Mourning in the Garden

A Livestream Class with Yeshe Matthews

Sunday, October 5 at 10:30 am in Haunted

Join Yeshe Matthews, Mandala Priestess of the Mt. Shasta Goddess Temple, for this illuminating workshop on ancestral herbal funerary traditions. Our ancestors employed a wide variety of herbal practices to support the dying and honor the dead, including ritual washings, incense fumigation, fragrant herb beds, and talismanic protections to maintain the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead. Today, a corporate bouquet is often all we offer. This class revives sacred practices once central to the art of dying.

• Study how the ancient Greeks used seat water and hyssop to cleanse the belongings of the dead
• Learn how to make łazanki (Polish noodles with honey and poppy seeds) as a dish to serve at the repast
• Examine pre-Islamic Anatolian customs of creating biodegradable tent dwellings for gravesites
• Explore the Tibetan process of divining whether a body would be buried, burned, or left to sky burial

And so much more! When we reconnect with the plant world as part of the arc of death, dying, and grieving, our process becomes more sacred, less remote, and imbued with the grace and tenderness of Mother Nature herself.