When You Die Podcast with Day Schildkret
So, you know, this is a culture of forgetting, forgetting our past, forgetting where we’ve come from. So much of the social justice movements in this country are trying to help us remember what happened and for us to be informed by that sense of remembering. So, rituals and ceremonies do that for us; they’re mechanisms to remember.
Johanna Lunn
This is the When You Die podcast. If it has to do with death and dying, we’re talking about it. I’m your host today, Johanna Lunn.
I’ve been really looking forward to this conversation today with a very special person. Day Schildkret is internationally renowned as an author, artist, and teacher behind the Morning Altars movement, inspiring tens of thousands of people to make life more beautiful and meaningful through ritual nature and art. His work has helped many to pass through transitions of loss and of joy and embrace the ordinary wonder of life itself. Welcome Day. Thank you so much for being here.
Day Schildkret
Grateful to be here. Thank you for having me.
JL
My pleasure, truly. So, you have two beautiful books and tens of thousands of people that you’ve touched. The first time I saw Morning Altars I thought, wow! This is it, you know? This is what I love. I collect rocks and pinecones, have been doing that since I was a young child toddling around in the woods. And so, it was like, “Look what you can do with them. It’s so gorgeous.” So, it’s not just this reveling in nature that you’ve discovered, though, but a way of really harnessing that to work with loss and love and transitions and the interstitial itself.
DS
Yeah. I’d say “meaning” is the word that comes to mind. You know, we’re making meaning. One of the things that I’ll just start off by saying is, I do a teacher-training. And I tell my teachers, that we’re a Trojan horse enterprise. And on the outside, we’re just playing with berries and leaves and twigs and flower petals. And to a four-year-old it looks very attractive and simple. Even to a forty-four-year-old it looks beautiful and like art. I think the subversive piece of it is that who knew that berries and twigs and flower petals could help someone remember their dead; could help someone move through post-traumatic stress disorder; could help someone ground their body after giving birth. These are real things. You know, these are actual stories of people that I’ve worked with where this process and practice has actually helped them move through some of the biggest and smallest life transitions. And so, the practice is subversive, because we’re really just playing with nature. But we’re opening ourselves up to a profoundly important, meaning-making mechanism. And that is working with ritual and working with creativity and working with impermanence. And those are the heart and soul of the practice itself. I started this practice because I needed something to do after my father died. And I was totally grief-ridden. Couldn’t really even socialize; barely could work; really heartbroken. My dog, who I adopted from my father at the time, got me out of the house walking on dog walks. And my head was down because I was kind of lost in thought at the time, trying to figure out what happened. How did this happen? And seven months of that, by the way. You know, grief is incredibly disorienting and destabilizing – as it should be. So, I was really lost in my mind. And my head was down, and I was looking at the ground on these dog walks, and I would find these beautiful objects. And eventually, the dog and I climbed to the top of a hill, and we sat under a tree, and I just started to arrange them into some kind of order. And an hour went by like it was a minute, and before me was something beautiful. But internally what was happening was that I recognized, or remembered order, again, like something other than feeling totally disoriented. And it was in the art, it was in the external that helped me remember. So, I started to create them every day as a way to remember what’s important, a way to remember my father. Eventually, I had a major breakup of a relationship. So, it was a way to remember myself inside of that. And then eventually, you know, as life does, it’s not just about grief, it’s celebration, it’s that things change. And so, I started to make them for all transitions of life. Then it took off and became a thing, a movement in the world. Now I train hundreds of people around the world to bring it into nursing homes and elementary schools and churches and synagogues and businesses and community centers and botanical gardens. And people are playing, which is good, we need to play. But they’re learning how to exercise this muscle of wonder, which is really important. And mostly they’re learning how to make meaning. Meaning-making is the renaissance that I’m trying to spark in the culture, because we’re such a meaningless, meaning-devoid culture.
JL
I’m with you 100% on that. I find working in the end-of-life space, especially when so often the deep sense of grief is at, “Did I really live?”
DS
Yeah.
