happy vulture awareness day.

A few years ago I attended an animal totem workshop. We did all sorts of activities and meditations including whistling bird calls, walking around imaginary labyrinths, and re-enacting a predator/prey hunt. It was all in good fun. In the end of the thing, I had learned that my animal totems were as follows: a bat, [...]

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the grim.

Last week I found that I had a pure white eyebrow hair. Furthermore, this week was my first back to work after two months off. I’m listening to the Wailin’ Jennys. There’s nothing like a high, reedy voice with a mandolin, white eyebrow hair, and the last quiet whispers of summer to get a girl [...]

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the oil spill is darwin’s fault.

(Jean-Baptiste Lamarck) In the last month I have witnessed a lot of death in nature. There was the green snake killed by the scrub jay (an experience on which I wrote a blog entry). Then two weeks ago I saw a little brown bird being pecked to death by a crow. Over the weekend I [...]

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you have bones inside you.

My next door neighbor invited me to come over and watch his dog (and his cable) last friday night. I was watching an episode of the Ghost Whisperer (starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, who I last saw in that one show from the nineties…I keep thinking it was called Eight is Enough but that isn’t right…you [...]

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do you save worms on a rainy day?

(photo by Ingrid Taylar) I save worms. Sometimes I’m late to work because I keep finding them, every few feet, and I feel compelled to get them off the death cement and put them back into the soft, nutritious soil. Compelled, I said. I don’t necessarily do it because I have compassion for the worms. [...]

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suffering and bones.

A few weeks ago I became intrigued with Vincent van Gogh. I remembered a story that a teacher told me, about how van Gogh shot himself in the stomach (which is an excruciating place to be injured) and that it took two days for him to die. His last words were, “Who knew that life [...]

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the natural burial.

Yesterday I went and spoke with an engaging woman who is finishing up her schooling in embalming. The woman, despite the fact that she is learning how to embalm/preserve bodies in the “traditional” method, is a proponent of a newly re-emerging burial method called the natural burial. Human beings have been burying their dead for [...]

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gossip barbed with anger, a polite form of murder…

Character assassination. The police won’t come for me, but I’ll feel like crap. I might not even know why I feel like crap. (This is where I think Steiner’s demon [the one you create when you try to control a person] comes into play. I think of it more as an energetic demon that eats [...]

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aghori: holy men of the dead.

I watched this video (in its entirety) in college. Not in the lederhosen class. In a different class, with a different professor. This class was taught by a really lovely professor who told us a story about getting a severe injury when paint spattered into his eye. He told us how he made up a [...]

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overcoming the fear of death, without an invisibility cloak.

As a part of my religious studies major in college, I took a class called death and dying. I didn’t want to take it, I had to to complete the coursework. The best thing I remember about that class was when I ran into the class professor at a PRIDE parade and he was wearing [...]

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