Life Supporting Life

 As an antidote to the dismaying happenings in our government lately, I've been spending a lot of time out in nature. I go to my garden where I've planted hundreds of seedlings I grew inside. And also to my favorite spot at Kent Park, where you can look out over prairie and sky, birds flying overhead, trees shading the landscape, a wide expanse of the earth with less evidence of human interference. There I can breathe deep, open my mind and heart, and join the other millions of lifeforms in our world. I can remind myself that I'm just another little being, connected to everything. And I can ask for guidance. I love to think about how life sustains itself. All of us beings (plant and animal) grow and thrive for awhile, and then when we're done, our bodies sustain the following generations of life. It's like natural recycling, there from the beginning. Our earth's natural rhythms perfected this process long before we coined the term recycling.

As a follow-up to our class about Tallgrass Prairie, a couple of us from Prairie Hill organized a trip to Rochester Cemetery, where there remains a beautiful stretch of prairie remnant. Three carloads of us traveled the half hour to the cemetery on Saturday afternoon and roamed over the hills and around the tombstones, witnessing lush growth of native plants such as shooting stars, wild geranium and may apples. I intended to sit in the midst of the prairie and try to stretch my metaphorical roots down deep, feel the centuries of old inter-connective growth below and around me. And I tried. But one thing that was also plentiful was buzzing insects flying around my face and any exposed skin. I tried to feel welcoming to those too, but it was a little distracting! Oh well. Even so, it was inspiring to walk around and see it all.

This field trip reminded me of my growing concern about how we bury our dead. One recent morning, I woke up to a beautiful day outside, plants thriving, life burgeoning. I lay there marveling about how the bodies of all of us living things sustain the next generations.  And then I suddenly realized that our species doesn't do that! Instead, we fill our dead bodies with chemicals so they don't decompose, and then put them in metal or stone boxes, to protect them further from spoilage, and put those boxes under the ground. I've been a simple burial advocate for a long time, but suddenly I was able to see the broader picture, and it just seemed totally crazy that we don't let our bodies contribute to future generations of life. We separate ourselves from Nature so much that when we die, we remove our bodies from the natural world, the important cycle of life giving to life. While I was still in bed that morning, in this brief moment of a wider view, it seemed totally incredible to me that we do this! I had to find out what people did in the past. Maybe this perverse attitude of containing and preventing our bodies from the recycling circle was pretty recent. After all, once we are dead, we will not need these bodies ever again. What in the world compelled us to preserve them?

So I did some research. And what I found was really interesting! I'll share some of it here:

• Evidence points to the first humans to bury their dead as the Neanderthals. They dug shallow graves and buried them under ground. There are lots of reasons why burying our dead has made sense through the centuries. One is obvious: we don't really want to watch our beloved family members rotting! And burying hides this decomposition process. We would rather honor the one who is no longer with us, without witnessing the deterioration of their bodies.
• There have been many traditions of burial over time, and most of them are focused on giving respect to the people who have died. Different philosophies or religions have developed an array of rituals that help to give the departed people a loving goodbye or a supportive send-off to the next world. In some religions, it is believed that the person would not be able to move on to the afterlife if the proper procedure, position and timing were not followed.
• Some rituals are very particular, requiring exact body positions or directions as well as depth of the grave. And many historical practices included burying important belongings of the individual in their grave. Especially if that person were important, there might be very valuable things buried with the body, and of course over the following centuries, grave robbers and archeologists have dug up those graves to recover the loot inside.
• Embalming: In ancient Egypt and elsewhere, mummification was used, an elaborate process that enabled the bodies to not deteriorate (as much).  However, quite recently we have started embalming pretty much everyone who has died. My research didn't go into enough depth to cover this, but I have heard that at least in this country, during our civil war, bodies of soldiers were embalmed before sending them home. That makes some sense, since some of them had a long way to travel. But I don't know why we started embalming everyone who dies, when no great distance was involved.
• Green Burial: With the growing concern for our environment, green burial has become more popular, though it is not allowed in most cemeteries. There are many methods, but basically in green burial, the body is allowed to decompose so that it continues our earth's process of the dead contributing to future lives. You can read up on all kinds of ways to do green burial, from being placed in a wooden box, to being wrapped only in cloth, to being put in a mushroom suit and buried! I'm glad that it is gradually becoming easier to arrange for a green burial, for folks like me who want that and can ask for it before we die.

I guess that's enough said about being buried! It has helped to read about how our species has dealt with this over the ages, and I definitely am more firmly in the camp of green burial now. Just recently I heard that it was possible to be buried in a cardboard box in the cemetery that my family is buried in. That's good! So if I die tomorrow, you-all know that I want a cardboard box!!