JL
You know, what do I have? Did I waste this life? And of course, we all are living, but we are not always conscious, because we don’t have any bookends to our day. I think the rituals that we make are very unconscious rituals. We do have them, but we have forgotten, you know, where, certainly, my grandparents came from. And going back in time, there were many more rituals that marked our time in space. But I think COVID made it vivid to me what a comic once said: “Because of the pandemic, time became stupid.” Funny, right? But really true, because suddenly, time was this very fluid flexible thing, because nothing was marking our day. If you were working from home, it’s like you weren’t even leaving the house and coming back.
DS
You keep on using the word marking, which is appropriate when we’re talking about transitions. But let’s unpack the word for a minute, because why do we use the word marking? And how else do we mark things in life? One of the metaphors that I often talk about publicly when I speak about ritual is cairns, which is the stack of stones that folks make on a trail in order to denote, or mark, the turn, or the bending of a path. So, it basically says to people coming after, you don’t keep going straight; turn here. So, ritual works in the same exact way it plays with markings, but instead of space, it plays with time. And it basically says, don’t keep going straight. Instead of turn, the word is “return,” return here, return to what’s important, return to your body, return to your ancestors, return to your family, return to your home, return to the change in season, whatever it is. But it’s a cairn for time, which I’ve never actually said before, but it’s actually quite true. It’s a marking. Rituals mark time. So, when that comic said, “Time has become stupid,” how I hear that is time has become pathless or weightless. We don’t know where we are inside of it. But ancestrally speaking, at least in my own culture, I come from a Jewish culture, we are really skillful with marking time. And I think it’s because our ancestors understood the consequences of not doing that, of stopping counting, (which, by the way is the etymology of the word ritual, to count). For instance, in our tradition, we often count in sevens: seven days of the week, seven years, 49 years. We have a certain system of counting time. Why? Because when you actually get to the point of the marker, something else happens, right? For instance, like seven days, we rest on the seventh day. So, something else happens. There’s something else that needs to be protected and honored and remembered and marked. And then you return back to the pattern or the cycle. So, there are rituals for, let’s say, death anniversaries, which are very important. If you don’t mark the anniversary, for instance, my father’s anniversary is February 27, and if you don’t mark that every year, the consequences are you forget, you forget your dead. So, the markings are a way of remembering, they’re a mechanism to remember, and a mechanism to return.
JL
It’s very powerful. I’m reminded that when we lose someone, they’re not physically present with us. But in many ways, they’ve never really left us, you know, we don’t get to go hang out with them or have a meal or any of those things.
DS
But there is something that I do every day. I have a whole wall in my house of ancestral photos, probably around 75 photos, on one wall. And every time I share a meal with them, I acknowledge, I acknowledge them, because I wouldn’t be here without them. And that’s a ritual, right? It’s a way of turning towards that … that which needs to be remembered. Or those that need to be remembered. Turning back towards them. Life is inherently forgetful. That is being human: we forget all of the time. So, we have these mechanisms called rituals and ceremonies that help us, as Robin Wall Kimmerer says in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, “Our elders tell us that our ceremonies and rituals are ways we can remember to remember.” We might need mechanisms to help us, that we have to help us remember, that we have to remember. That’s the point of it. And the flip side of that quote is, “If you don’t remember, you forget.” And then the question is, what happens when you forget? And you just have to look at the dominant culture of North America. Or another way of saying it, as Brezny, an astrologer once said, “The United States of Amnesia.”
JL
Right.
DS
So, you know, this is a culture of forgetting, forgetting our past, forgetting where we’ve come from. So much of the social justice movements in this country are trying to help us remember what happened. And for us to be informed by that sense of remembering, so rituals and ceremonies do that for us; they’re mechanisms to remember.
JL
Well, it’s the antithesis of materialism, because we’ve been sold on, “If you buy this lip balm, you’ll feel better.” And the next thing will make you feel better. And then we are in a cycle of things instead of in the cycle of a richer fabric that we actually came from.
