Wake for a vanishing world

Ecological wakes celebrating our love for what’s being lost, through the regenerative practices of storytelling, art and performance and communal grief tending.

Starting in Scotland in November 2021, to coincide with COP26, we’ll hold immersive ecological grief workshops that connect people and communities with the climate change-induced loss of habitat and biodiversity they’re faced with in their local area.

By being present to what’s happening and tending to the pain, communal grieving builds our individual and collective resilience and becomes a generative force for action.

“The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time. They are kneeling with hands clasped that we might act with restraint, that we might leave room for the life that is destined to come.”

Terry Tempest Williams

Wakes

The events include movement and nature connection as a way to come into relationship with ecological grief. Connecting to the more-than-human world through play, movement, dance, creative writing and performance.

“The wake is the oldest rite in humanity, once practised in some form by every culture on earth, reaching back beyond the fall of Troy to our Neolithic ancestors and further still. A real wake…is both transcendent and tangible proof of the mortal limit of every human life, our common kinship. A wake is the best guide to life you could ever have.”

Kevin Toolis, My Father’s Wake

Get involved

Organise a wake in your community or sign our online book of condolence.

“When we truly open our hearts to each other, there is no burden too heavy for us to carry together, there is no pain too deep for us to hold in each other’s arms. And it’s in that place—of feeling the Earth’s injuries, and feeling it with each other—that the alchemy emerges. It’s in the cauldron of sharing our grief with our community, of gazing at it together and not looking away, that the heartbreak turns to hope.”

Tyson Yunkaporta, author of Sand Talk