Projects
and Events
Thanatolab: A Gathering to Share Practices and Critical Perspectives on Death
Politicizing the processes of illness, death and mourning involves articulating and strengthening community networks. This space seeks to be a political, somatic and spiritual device that helps us reconcile with death from a place of interdependence, mutual care and social justice.
https://laescocesa.org/en/view/tanatolab/3878
Feb 26 & 27, La Escocesa, Barcelona, Spain
Greeting the Great Friend: A Day of Repairing out Relationships with Death, Dying, and the Dead
A day of honoring the process of dying and death for ourselves and within our communities, through a series of workshops, food, and song.
Presenting - Tending to your own beloved dead: how to bypass the funeral home
+ two guided death meditations with Tunnels of Light
feb 2, 11am-5pm, Richmond Virginia
Tea to Die For
Sequim Death Cafe - Every 2nd Monday of the month, at KSQM-FM radio station.
This group is meant to foster informal and relaxed monthly discussions. While not a grief support group, it is open to anyone interested in deepening their understanding and acceptance of matters related to death and dying.
“Talking about death,” said Sarafina Landis, “brings people more into presence with being alive, the finite time we have while we are alive, and how to make the most of it.”
“It brings us into this distilled essential place in our lives where the things that are most important to us are clear.”
EarthRest: A Forum on Environmentally Friendly Natural After-Death Care
A FREE community event featuring expert speakers in after-death care choices such as; human composting, water cremation, and green burial. Learn about sustainable practices and how they can benefit both the environment and your loved ones.
Sarafina will be participating on the panel, with the presentation Caring For Our Own Beloved Dead: Community Held Death Care.
Reclaiming Appalachian Murder Balads
Sarafina will be performing a piece with Tunnels of Light, called Sitting Up Is Holy Time: Appalachian Death Rites, alongside publishing in Midmountain zine a story based on research of traditional death rites in southern Appalachia.
Die Before You Die
Die Before You Die is a psychosomatic guided journey in three parts, moving through decay and its fecund regeneration, a textural mythic experience, and spiritual explorations of mortality.
Tunnels of Light is a collaboration between Sarafina Landis and Shoz involving interactive performance pieces which invite people into a somatic experience. They bring their professions in the mental health field and death care, and backgrounds in sound and performance art, to usher in nature based ritual through sonic, narrative journeys. Using a trauma-informed container, Tunnels of Light holds the immersive space with intention to open toward personal and collective healing by connecting people with mortality, through supported experiential art and ritual.
Reflecting on
Past Events
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A pop-up art exhibit November 20-21, 2021 titled Death, Grief, & Ancestors - Expanding the Conversation and Transmuting the Fear of Death Through Art and Community, held at the Cotton Building in downtown Port Townsend.
Learn more here. -
Play Dead. A conversation and a game
Learn more here. -
A Dying Matters Guild seminar on "Green Burial Options" hosted at
The Quimper Grange in Port Townsend on April 13, 2024.
Learn more here. -
Whoever you may be: step into the evening.
Step out of the room where everything is known.
Whoever you are,
your house is the last before the far-off.
With your eyes, which are almost too tired
to free themselves from the familiar,
you slowly take one black tree
and set it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made a world.
It is big
and like a word, still ripening in silence.
And though your mind would fabricate its meaning,
your eyes tenderly let go of what they see.
-Rilke, Book of Images
translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows
grandma Doris