DS
Yes, when you say lip balm, what I’m now hearing is that we’re addicted to novelty. We’re looking for the new thing, the next thing, the inspired thing, the fancy thing. You know, its novelty addiction. But the antithesis of that, or the antidote to that, is memory. Right? Not always looking forward. Looking forward is a way of basically saying forgetting. The way forward is by remembering. And the word remember, is two words. And there are essentially two meanings in the word. The “re” means doing it again. And the word member is referring to a verb we don’t really have anymore. But we have a verb that’s like membership, which means whole, a gathering of one body. But the “re” is basically saying that was broken. That dispersed. That is no longer. So, we have to bring it back together again. Right? We have to remember. It is a gathering in again, because life is dispersing, it’s forgetting. It’s that we lose things all of the time, including our dead. So, the acts are the mechanisms to remember, help us to re-collect or recollect, to play on words, to re-collect or recollect our memories back into wholeness. And when we do that, we can see ourselves in that. For instance, like every meal I re-collect my ancestors back into some semblance of memory. I remember I come from a people. So, I find myself in that, because one day I will be an ancestor. And so, I live my life with them in it, so that I can remember that I’m not separate or distinct or special. I’m a part of them, and they are a part of me. And just turning towards them during a meal, a small, little ritual, let’s just say, take a pinch of bread off my plate and offer it to them, is a way for me to remember them and be remembered by them perhaps.
JL
That’s very powerful, it really is, Day. Especially, I do feel the pandemic, again, really brought this forward, this kind of isolation feeling that so many people have. And when we lose someone, when someone dies it’s like we’ve lost part of ourselves. We’ve lost a whole set of relationship that is no longer there. So, it is that sense of ritual of remembering, that’s very powerful.
DS
And many of us don’t really have a relationship with rituals and ceremonies. We might have a relationship with routines that we call rituals. But we don’t necessarily have a relationship with ritual. One of the things that I’m trying to do, both in my speaking, including on this podcast, and also, in my book, in Hello, Goodbye, is to try to refer to it over and over again, as a ritual cookbook. Because I assure you, you can go to a five-star Michelin restaurant, and you can get served a very fancy meal. But you’re probably not going out to eat every single meal. You’re probably cooking some of your meals in your kitchen. So, I want people to see ritual in the same way, which is, it’s accessible. It doesn’t have to be something fancy, like in the churches or synagogues or mosques. It doesn’t necessarily have to be something that is only connected to your ancestors or passed down through lineage, that makes us creative people. And we can be creative when it comes to rituals and ceremonies. Some of them can be remembered and passed through time and passed down through lineages. And some of them can be made up on the spot because someone has a need. And there’s an urgency around it. In the same way that, like anyone, even the worst cook could probably make an omelet or scrambled eggs, someone who is totally unschooled in ritual can probably make some semblance of meaning when it’s needed. So, I’m trying to empower and awaken people’s sense of creativity when it comes to ritual, because we need more people making meaning, especially as things continue to change in the culture. If you don’t make meaning with the times that you’re in, then you don’t know where you are in it. Going back to our reference of markers, the meaning of the markers is to understand, you know? Especially during the pandemic, the markers helped us to navigate times of uncertainty. They can help us understand where we’re at inside of it.
JL
Yes, absolutely. And so, for someone who hasn’t seen your wonderful books, Hello, Goodbye is a wonderful cookbook of rituals for all occasions. For parents, for people who never became parents, for all of life’s transitions. And it’s absolutely fabulous. So, what would you say? What are the components of a ritual?
DS
So, a ritual, first and foremost, has a beginning, middle, and an end. It’s not something that exists all of the time. It’s something that you enter into; it’s almost like entering into, spatially speaking, it’s almost like entering into a cathedral. You enter into something, you’re in something, and then it ends, akin to, let’s say, a theatre production. You enter into the theater, you see a show, you know when it’s over. So, ritual has the same kind of mechanism. You enter into it, it’s a different space. It asks different things from us. It doesn’t work with things like rationale. It works with symbolism. It’s not trying to be rational. It’s trying to be symbolic. Right? So, things hot take on meaning that in our day-to-day life wouldn’t mean anything. I’ll give you an example. Yesterday. Was it yesterday? No. Sunday my best friend got married. And she’s part of a Jewish culture as well. And in our Jewish weddings we have a variety