Unbraiding Sweetgrass

“Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass, loose and flowing, like newly washed hair...Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten.”

Robin Wall Kimmerer, ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’

I’m writing to you from what at times feels like a circle of hell Dante himself couldn’t have pictured. We’re in the white hot heat of moving house, stripping the house back to the paint for its new occupants. The emotional pressure is immense. The physical tasks overwhelm me if I think about them for more than nine seconds. But every picture taken down, every book packed, every box filled, also reminds me how shockingly easy it is to take a life apart. We’re unbraiding.

Or it was easy until the baby was sent home for isolation, a toddling spanner in the works. At night, my four year old has started to ramble the house. He needs urgent conversations about the move at 3.30am. Everyone is feeling it. So we’re in a period of chaos, although it is chaos with a purpose, which in this life feels like something.

In my fatigue, I read little and watch almost nothing, except gardening programmes. Nature soothes, even through the television. But I was drawn to Netflix’s ‘Surviving Death’, a very watchable documentary series about near death experiences, life after death and mediumship. A little light emotional relief.

I enjoyed it apart from episodes two and three, which focused on mediums and seances. We are taken to a spiritual retreat in the Netherlands, where clearly-bereaved people go to try to commune with their deceased loved ones. The star of the show is Dutch medium Nicole de Haas, and I do mean that literally. We are treated to a compelling one-woman show featuring Nicole doing several voices, purporting to be spirit guides, the most patently ludicrous being ‘Tommy Boy’, who we are to believe is a nine year old boy. I mean, it wasn’t even a good performance. It was actually really bad. The whole thing would be laughable if there weren't so many grieving people in the room.

If you haven’t watched the series, consider it. Some of the stories were very credible indeed, and the debate about consciousness was the most interesting to me of all. Are you conscious when you’re awake? Are you conscious after you die? Are you conscious right now?

But the whole mediumship thing left me cold.

I want to think that maybe the Nicole de Haas’ of this world believe in what they are doing. Communicating with Tommy Boy and Silver Cloud and your nana. Maybe they’re suffering from a mental illness that is concealing itself from the conscious mind, manifesting in what they think are spirit voices. Most unthinkable of all - but we must think it - they are simply grifters, capable of looking into the tear-stained faces before them and exploiting raw vulnerability.

Nothing in these episodes convinced me that any of these people were communicating with the world beyond.

So I say - let’s not bother. Why do we need to prove life after death? We don’t.

You’re alive today, in the world of sweetgrass and rich soil. I believe you’re surrounded by love with your people of yesterday and all the people yet to come, braiding with you. Don’t fear death. Live with it and each day will be sweeter and more important. Then when the time comes, jump off with grace and humour into the next life.

You can access the spirit world if you really want to. Listen inward, stay close to nature and turn your phone off. Align with the cycles of day and night and you’ll tune into a different way of being. But let no one intercede for you. This is a process for you alone. You don’t need a priest, a medium or me or anyone else to guide you to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten.

“Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass, loose and flowing, like newly washed hair. Golden green and glossy above, the stems are banded with purple and white where they meet the ground. Hold the bundle up to your nose. Find the fragrance of honeyed vanilla over the scent of river water and black earth and you understand its scientific name: ‘Hierochloe odorata’, meaning the fragrant, holy grass. In our language it is called ‘wiingaashk’, the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth. Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten.”

I’m taking a break from writing until the move is complete, and I take up the new braids of a new life. We’ll speak again on 15th April.