We’re busy editing our most recent interviews with the awe-inspiring death community in Seattle… here are some stills until the footage is live:
Teaser: these are some of the most epic conversations we’ve ever had, they are provoking, inspiring, and we do want to share one spoiler…
When all the interviewees answered our question about what they do to sustain their life since they spend so much time supporting death, they all answered with a version of this: They go outside, they sit with wild plant and tree people, their death work is fed by the life of the wilds…
Thank you Lashanna Williams, Oceana Sawyer, M. Abeo, Morgan Yarborough, Stefani Kaufman- Mthimkhulu and Thabiso Mthimkhulu: your contributions to DMDT’s documentary are of unspeakable importance.
DMDT is thrilled to be producing & supporting the creation of a new work:
YOUR FUNERAL: a celebration of life on the eve of the sixth great extinction
It’s a ritual play to help you digest climate crisis grief and perhaps transmute it into ground pounding action? If you’re dying to know more right now you can check out the theatre ensemble La Lune De Mort for a teaser.
“PEOPLE NOT AFRAID OF DEAD THINGS”:
An expose on people who work with DEAD materials for a LIVING.
This mini-series aims to de-stigmatize having a relationship with death. Episode 1 will premier this coming spring… popping up with the saplings that often grow out of dead logs:
Temporary Mourning Rituals for Animal/Pet Death & Ecological Grief:
These rituals aim to be a physical catharsis and memorial for loss. And a reminder to you that grief is the flipside of love, it’s not fair, and it is a part of our lives. We hope this helps you to recognize all that you’re dealing with as you navigate grieving and honoring what you’ve lost (whether that be a loved one, a dream, a job, a relationship, a companion animal, ecological safety, or really anything you formed an attachment to to survive;) while living your everyday life.
Grief is something that we can’t see, and that makes acknowledging and feeling it all the more difficult: so these rituals may help by giving you permission to take time out of your day to metabolize and essentially digest your grief. Grief bruises the heart, but we can’t see that, thus these rituals are a way to see the unseeable, to have a reminder of what’s going on beneath the surface.
The temporary tattoo colors associated with each “week” of the ritual mirror a healing bruise… after the initial shock that only black can hold, we move into red, flow into blue, and the metaphorical bruise ages finally into yellow. These colors are guides to remind you that while grief never goes away, it does morph and change like a bruise moving from the surface back into your bloodstream and body.
These rituals are kid friendly, in fact we encourage you to move through them as a community or family, together.
While we originally designed this line of temporary tattoos and accompanying rituals for pet and or ecological grief: you can use these rituals to metabolize anything. You can custom order a tattoo to represent a beloved human, a big life transition, or really any grief or loss that you are processing.
You can find these rituals here: scholarships are available, simply email deathmedyingtree@gmail.com.
All the profits of these temporary tattoo mourning ritual sales will be a donation to “death, me, dying tree”- so that we can continue to curate and produce events to help transmute our societal relationship with death.
And finally: we’re turning one of our community projects on mourning into a book:
It’ll be part herbal recipe, part coffee table art book.
So that the reader can digest a personal or collective grief while sipping one of the elixir recipes, and take in the work of an artist who has needed to do the same thing.
If you’d like to participate as a recipe maker or art maker in the book, please email deathmedyingtree@gmail.com, we have made about half of the book and are still looking for submission, do reach out.
Our dream is that through this community experiment people will feel less alone with the grief they are holding. More soon.
