Practices for expanding imaginaries around death & loss, part 1: starting close in
This blog post is part of a series documenting a peer learning journey exploring death & the collective imagination. You can find out more about the cohort here, and what the journey’s all about here.
In this blog post, we follow the first three of six sessions hosted by our participants. These three sessions encouraged us to start close in, to pay attention to the individual deaths, declines & endings happening all around us, and cultivate new means of relating to them.
“How can we get a look at the cinders side of things when the society is determined to create a world of shopping malls and entertainment complexes in which we are made to believe that there is no death, disfigurement, illness, insanity, lethargy, or misery?’” — Stephen Jenkinson
Exploring… Being With Death
With Devyn and Diane
Our first peer-led session aimed to offer ways to presence death & the declining in our everyday world.
We were invited to spend the time leading up to our session opening our eyes to the dead and dying around us. For the first week, we captured and documented unexpected encounters with death: lightning-struck trees on our commutes, compost and discarded debris; the supermarket-bought flowers. In the second week, we were tasked with visiting the orphaned places of our neighbourhoods. Our journeys took us to the derelict building sites, the undeveloped sides of motorways, and the lost-and-found lockers of our public rail stations. The practices recalled the observation that “what you pay attention to, you make sacred” (mythologist Martin Shaw’s words): in showing up for these encounters, we could sense our relationship to these processes shift.
In our session time together, huddler Devyn shared a powerful guided meditation journey inviting us to greet death. We reshared this extraordinary journey at our recent Seed Swap event for the wider community (we’ll update this post a replay link) — it’s worth experiencing for yourself.
Exploring… Rituals for Endings
With Caroline & Natalia
How do we mark the endings of our lives, and why does it matter? Caroline & Natalia tackled this question by leading us on a practice designing rituals for objects at the end of their lives.
Gathering on Zoom, we had the benefit of real-world homes, offices and cafes to source objects whose life was coming to an end. We had a short amount of time to prepare, plan and perform a ritual for our object in pairs, and share back the experience.
This was really an extraordinary exercise that unlocked for us all the untapped power of intentionally externalising the processes behind our endings. Saying farewell to long-loved kettles, shredding completed to-do lists and even cutting up expired credit cards, all took on an ethereal significance as the process of ritual-making drew out the nuances of our relationships with these objects. It was also joyous and very silly — we suspect it would be a great one to bring kids into the discussion too.
A few ritual reflections from the cohort following the experience:
“Not a skill to learn but a sacred potential to embody, an untapped potential to explore, to mark, the smallest and the grandest, most consuming, endings”
“Through ritual and objects we externalise and physicalise our thought processes”
“In a world that conditions us to dampen our emotions, ritual is a space we get to dramatise our experience”
Exploring… Mourning, Customs & Imagination
With Selam & Ally
“What’s an unfamiliar cultural practice that fascinates, inspires or amazes you?”
Selam opened our session on mourning, customs and imagination with this fascinating check-in question, which prompted an outpouring of longing for all kinds of global practices, historical and present-day — from grief customs, to birthday traditions, and rites of passage for first menstruation cycles. What struck us was how unusual it felt to be permitted to scan beyond our own cultural traditions, and express curiosity or even envy about the practices of others. It felt uncomfortable, too (parts of us showing up to question is this “allowed”? Is it derivative, appropriative or exoticizing?) But what became clear to many of us was how impoverished we felt our own cultural traditions to be.
Selam grew up in the UK, but has spent extended time in Eritrea — her ancestral home — and participated in a full 40 day mourning ritual there, while now living in Kenya. Having experienced many different cultures, she was a perfect host for a storytelling session documenting her experiences of the mourning ritual and inviting brave conversation about what could be learnt & seeded elsewhere.
She drew out specific tensions she’d experienced with her outside perspective: between restriction and freedom, conformity and resistance, support and privacy. Most of all, she encouraged us to bring a childlike attitude of curiosity to the session. We became aware of how in death, much of our energy is sapped in fear of saying the wrong thing, particularly where cultural sensitivities are concerned. But without brave spaces like this, we dampen our curiosity about what else might be possible.
In our upcoming blog we track to follow the next three peer-led learning sessions, which widen the lens on death & endings. We’d love to hear your reflections in the comments. And do check out our Seed Swap replay (link incoming) to experience some of our practices yourself.
Dive Deeper
Dig into a few key resources & stimuli that shaped these first three sessions.
LISTEN: Huddler Caroline is an artist who created a beautiful audio piece following a graveyard residency, meditating on grief following the death of a loved one. Listen on her website.
WATCH: Lifting the Lid is an international festival of death & dying, spotlighting a new wave of changemakers reimagining how we mark the endings of our lives. Find replays here.
READ: A powerful experiment in dining with the dead went viral on the Guardian.
WATCH: Rites of Passage is a fascinating series by UK artist Grayson Perry, in which he reimagines meaningful rituals for the modern day. The death episode is excellent but do watch the full series (UK only).
LISTEN: Dreaming your Death Awake, on one of our favourite podcasts, Accidental Gods, posits that when we learn how to die, we learn how to live.
WATCH: a fascinating interview with Meredith Little Foster (Founder of School of Lost Borders) in which she discusses the power & potential of rites of passage work to hold death & dying.
