carry is that there is enough time. Enough time for love, for mercy, for justice, for reunion.
49 days until the solstice.
This is deep wisdom old wisdom and these gray days are the time to claim it.
Perdita Finn is the author of The Way of the Rose: The Radical WIsdom of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary and Take Back the Magic: Getting to Know the Dead. She teaches workshops on how to rekindle the magic and miracles of the ancestral realms.
Scattered Showers in a Clear Sky 