Wild Heart Willow Coffins’ core values

In 2006, Tom and I co-founded Canalside Community Food (www.canalsidecommunityfood.org.uk) - a CSA scheme based on our organic farm here in Warwickshire that provides seasonal veg throughout the year to local households.  What drove us, and those we worked alongside to bring Canalside into being, was a passion to connect people more directly with the food they were eating, the land it was grown on and the people who grew it.

It was all about CONNECTION.

Connecting people with processes, and connecting people with people.

As much as I see this disconnect in our food systems (buying food from unknown places and people, unknown methods of farming), I also see and feel a strong disconnect in how we deal with death and dying in our society.

Once upon a time, we would have all known how to care for someone who was dying.  We would have known how to tend their body after they’d died, and we would have taken care of all the funeral arrangements, from making a shroud or coffin to carrying them to the gravesite.

Nowadays, so much of these processes are removed from us by (mostly) well meaning funeral directors (more on these in a later post) and, whilst we may help to make decisions about the funeral along the way, I think it can be all too easy to become quite dissociated from the deeper experience of getting our loved ones ready for their final resting place.

I want to EMPOWER people to be more involved with what happens after someone they love dies.  To understand the environmental impacts of different types of funerals, to know where the coffin comes from, who made it, and to know that it was made with LOVE and CARE.  These are always at the very heart of how I work.

I really understand that not everyone wants to or feels they can engage with these processes.  That handing it all over to someone else comes as a relief.  I also believe that some people feel like this partly because of the huge difficulties we have in our culture to talk about death and dying. We just don’t do it enough and that also needs to change.  So there is EDUCATION that needs to happen too.  We can all learn that death is not something to be feared, but rather something that will happen to us all and it is okay to both talk about and even embrace it. And we can learn how to support each other more fully through this inevitable transition too. We can empower each other.