bish blog

Too cloudy to actually see the sunrise, it was nonetheless a pleasant way to start the weekend. The picture above was taken from the bottom of what will become our new village burial ground. As you can see the view is remarkable, looking east over the village towards Wotton under Edge and the Cotswold Escarpment.

Blessings of the Solstice to all.

Wow! I bet that title got the juices flowing. It’s a life I live, I tell you! Still, that was the course I went on yesterday, run for Parish Councillors and Clerks in Long Ashton, North Somerset. I went, along with my Clerk, in order to understand the issues, obligations and liabilities that come with running a burial ground. Our Parish has been unable to bury its dead in the parish for more than a decade due to the local church cemetaries being deemed full and closed, but recently we have been gifted with a plot of land which makes it possible to build a new burial ground – happily adjacent the old church yard.
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It’s been hard to get back to this wibbling stream of unconsciousness. I think it’s been since attending a family funeral… the funeral service went as well as these things can do; the service was a Catholic Mass which was fine and apart from the obvious issues of being on ‘the wrong team’! But after the lengthy and emotionally charged Mass we drove the five miles from the church to the crematorium.

Now, I’m no fan of crematoria or cremation. It’s a funny thing to know that a self-identified Druid, William Price, established the right to cremation at the end of the 1800′s. It feels wrong to me, to burn something that is so well designed to melt back into the mother Earth. Not to mention the pollution and the fossil fuel used in the process. Hey ho, horses for courses… rant over. Well… that particular one!

We made good time to the crematorium, being only a minute behind the funeral cortège. However, by the time we’d made the short walk to the actual venue we were just in time to see the curtains close – folk behind us, some several dozen, never got to see the final journey at all. It felt as if the whole thing was an industrial process (which, of course, it is) with little or in fact no respect for the body thus transformed. There were several folk and boxes queued up behind us as we left, not to mention the folk before us who were still wandering around looking lost. It just felt disrespectful, and an anti-climax to an otherwise honourable and loving farewell ritual.

I promised myself I would have my own burial plan sorted out by Samhain this last October’s end. I failed. It happens. However, I am thrice committed to a natural woodland burial now and plan to have bought my plot by the New Year. The burial land I am looking at only ever allows one interment per day, allowing a full ritual burial and a respectful and peaceful farewell for all. I plan to be buried as soon as possible after decease, so that preservatives and chemicals are not used, thus avoiding poisoning my landscape. And then I will melt into the roots of a tree, to feed it and become in many ways a part of it, to home new life, to bring pleasure to others for many years to come… rather than a mercury and dioxin smog issuing from a blackened chimney.