Praise Be, Sister Tick

When it comes to summoning the dead, I always tell people not to leave anyone out. You never know who you are going to need, who you are going to call. My father, who enraged and disappointed me in life, who cut me out of his will (read the story here), has become my greatest benefactor and protector from the other side. The monster on this side of the veil sees with different eyes on the other, all of the harm and violence of their shuttered ways of viewing the world. My psychic friend (read the story here) often says that so many of us arrive into our death, blink, and go, “Oh shit, I didn’t know, I didn’t know….” That is why I want to see with the eyes of the dead while I am alive—to view all around me from the perspective of the long story of all of our entagled souls through deep time.

We all belong to each other, not one soul left out.

I’ve often thought that no one knows anymore how to read the story in Genesis. I’m certainly not blaming Eve, that primordial snake goddess, for anything but we certainly did make a wrong turn as a species when we ate from the Tree of Good and Bad, when we began sorting the entire world into two different baskets—good for human beings (ie good for men at the top) or bad for human beings (ie men in charge.) Eve of course is the first soul designated as bad. This, of course was when we decided that death was bad, a punishment and a failure; that sex was bad, shameful and dangerous; and that we only had one life to get it right, not the snake goddess’s long story of infinite comings and goings, sheddings and renewals, circles not lines.

Before the rise of patriarchal empires, death was inevitable but so was the eternal return. Desire and sex were essential so that we could come back, and we were always coming back, but not necessarily as beings “on top” because there was no top—male or female, plant or animals, we were always taking new shapes and discovering new things about our souls. We ate the salmon, and then we became a salmon feeding our kin, and then we came back again as a child within our grandchild’s womb. When the wandering teacher Yeshua said, “Take eat, this is my body,” he wasn’t performing an act of singular magic, he was reminding us what all beings say to all other beings. We eat and are eaten. It’s not good or bad, it’s just life transforming, entangling, becoming. When that teacher came back a thousand years later as another teacher, Francis of Assissi, he begged his brothers to lay his naked body on the ground for all to eat. When he encountered a wild wolf terrorizing a village, he told them it must be fed. He did not “tame” the wolf, I discovered when I read the original legend; he taught the villagers how to feed it. There were not two wolves, one good and one bad, but only one that was wild that needed to eat, and its eating was not a mistake but a necessity.

The tick is not good or bad. It is simply eating. It is eating so that it can grow and feed its young, because its desires for life are vast and unshuttered. It falls on me, crawls to a soft hidden spot near a vein and eats. Then on the Feast Day of St. Francis I am diagnosed with a tick-borne disease that makes me deathly allergic not only to red meat and dairy but all products made with mammals. It turns out that most of our medicines are made with mammals. Do I blame the tick? Do I go to war against it? Or do I try to remain curious about its strange invitations?

I am food—and the food I can now eat has been transformed.

Before he died St. Francis composed the Canticle of the Sun in praise of all beings great and small, all energies vast and cosmic, all that is from day to dark. Laudato si, praise be, begins every verse. Stripped of its thin veneer of Christian piety, it becomes one of the great hyms to the animate everything. Can I praise the wolf, the darkness, the weather “cloudy or temperate all weather is our nourishment,” the tick?

I try to live within the vast mysteries of comings and goings where my mother can be a tick who is my teacher who is my protector. This doesn’t mean I go outside and offer up my body to the creepy crawlies, that I don’t rigourously pull them off when they crawl up my leg, that I don’t screech when I find one attached, that I am not deeply concerned by how many there are now in my ecosystem.

But I know there are so many because human beings have hunted the capstone predators—the wolves and the wild cats that ate the deer, the coyote and the foxes that ate the mice, that once upon a time ate us—that kept all of these beings in balance. I tremble when I hear about human beings who want to eradicate the ticks or the mosquitoes—as always incapable of imagining what happens when we label one species bad, and always our own as the best. How come we cannot see how all of these problems of our own creation, that our best thinking got us into this mess, and only a renewed conversation with other beings and souls will get us out of it? We killed the mosquitoes with DDT and killed off all the birds as well.

Because I have an allergy to the alpha-galactic sugar in all mammals except primates (known as Alpha Gal syndrome, its own sly wink to a feminist invitation…) I am more aware than ever of the horror of what civilized human beings have done to domesticated animals. I think of the tiny lone star tick that bit me, I don’t know when, and how her mighty heart beat with compassion for all of her sons and daughters confined in pens and cages, fed growth hormones and geneticaly modified corn, fattened up, slaughtered, wrapped in plastic and sent to grocery stores. One epidemiologist got in no end of trouble when he suggested that Alpha Gal might be the best thing to happen for the health of America’s people and her lands.

As long as I avoid mammal products, I have never been healthier. I was praying to embrace longevitiy when I got bit—to various saints and ancestors on the other side. One of them showed up as a lone star tick and delivered an expedient solution. I cook all of my own food, carefully sourced from farms I know. There is no processed food in my cabinets. I only clean with simple ingredients. My medicines are compounded without hooves and gelatins and gums. I am doing deep prayers to help my immune system relax—without changing any of these behaviours.

All because of Sister Tick, Mother Tick, the ticks that tell us how wrong we are about all of our ways, all of our solutions, all of our best laid plans and ideas.

Laudato Si, my sister tick, who brings me health and wisdom.

note: I will only add that yes, Lyme disease and all other co-infections are truly horrible but that first learning about them in my own body over 15 years ago was my invitation to herbal medicine and the invasive plant healings….again there are invitations in these moments if we stay curious, ask questions, and ask for help from all that is.

Perdita Finn is a writer, a woodwife, an old witch. She has been a chestnut tree in a vanished grove, a seal (her husband hides her skin in the attic), a she-bear dreaming inside the mountain, and always a mother to blood kin, soul kin, fur kin and odd kin. The dead have, over the past thirty odd years, led her back to the old ways of magic and miracles.

She is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseeen World and Mothers of Magic: Summoning the Wisdom of Our Ancestors. With her husband Clark Strand she wrote The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary.

Her next workshop is on Saturday August 22nd: Creating with the Dead. Liberate your imagination, summon your inspiration, co-create with beings on the other side! Whether you are a writer, a painter, a musician, or a dabbler, this one-day immersion will help your creativity blossom!