Excerpt from Chapter One of From Elder to Ancestor – Nature Kinship for All Seasons of Life

Engaging Rituals for Caring and Accountability

Image reads: If we don’t die well we don’t become fit Ancestors. Deathwalking preserves our future.

When I say “die well,” I mean be reconciled of our traumas of formed being. I mean be given full and effective death rites. I mean that we be commended back to our ecosystem, divinity, and heartsong with compassion and assurance. These are aspects of death rites that haven’t been properly done for thousands of years in American settler culture, and we can learn to do them effectively again.

Just because we don’t receive them at the point of death doesn’t mean we can’t still receive them. Just because we aren’t ready to be a fit Ancestor at death doesn’t mean we can’t still become so. We learn skills in deathwalking to help those who didn’t receive proper death rites to release from the formed realm. We change the trajectory of the Descendants by preserving the wisdom of the Ancestors in our daily lives. 

In From Elder to Ancestor I state:

We don’t talk about dying well in settler culture. Even with the non-church spiritual crowd, we operate on an assumption that a nonpartisan process automatically plays out at death to ensure we end up wherever we need to be. I suspect that it does for folx on intact animistic paths. That they have an unbroken path via cosmology held over generations that guides them at death into What Comes Next. I suspect that at some point far back in our active kinship with Nature our Ancestors had such a relationship with life and death. As someone who has done deathwork for most of my life, it’s not that way now in settler culture. We don’t automatically know what to do at death; thus, as animists we are responsible for knowing what we and others in our lives need to die well and for restoring the dignity of good death at a cultural level. We need certain rites and witnessing in death, so that we greet What Comes Next in the best shape possible. We need to use our earthly agency to set ourselves up for a smoother transition into spiritual options and to create avenues for surviving loved ones to grieve openly.

One way we can reconnect to our animistic natures, our ancestors, and the wholeness available to us now is by tending our dead appropriately. When we do, we heal ancestral wounds and rebalance sociopolitical power dynamics that have none of our welfare in mind. We tend our dead through deathwalking.

Join me 3 November for In the Danger of Death, an experiential course and ritual session that I facilitate every Autumn to reconcile our unquiet dead. In this session learn psychopomp work, or deathwalking, in season with the natural elements of Autumn that facilitate us helping our unquiet dead to move on.

In this gathering you will learn:

• The difference between animism and soul tending
• What deathwalking is
• What The Broken Path is
• Why we don’t deathwalk
• Why we must deathwalk our dead
• Why the dead are unquiet
• A group ritual of deathwalking

Gain animistic insight into the runes, learn to elder well with ancient wisdom, and cultivate a strong spiritual path

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S. Kelley Harrell, M. Div.

Kelley Harrell is an animist, author, deathwalker, and death doula held by Tuscarora, Woccon, and Sissipihaw land. For the last 30 years, through Soul Intent Arts she’s helped others ethically build thriving spiritual paths. Her work is Nature-based, and centers soul tending through the Elder Futhark runes, animism, ancestral tending, and deathwork. She hosts the podcast, What in the Wyrd, and also writes The Weekly Rune as a celebration of the Elder Futhark in season. Work with her in the Runes for Change community or in her intensive soul tending training, The Spirited Path.  Full bio.

#beyourcommunity ~ #youareecosystem

elder well, die well, ancestor well

@kelleysoularts