death is a verb · gatherings
our first · in person
Sense together what no one can sense alone.
Some things cannot be sensed alone. Grief is one. Wonder is another. The slow shift in how we come to feel ourselves as beings of the earth happens most readily in company, in conversation, in shared attention, in the presence of others asking different questions.
This October we gather for the first time. Most of us were taught to live as though we end at our skin: sealed selves, moving through a world of inert things. Our conventional death practices carry that lesson to its furthest edge — the body embalmed, boxed, and set apart, kept pure from the very earth it is made of. But we are porous. We are processual beings, made of and making Earth’s own processes, always exchanging, always becoming with everything around us. Death is the great un-sealer: it shows, plainly, that the boundary we imagined between self and world was never really there. This is an evening of attunement — arts of attention and sensing, in the lineage of thinkers like Anna Tsing — a practice of loosening that estrangement, of remembering that the porosity we fear is the same mixing that makes soil, resilience, and multispecies flourishing possible. Each gathering follows the turning season, deepening that sense a little further. Let the old stories compost in good company.
What we sense together this October will return as traces in The Compost Heap — and the Heap, which composts fully within a year, hands us back toward each other, into shared and public space.
The gathering is free. It also welcomes pay-what-you-can, which supports The Human to Humus Fund. No one is turned away for lack of funds, and no one is asked for more than they have.
One evening, one hour, in two movements. We begin in the familiar shape of a talk, and let that shape dissolve, until there is no longer a stage and an audience, only a room of people intra-acting. Come for the whole hour.
We begin in a shape we know: for half an hour, board member and artist Krista Dragomer — who tends the art that grows through this place and will weave the evening together — sits with a writer or artist to wonder aloud about a single question: what does it mean that we are processual beings, made of and making Earth's ongoing processes? Less lecture than shared thinking. Then, gently, the roles that mediate us — speaker and listener, expert and audience — begin to loosen, and the questions open to the whole room.
Now the chairs are all the same. The mediated roles have composted: no one is only an expert, no one is only an audience. We pair off and intra-view one another around the evening's question and one of our own — what is composting in your life right now? — exchanging rather than receiving, and noticing as we go how the energy moves: where it flows freely between us, where it catches, how we are changed a little in the exchange. A few threads rise back to the whole circle. This is the practice: to open toward possibility, and to deepen our relationship with change, with death, and with Earth.
Date and location for the October Gathering are being tended now. Want word when they're set? Join the gatherings list →
The October Gathering is our first. These are conversations we'd love to hold next — sketches of where the gatherings might go. None has happened yet; they're invitations waiting for the right voices and the right moment. If one calls to you, or you'd help convene it, tell us.
what we carry to the table
Unlike the Heap, the Field Guides are meant to last — the literacies of earth, death, and grief we return to again and again. At each gathering we hope to carry them off the screen and into the room: gathered into a small printed compendium, read aloud, and passed hand to hand. The digital guides stay open to all; the printed compendium is something to hold, mark, and leave with. You can still offer a guide of your own online — the ones that take root may find their way into the next printing.
a living circle · gather with us
Are you a writer, scientist, artist, or death-care practitioner with something to sense alongside others? Is there a conversation you wish existed? Gatherings grow from the questions the community is carrying. Propose one to host, or one you'd love to attend — online or in person — and the circle will help it find its shape and its people.
Proposals are read by the Death Is a Verb circle, who curate and co-host gatherings. Proposing is the start of a conversation, not a commitment. Gatherings are held pay-what-you-can, with care for safety, consent, and the wellbeing of everyone who comes to sense together.
