Driving up the gravel driveway to Salt Spring Island Natural Cemetery takes a little time. As I pass by a house, hayfield and barns, the smell of horse dander flairs my nostrils. I have to stop. Visit the horses. Feel my nervous system relax. My animal body attune. Reminded of over a decade of living with three equine friends. Three friends that my husband and I buried in the ground after they took their last breath. Three friends whose bodies we returned to the earth.  

“Your acreage is like a cemetery!!” a young girl who lived next door once exclaimed. I hadn’t thought of it that way, yet she was right.  It seemed natural to bury them in the place where they had lived, grazed in open fields of grass, munched alfalfa and hay, attuned to a family of ravens, bears and bobcats, small birds that rode their backs and the sound of a creek flowing down from a mountain. 

Neighbours, friends, previous owners of the horses and folks who walked the road and felt kin to our friends arrived to pay their respects and participate in the burials. We feasted after, sharing stories with one another of our times with these thousand-pound magical beings. The time that Dancer mischievously took a hammer from my father’s workspace out into the middle of the field and dropped it in the tall grass. The time Kal and Dancer left for greener pastures in a farmer’s field across the road when they found an opening through the fence. The time Coco stood down a bear – her matriarchal presence, firm stance and gaze letting the bear know this was her territory!

Each time we filled a grave, taking an entire day, our bodies warm with sweat, hands dirty and breath laboured, I felt a little lighter, a little braver, a little stronger to meet life unfolding as it does whether we’re ready for it or not. 

Which is one of the many reasons I care so deeply for natural and conservation burial for humans – for the embodied opportunity it provides for meeting grief and for the potential it offers to regenerate the earth from which we have received so much!  To imagine the elements of my body returning to where they belong seems – well, natural!