of rituals inside of the wedding ceremony. That’s an important distinction, by the way, the ceremony. This is Victor Turner, who is an ethnographer from the 50s. He distinguished ceremony and ritual. Ceremonies affirm, rituals, transform. Big difference. So, the affirmation of the wedding ceremony is these two people are coming together in union. The rituals in the ceremony are many, and one of them, maybe a popular one that folks have seen in movies, is that at the end of the ceremony, the groom breaks a glass. And there are many meanings of that. We have different interpretations of it to remember all that we’ve lost, remember that we lost, that we were kicked out of, our homeland, to the destruction of our temple, to remember that even in the midst of harmony and unity, life is broken. And we have to remember that. So, lots of interpretations, and so, he smashes the glass at the end of the wedding. And we all scream, “Mazel Tov!” which means something like, congratulations. And in a day-to-day life in a non-ritual life, that would never make any sense. Why would someone step on a glass, that has no meaning in it, right? But in this Cathedral of the wedding, inside of this ceremony, inside of this ritual, it has enormous meaning. It’s all symbolism. And so, this is what I call in my book, symbolic action. He’s breaking something to mean something. And rituals are always dealing with symbolic action. We submerge something to mean something; we bury something to mean something; we tear something, we cut something, we eat something to mean something. So, the symbolism is pointing towards something. And so, that’s also what distinguishes ritual from, let’s say, routine. Routines are trying to get us from point A to point B, like a nighttime routine, they’re trying to get us from maybe cleaning the house to bed. So, we shut off the lights and close the curtains and wash the dishes and blah, blah, blah. A nighttime ritual has no interest in getting you from point A to point B, it’s only interested in creating meaning. So, a nighttime ritual would be, for instance, you could wash your hands, but it’s not about getting them clean. It might be about remembering something from the day, what’s something that I want? Something from the day that I don’t want to take into bed with me, you know? What’s a stress that I’m wrestling with, that I need to let go of. And so, I still could symbolically wash my hands before bed to mean something bigger. It’s not about cleaning my hands. It’s about letting go of something. So, rituals work in that way, they work with meaning. And by the way, the etymology of the word meaning means, a way to remember. That’s actually the root of the word meaning. So, the things that are when we create meaning, we’re looking to remember something.
JL
And in that process, is that transformational?
DS
Yep, exactly. Because, for instance, let’s say I was going to bed worrying about money, right? And I take the water, and let’s say I pour it three times over my hands. And I’m asking myself, “What is something that I’m looking to let go of from the day?” I’m looking to let go of holding the stress right now. I’m just going to let myself surrender and rest tonight. I’m going to let go of that. The transformation is from holding, to letting go. I’m not affirming anything or confirming anything. It’s not a ceremony, but I’m transforming my grasping and holding and stress into something that’s more relaxed and open and free. That’s the transformation. And that’s a very small ritual.
JL
And in terms of grief, in what way can you break down what is transformational about a grief ritual?
DS
For instance, we started the conversation talking about morning altars. And in my tradition, we have these time markers. When someone dies. We count in seven days, which we call Sheva or Shiva. So, seven days after a death, it looks very different. We count seven days after a death. And then we count 30 days after death, which is called shloshim in Hebrew, and then we count a year. So, we go from day of, seven days, 30 days, a year. And then we just cycle back into a year. And when my dad died, for those 30 days I was creating these morning altars. So, I would go on a walk with my dog. And as I said, at the beginning we would make different alters as a way to metabolize the grief. And so, the transformation that happened was that oftentimes I’d start off those walks just feeling completely wrecked and heartbroken and confused. And along the way, collecting material and sitting under a tree and putting it into some order, the transformation that happened was that I would, in some ways, find myself back into clarity and balance and peace. And remembering I was offering them to my father, and so remembering him as well. And that was something that I did. I mean, I’ve been doing it since, it’s been twelve years. But the ritual itself of creating these altars was a way to transform my grief into beauty. Something that felt beautiful.
JL
So, in that sense, that since your father isn’t with you, physically, is it kind of transforming the inner father, in a sense?
DS
My inner father like my actual father, or me as a father?
JL
Well, no, I meant as your actual father, bringing him into your inner world in a different way, because he’s not in your outer world?
