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

The Problem of Animism

Image reads: We’ve always done death rituals, but not the way we have to do them now. Deathwalking is sacred activism.

I often read other spiritual practitioners say that it’s not the job of humanity to do deathwork. It’s the job of the dead. Humanity’s job is to tend the living.

I don’t know everything, so I’m always game to learn more about soul work, especially in different cultures. What I do know is that we have a backlog of unquiet dead wandering the formed realm, and that if the dead and spirit realm alone could manage them, we wouldn’t have that backlog. So why do we have it?

The descendants of the colonizers have more and different deathwork to do for our unquiet dead than the descendants of those who are on unbroken paths, and than those who were conscripted into settler culture. European diaspora must not only come to terms with our lost ancestral deathwalking rituals and cosmology relationships, but we also have to do the healing and reparation of the harm (death) that colonization caused. That, also, is a form of deathwork.

How we live is how we die. I talk about this dynamic throughout my book From Elder to Ancestor:

Much of soul-tending discourse is now devoted to reaching into the deep past of well Ancestors—or those who have moved on from the living realm, reconciled their personal and collective traumas, and returned to oneness and are now ancestral Spirit Allies—and asking them to walk with us through these difficult times. Yet we don’t talk as much about our hungry ghosts—an ancient Asian reference to unreconciled dead, who feed on the life force of the living—or emphasize how we, ourselves, become well Ancestors. In this omission, we still aren’t addressing how we got here, or where fit elderhood is situated in not only how we live but how we die as well. Those things are related.

Join me 3 November for In the Danger of Death to learn how deathwalking is sacred activism, and how you can learn to die well. This experiential session is both coursework and ritual 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

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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