The Spring Equinox offers an experience of coming full-circle, of the life that is fed by death, new growth emerging from the fallow times. 

I spent the first part of the first day of Spring at Portland Nursery, leading a discussion on springtime rituals and making a spray that would grace my father-in-law's grave when we buried him later in the week.

​I went from the nursery to Forest Park where I led a ceremony honoring a baby who had died before her birth. 

On Friday we gathered to mourn and celebrate my spouse's father Dean, a deeply decent man. That night, we gathered with our larger circle to mourn and celebrate our much-missed friend Marcy on the anniversary of her birth. 

Then, a few days of retreat in a sacred place in the Columbia River Gorge. We were sent with prayer flags sewn at a kitchen table by women whose hands followed the stitching of untold generations of women before them. We released the flags into the mists of a wind-gnarled oak grove, returning the next day to find them perfectly framing a view of a freshly snow-laden Mt Hood.

What rituals of remembrance do you employ? ​

This month on the Death Talk Project blog, I'm starting to share stories from my archive. You can find them all on this site, of course, but here's a sample of just three, on the theme of "ashes to ashes".

I live in a temperate rain forest where trees and shrubs bloom seemingly year round. Our January sidewalks are dusted with cherry blossom petals instead of snow. In place of curtains, our windows are shaded by bough upon bough of camellia flowers.

It wasn't always so. I grew up in New England where it was winter until it was spring. Some of my favorite childhood memories relate to the rituals practiced by my mother to coax spring into our home.

She brought branches of forsythia and pussy willow indoors to force their blooms weeks ahead of their outdoor schedule. We pricked the ends of eggs with a pin, blowing the contents out into a bowl, then dying the shells. A drop of melted wax affixed a thread to the decorated eggs which she then hung from the blooming branches.

There was Easter sunrise service, up on East Rock, then home for hot cross buns and a treasure hunt for the Easter baskets my mother had hidden. 

These days I mark the change of the seasons by heading to Portland Nursery to lead a class where we reflect on the personal, familial, and cultural traditions that tether us to the turning of the great wheel of life. This weekend we'll forage from the garden grounds to gather bits to tuck into a spring altar swag.

As we admire each other's creations, we'll offer this simple blessing for the vernal equinox: May the seeds of your intentions be well tended. 

There are few sounds that pierce the heart like the sound of grief - a sound seldom heard in our otherwise cacophonous contemporary culture. I wrote about that silence last year in my account of a Dagara grief ritual led by Sobonfu Some. 

Last week, the sound of grief ruptured the quiet of our Sunday morning: my spouse Amber reacting to the call from the hospice house. Her Dad had just died. 

The days leading up to and following his last exhale were punctuated by so many clear notes of grace. One of those came in the form of a glossy, black bird. 

On Wednesday morning, at the time Dean's body was being cremated, Amber and I entered the wet green womb of the Portland Audubon Sanctuary, where Dean had volunteered for 17 years. On this rain-soaked weekday, we had the place to ourselves, it seemed. As we stepped down the slick trail among the old-growth conifers, descending to the rush of Balch Creek, we noticed a large enclosure. A sign told us it was the home of Aristophanes, the resident raven. But Aristophanes was nowhere to be seen.

We reached the creek and took shelter in a grove of giant trees, pausing to speak aloud some words to Dean. After a while we found ourselves drawn down the path to a small pond bordered by a wooden pavilion. As we entered the open-sided structure, facing the pond, we became aware of a slender man with waist-length braids, behind us, bending to the ground just off the deck. On his heavily gloved arm was a large blue-black bird: Aristophanes.

This long-time Audubon volunteer who spends every Wednesday visiting with the eight year-old rescue bird was gathering wet leaves to tidy up the large glops Aristophanes had left on the floorboards. Unaware of the reason for our visit, he began to weave a gentle spell that held us there for story after story about this remarkable bird.

In cultures throughout history Raven has been seen as a mediator between life and death. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss theorized it was this attribute that propelled both Raven and Coyote to mythic status. A quick tour of Wikipedia finds Raven featured in important stories of the Greeks and Romans; in the Talmud, the Bible, the Quran, and among medieval Christians; among Nordic and Celtic cultures; in Siberia, North Asian, and South Asian lands (where the Raven still serves as the national bird of Bhutan); and among the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest.

As a symbol of death in European cultures, Raven has become associated with sadness, a bad omen. But in Africa, Raven is seen as a guide. In China and Japan, Raven is a messenger of the gods representing the light of the sun. Unlike the modern West which dichotomizes life and death into mutually exclusive realms, several indigenous cultures' creation stories depict Raven as both creator and trickster.​

Our Audubon guide focused instead on his wonder at the intelligence of this bird, its neocortex proportionately thicker than a chimpanzee's. The raven not only uses tools, it makes them. Their communication skills, we're learning, are remarkably complex.

During his keeper's narrative, Aristophanes kept up a steady litany of gurgles, clucks (sounds like "tock!"), and croaks. This unexpected cross-species duo, showing up in this place of ancient beauty, on this most sacred of mornings, provided a glimpse of the power of the mythic imagination to connect us to worlds outside the limits of our physical existence.

Over the past week, as my father-in-law entered his dying time, I prepared to introduce the Death Talk Project, with its logo (seemingly coincidentally) the sociable raven.

As the life-force began to ebb from this deeply decent, loyal man, I was reminded with my every breath how each grief touches the ones that came before. With me in the room with Dean: my own father, whose brain cancer showed up 16 years ago this month. My dear friend Marcy, whose birthday we'll mark on March 25th without her. The other beloveds, mine, and those of the clients I serve. And beyond them, the names we'll never know, the generations of life in all its forms whose deaths made my existence possible.

All of them here, as memories, as felt presence, in the molecules we breath and the food we eat and the ground we stand on. In what John O'Donohue calls the space between us. I created the Death Talk Project to serve and support that space between us. Please let me know what you think.