DS
Oh, yeah. I would say that it’s the process of the repetition of doing it every day. That process, that rhythm, is a way to take that remembering of him and to bring it back into the world. And so, it’s a process. It’s like internally I’m trying to bring the memories of my dad externally. I’ll give you an example. During his death anniversary I usually work with leaves and berries and bark and flowers. But last year, I wanted to do something different for him. And so, I remembered that my dad’s favorite dessert was Little Debbie’s, those chocolate Swiss rolls. And so I went to the store, I would never eat these or buy them, but he loved them. And so, I took a packet, I took each one and I made a symmetrical altar out of these Little Debbie’s, and I put candles all around it. And I spoke to my dad. You know, I really spoke to him. And I laughed with him. I basically said, I would never do this, but you love this. And so, I’m taking something that I love to do, which is to make art and to make symmetrical art, outside. I love doing that. And I wanted to weave you more into this. So, I’m using a dessert that you loved, and I hope that you love it, and I hope that you can feast upon this with me. And that was me externalizing him. Otherwise, that would just be like another memory that would just sit inside of me that would be really insignificant. But making something out of his desert externalize brought it into something that was unique and beautiful and real again, if that makes sense.
JL
Oh, it does. It does. It does. And it reminds me a bit of the Day of the Dead ritual of making a feast for your ancestors and very specifically for the more recent people who have died. Their favorite food goes on the altar and, you know, it can be very elaborate, or it can be simple, but it’s usually a pretty elaborate setup. But then it’s the conversation. You’re talking to your mother, your father, your brother, your sister, and it might be that you have a difficult conversation. You might say, “I didn’t like you very much when you were alive,” and then some healing around that can happen. And then usually there’s a request in the Day of the Dead, like, “So, now I want you to help me in my life.”
DS
I mean, it’s part of lots of cultures all over the world. I’m thinking of Japan, I’m thinking of Mexico, I’m thinking of Peru, my own culture, we have lots of different, or there are, lots of different ways to “presents” the dead. And lots of interesting and creative ways to give them a place to rest and arrive or maybe arrive and rest is a better way of saying it. Spirit houses, lanterns, altars, different ways that we create a place for them. Without the physical realization of it, it’s all internal. And when things are internal, it’s really hard to, it’s almost impossible, to understand what’s happening. When we can see it externally, we can remember and understand better what’s happening. I’ll give you an example. I’ve been teaching every summer for, I think this will be the sixth year, at the historic Lakewood cemetery in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And they have me build a 20-foot altar. And hundreds of people come in. We have them, sometimes right there, the name of their dead on stones or in seeds, and they’re planted on the altar. We have lots of ways where folks come, and they can remember their loved ones. And then I teach to workshops. And oftentimes, the workshops are specifically for families that are grieving. One year, there were a lot of children at the workshop. And I brought them through the morning altars practice where they go off and they make their altars, and they all have symbolism in them. And then we go in, view them together so, that we can witness each other’s stories and memories. And this one five-year-old boy grabs me by the hand, the first one, and says, “I want to go first.” So, I motion the crowd, like let’s follow this boy to his piece, and we go there. And it’s a beautiful piece, filled with berries and leaves and flower petals. And he says to me, “What do you notice? What do you see?” Like a question. Five years old. So, I ask the group, well, what do we see? And people are starting to notice that there’s seven, everything’s in sevens. There are seven berries, seven leaves, seven twigs, seven flower petals. And he says, “That’s because my brother was seven when he died.” Right. And so, this was a jumping off point for this five-year-old boy to talk about his brother in the symbolism of the piece. Just seven was enough to bring this boy into a flood of memories. Whereas if you were sitting in an office with him in therapy, trying to talk about his brother, he probably wouldn’t have opened up like that. But as he was making this, he was actively remembering his brother. Right? So, it’s in that, when we externalize either through the memory of my father’s favorite dessert or the age that his brother was when he died, or whatever, when we externalize it, we can remember again, we can see it outside of us and remember it again.
JL
I love that story. I absolutely love that story.
DS
Yeah, that’s a good one. That’s powerful.
JL
Well, I think you know that for all of us that’s really powerful. But for children, especially, we’ve lost the language of grief, and it’s through the things that you’re doing, bringing art and nature into this ritual setting. It’s powerful because it creates a new language for people to open into that which isn’t threatening to them. It isn’t. You know, I think people have a lot of difficulty around grief because they don’t know how to talk about it, but they also get concerned about what are other people thinking of me. Because there’s a big wall, oh, you’re grieving, it’s a big grief, it’s your parents, maybe, and then you became separate from the rest of society. And that’s not cool.
