By Bodhi Be
Going home is a phrase I often hear at the bedside of the dying. While I understand the sentiments, these words have deep implications. Do they mean that this is not our home, here on Earth? Does it follow the transcendent view to be “in the world, but not of it” ?
If we are ‘just passing through'...tourists here, if this is not our home, would that explain why the Earth is in the condition it currently finds itself in? Does this come from the embedded teachings of some religions that God is somewhere else? The word ‘mundane’ means ‘of this earthly world rather than a heavenly or spiritual one’.
Many indigenous peoples experience all of nature as having sentience, conscious awareness, spirit essence and recognize that creator and creation are not separate. Holiness is found right here, right now, embedded in this moment and this place. This place, where their relatives are all buried and still a part of village life.
Cremation has now surpassed burial as the most common practice in the US for the final act of humans. This is in spite of the amount of energy, as fossil fuel, it takes to cremate a body and in spite of the gases, heavy metals and carbon emitted into the air.
As far as I can see, there are three reasons cremation is popular now. One, the financial cost is often a fraction of burial costs. Two, the current model of cemetery, approximately 100 years old, is an outdated model. As nomadic peoples, we buried our people along the trail as we followed the hunt or the herd. The following years we knew where grandma was buried as the herds found the tallest, healthiest grass. When we settled in homes, grandma was buried in the backyard and later in the church’s graveyard. More recently, as we moved to towns and cities, secular cemeteries entered the scene. Over one million acres of land in the US are now utilized for one single purpose, burials, and removed from the public commons forever. The third reason has only recently come to light for me. We have lost our connection to the bones of our people. In the US, on average, people move their residence every five years. Most of us no longer visit the graveside of the bones of our people. One of the effects is we ‘lose’ grandma, the most common word spoken when someone dies. We lose and have lost our connection to the ancestors. We have little and no relationship with “the dead”. They have ‘departed’, gone to heaven, into the light, with their departed loved ones, oneness with God. Our common assumption is they no longer need us and they are no longer here.
Added to this current outdated model are the current funeral home and cemetery practices. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic embalming fluid, millions of tons of concrete, plastic and tropical hardwoods are buried each year. Enough metal to build the Golden Gate Bridge. Cemeteries require concrete or plastic grave liners, in part, to keep the ground from sinking so it’s easier to mow the grass. As in corporate food production, burial practices are commonly based on financial profits.
Enter the green burial and conservation burial movement. Green burial has been the common practice for thousands of years. A simple cloth shroud, a simple wooden box, a hole often 2-3 feet deep where organisms and microorganisms are active but deep enough to prevent animals from digging a body up. Maybe a tree is planted on the grave. Green burial grounds are springing up both inside and outside of current cemeteries. Conservation burial grounds have taken green burial further, often partnering with a land stewardship organization to utilize a cemetery as an economic engine to protect and maintain open space and to integrate agriculture, reforestation and regeneration creating multi-purpose uses kept in the public commons forever.
The Earth has cradled us all our life. It holds our homes, our schools, churches, parks, gardens, coffee shops and all. It feeds us in so many ways. No matter what we eat, it comes from the earth. What is in the dirt in your garden? Lots of dead things. Along with minerals from ground rock are the bones and remains of millions of seen and unseen once-living creatures. Grandma may be in there somewhere...
The dead feed life. In witnessing the cycles and flow of nature, we see life and death in a continuous dance, inseparable. Death feeding life. Life dependent on death.
We, as nature and in harmony with nature, gladly return our bodies to the earth as offering and food to feed that which has fed us our entire lives. Going home.