Lost Rites: The Ancestral Landscape

The last in the Lost Rites trilogy “The Ancestral Landscape” explores the space between us, both within and around us, in terms of what is longing to be given our collective attention for truth, reconciliation and healing. The first Lost Rites book was the Ceremony and Ritual for Death and Dying which tracked the thresholds of death and provided a foundation for bringing ceremony in service of the dying and the bereaved, this was the personal aspects of the work which then expanded through the second book Community of Grief to the collective, our shared spaces and how to “hold space” for grief in community.

The journey from the personal to the collective to the systemic comes full circle in this third book Ancestral Landscape as we encounter together the unseen, unmourned and unresolved which lies latent in our bodies and places as pain and struggle. The vast and cosmic concepts of the Ancestral Landscape boil down to some very simple and easy to implement principles at the mundane level. The invitation of this work is to recognise that good death rites for an individual is a systemic healing practice and that collective healing practices are also indeed death rites.

The Lost Rites reflect our shared wounds as a result of the loss of our indigenous traditions and cultures. This book offers insights and gentle suggestions as to how we can, together, begin to remember what was lost and reimagine what we need, today.