Who has idea about the songs for their funeral? This post is about ane of mine.

I remember about death often. I write this as I am wandering through 1 of my favourite places, Woodvale Cemetery in Brighton on England'southward south coast. Equally I walk, I retrieve well-nigh lost beloveds, mine across the globe, and all the unknown people, honey by others, around me hither under the tangled trees and groundsel. I remind myself how natural a part of our life the cease of it is. I think about decease, as a means of getting out from under the anxiety of it.

Woodvale Cemetary today every bit I wrote in my notebook

OH MY GOD I'G GOING TO DIE Ane Twenty-four hours… is ane of the most powerful and useless thoughts in a human mind. Unless, that is, we shift the kind of power it has and allow ourselves to understand the rightness of information technology: have our mortality and let it make the states peaceful.

(Bereavement and grief are non things I am treating lightly in writing this. It is dreadful to lose a loved one. I am talking most our more than general midnight heed and its grappling with our inevitable mortality, rather than specific deaths, which will always cause sometimes unbearable sorrow. I transport dear to anyone who is suffering with grief.)

I think most death by choosing songs I would like at my funeral, past walking in the beautiful cemetery; I call up about expiry by choosing to acknowledge it. I recommend this procedure. I accept found Going With Grace on Instagram a wonderful and life-enhancing help with this – a truthful and inspiring wise-woman.

Simply feet even so creeps in. Because of the ravages of Covid and because we seem hell bent on killing the planet, this is a very broken-hearted time. Many of us experience sad and scared about the time to come. The harms we wreak are more than distressing to me than the knowledge of my own eventual end. We are so damn reckless.

Part of the chorus, the herd voice of feral cows, who throughout Table salt Lick, comment on the lives and choices of the people in the book, and the folly of all humans.

Simply walking in Woodvale, to remind myself of the constant modify of life and the blessing of existence in it at all gives me comfort. A vocal gives me comfort – the song I would like played at my funeral. It reminds me that it is hubris to imagine that our stop will be the end of everything. It reminds me that beautiful nature is more than resilient, more wily, more than profoundly powerful than we are. The natural world, though it be ever so dilapidated and ill-used, will survive and flourish in new, unimaginable ways.

The song is Peace In The Valley Once Once more past The Handsome Family. It was a huge inspiration in writing Salt Lick – the reason I wanted to imagine places where the scrubby tide of human occupation recedes and its leavings are slowly obliterated past nature. My fascination with this song pb me to imagine an England with no farms where wild cattle create a patchwork of woodland and meadow, to picture a adult female walking under abased state highway intersections, a wolf, lying in the lord's day behind the crumbled cement of a brutalist multi-storey motorcar park in Chelmsford.

Quote from Common salt Lick, as Isolde starts her journeying on foot along the abased A12

I have always wanted to experience this mural of ours without the choke and racket of cars; i of the dandy joys of writing is yous get to design your ain play parks and I loved writing Salt Lick. It imagines a earth that is both frightening, as sea levels rising and human being nature boils in the cities, and hopeful. Cars are abolished. People relearn ways to piece of work, to co-operate, to grow food. Information technology is non a dystopia but a mixture of muddling along, in bad and good, which is how I imagine all our possible futures.

To exist clear, I don't desire to die unnecessarily, nor do I want people to exist subject area to the awful ravages of climate catastrophe. None of usa I think, know if we will go it correct. We are like inept and greedy mages, letting demons loose that we might gain gilt plate on our tableware. Information technology IS a catastrophe. Ane that takes more than a song to banish.

So sometimes we need comfort, a moment to regain our strength, to residuum our minds. To make us prepare for the next fleck. To rediscover the simple approving of being an fauna, alive. I find a place of recuperation in this song equally I footstep back from fearful reality and imagine wild horses breaking mirrors in the last shopping mall. It makes me call up that somehow, somewhen, everything will be alright.

What a comfort

I would like to thank Rennie Sparks of the Handsome Family for giving me permission to utilise the lyrics of her beautiful song.