DAY #6 OF ARCTIC BURIALS AND DANCING ON BONES
Curiosity killed the cat!
“This line of thought made me wonder about funeral customs in Greenland. The land here is tundra and granite. You cannot dig deep because of the permafrost, so how can there be an entire cemetery full of graves?”
One year ago I spent a month painting in Greenland, following the death of my mother. I wrote daily posts on Facebook and my writing gathered a dedicated following. People were disappointed when the daily posts ended. I now regret that I did not make myself a Substack before leaving for Greenland. I have decided to make those posts available here by running them all again, spaced out over intervals, so they can be found online. I am also bundling them into a book, combining the stories, photographs and artwork. (And I will back in Greenland, teaching a sacred art course, in September 2024. There are some places left!)
6 October 2022
Some people have asked me whether I am planning to move around, here in Greenland. The answer is a resounding no: I want to say in one place for long enough for the land to become an extension of my own body. For my feet to remember it so well that I will continue to walk here in my dreams (long after I leave). For the memories made here to be as vivid as childhood memories of places where I used to live. Places where I played, laughed, made friends, fell off my bike, fell in love for the first time.
It is my intention to find a new favourite place, every single day, and so far this is easy! Most of these magical places do not appear in any guide book, they are special to me because of the power they hold and because of the formidable spirits that inhabit them. When I visit often enough, these spirits start reaching out to me and lifting veils on other dimensions.
The local people are currently digging up water or drainage pipes in this town, replacing them or re-routing them, I am not sure. Yesterday I decided to scale a large mound of displaced earth in the middle of town and discovered that the soil was packed tightly with bones. I am a bone hunter, but this is not “hunting”. This is visiting the "sweet shop" and scooping up armfuls of what you like, free of charge. Bird bones, caribou vertebrae and one humongous bone (Musk Oxen or Whale?)
I also visited the local graveyard recently: row after row of white crosses, decorated with plastic flowers. Real flowers aren’t much of a “thing” above the Arctic Circle. You would not really embellish a grave with moss, lichen and alpine flowers. They appear all by themselves!
So anyway, right after painting Skeleton Woman, I literally found myself walking on bones, flapping my arms like a raven and performing The Bone Dance. (By now I am no longer “The Danish Woman”, I am “The Crazy Woman!”)
Only a few weeks ago I was teaching Norse perspectives on Death and Dying, at my Forest School in Sweden. When you really meditate on Death you realise that we literally walk on our Ancestors. The human life span is incredibly short, much shorter than the life span of many trees, let alone mountains or oceans.
For our brief window of time here on Earth, we literally walk on All That Came Before Us, crumbling, crunching and composting under our feet. For many centuries to come our own body will become part of that same mulch, of the topsoil that sustains other creatures and life forms.
When I think about how much has gone into physically sustaining my 55 years on this planet, it seems only fair that the components of my body will face centuries of sustaining other life forms in return. Fair is fair!
This line of thought made me wonder about funeral customs in Greenland. The land here is tundra and granite. You cannot dig deep because of the permafrost, so how can there be an entire cemetery full of graves?
(Permafrost refers to a thick subsurface layer of soil that remains below freezing point throughout the year, a phenomenon occurring chiefly in polar regions).
The answer is that digging is indeed impossible, but bodies can be covered completely with rocks. The graves are like raised flower beds, they are higher than level ground. They sit on a very thin layer of topsoil. The graves are covered with garlands of plastic flowers.
To see pictures of death and burial rituals from different cultures, click here.
Too much information? Well… Curiosity killed the cat, as we say in English!
Imelda Almqvist
The bone sweet shop. That sounds incredible. There is a bone sweet shop on the banks of the Thames, the south side of the river, where many of the bones thrown into the river from ancient feasts, or abbatoirs, or butchers wash up with the tides, all collecting together as the muds over up their treasure. I've collected a fox or dog jaw bone, various vertebrae and chicken bones. Several hundred years old. last month I found a badly decomposing dolphin washed up and half buried on Hove beach. It gave me its jaw bones, minus teeth, which are now soaking in my garage to remove the last vestiges of flesh. I have found porpoise vertebrae in the past, now adorning a talking stick. I reburied the human jaw bone, with teeth, I found near the psychic's grave I tend at Bishopstone recently. Part of me wanted to keep it, but I knew that was not the right thing to do, so I reburied it in a small ceremony.
Tomorrow is the sixth anniversary of my mother's death. I was privileged to be with her when she took her last breath. I washed down her body and sat with her in the hospital for some time. I wish I'd brought her home for a few days, but I did not know then, what I know now, what is possible when it comes to tending the dead in the immediate aftermath of the spirit leaving the physical body. My mother's gift to me in death was giving me the runes. I have never looked back.
You wrote during your time in Greenland last year
"I want to say in one place for long enough for the land to become an extension of my own body. For my feet to remember it so well that I will continue to walk here in my dreams (long after I leave)."
From.what I've read so far it definitely sounds transformative on many levels but I'm curious, did you succeed in that wish?