Shamamama — Field Notes

Death. Life. Grief. Ritual. Wonder. The road between them.

Welcome to Shamamama Field Notes—a gathering place for stories, reflections, encounters, adventures, and old wisdom discovered along the way.

I’ve always been fascinated by the places where life and death meet: the rituals we inherit, the rituals we create, the ways we care for one another through endings and beginnings, and the ways grief changes us.

But this isn’t only a journey into death work.

It’s a journey into living.

From the road, from wild places, from quiet conversations and unexpected encounters, I’ll be collecting stories and experiences that make me pause, wonder, question, remember, and see the world a little differently.

Some Field Notes may come from the people and communities reimagining our relationship with death—from green burial and conservation cemeteries to home funerals, death doulas, grief circles, death cafés, ritual makers, and grassroots projects rooted in community care.

Others may have nothing to do with death at all.

They may be about an ancient piece of wisdom that suddenly makes sense. A strange road that leads somewhere unexpected. A conversation with a stranger. A place that holds memory. Something I’m learning. Something I’m unlearning. A ritual. A landscape. A question I can’t answer yet. An adventure I never planned.

Some will be stories from the road.
Some will be stories from the past.
Some will be reflections on grief, love, loss, aging, transformation, and becoming.
And some may simply be beautiful things I don’t want to forget.

These are not travel guides or polished answers.

They are field notes—observations gathered while moving through the world with curiosity and an open heart.

Because life is constantly asking us to cross thresholds.

We leave places.
We lose people.
We change identities.
We shed old stories.
We discover new ones.
We begin again.

Death is woven through all of this, but so is wonder.

So I’m following the threads—light, water, wild things, old wisdom, new experiences, grief, ritual, and the mysterious terrain of becoming.

Come wander with me.