DS
I think that one of the most important things that it offers us, ritual offers us, is something to do. When it comes to grief, I think a lot of people fail because they feel almost disempowered inside of it, which makes sense, right? We are in a time and culture that loves control. We are all being told through advertising that we’ve got it, that we’re in control, we can handle it. If you look at commercials, you have a problem, and this thing can solve it. Let’s bring you back into control, back into certainty, back into being on top of it all, whatever it is. Grief is basically saying you’re not in control. This life is bigger than you. And as much as you wanted this person or this thing to be around forever, it’s not. And so, I think that ritual and ceremonies are ways that we can do something inside of our grief, with our grief, that actually changes it. It doesn’t disrespect it. It doesn’t turn away from it. It doesn’t make it wrong. It employs it. And that’s a very unusual thing. To employ grief for what purpose? To create more life. Right, it’s like, we’re taking sorrow, and we’re employing it to feed and love and be grateful for and praise life. And ritual does that. With elegance. It does it. It does it in a way that it raises the grief up. Which by the way, is the etymology of the word altar. It means to raise up. So, the things that we put down on our altars, we’re trying to raise them up. Rituals can raise up our grief. But it asks something from it. It’s not just saying, look, don’t touch. It’s actually saying touch. And here’s what you can do. And, you know, for me, in Hello, Goodbye I’m remembering the ritual for folks that have been through a traumatic experience. And the ritual is very simple. It’s just asking the person doing the ritual, almost all of my rituals, ask for some witnessing. So, it’s basically saying invite over a friend or two. And the ritual is very simple. You get, let’s say, five or six stones, and with charcoal or chalk or whatever, on each stone write down one thing that this traumatic experience has taken from you. So, each stone gets one word of something that that trauma has taken from you. And the root all the ritual is stacking the stones until they fall. And doing it again, just keep stacking them until they fall down. Even saying it right now, I’m getting teary eyed. Because that’s what the trauma has done to us, or them, is it brings you into that fall, where you’re collapsed. And to actually be able to physicalize it and see it before you is very healing. To be witnessed seeing that rise and fall by your friends, by people that you trust, is very healing, because you’re going through the motion, the action of what it has felt like to go through this experience. By the way, the end of that ritual, the way that it concludes, is a washing of, or pouring water on, each stone and wiping off those words from the stone, which is also quite healing to be witnessed to the end. So, the point of that story is you’re doing something, you’re not just going through a traumatic experience and trying to live with it or go to therapy and talk your way through it. But you’re doing something physical that symbolizes the meaning of what happened, and the potential for healing.
JL
Day, thank you for all of these amazing tools for living, and for bringing it all back into the world.
DS
Thank you. It’s so good. I will gladly rally my troops under that banner.
JL
Well, I’ll be there with you.
DS
We need more all.
JL
We definitely do.
DS
Daily, hourly.
JL
Yeah, it’s really true. Fortunately, it is readily available.
DS
So, look outside your window.
JL
That’s right. That’s right. Well, to our listeners, they can find you at morningaltars.com.
DS
Morning, like this morningaltars.com, or Instagram, or Facebook.
JL
Great. And two beautiful books. And I’m sure there are people out there that will be really interested in your training, as well. So, you do workshops, but you also do teacher training in this recording office, which is a very powerful thing for people to add, particularly if you’re already a therapist or an artist, to extend your practice in that direction.
DS
That’s right. Each cohort is around 100 people from around the world. And it is maybe the most powerful thing that I’ve made. It’s going very deeply into these themes that we’ve been talking about, the themes of wonder, the themes of nature, connection, the themes of creativity, and, of course, ritual, and impermanence. And so, I’m giving away a lot of this practice to people working with different communities and serving different groups of people, so that they can take this back into their communities and clients in the places around the world that we have. I think right now we have teachers represented in over fifteen countries. So yeah, I would love it if folks were interested. Morningaltars.com/teacher training is how to find more information.
JL
It’s like helping people restore their own humanity that they’ve lost. So big, big, big gratitude to you for that.
DS
Thanks for helping amplify it.
JL
My pleasure. My pleasure.
DS
And thanks for all the good work that you’re doing and the good questions that you’re asking and bringing awareness to a topic that we so desperately need to examine and learn more of in our times. Thank you.
JL: This conversation is brought to you by the When You Die Project. From existential afterlife questions to palliative care and the nuts and bolts of green burial, if it has to do with death and dying, we’re talking about it.
