Having lived, the dead can never be inert.

The enormity of grief is sometimes tempered by the invocation of cyclical time—  a return to origin among the material and immaterial worlds. This is why,  imagining the event of our own death, we are often struck by an image of place: some resonant landscape drawn from a cherished memory or imbued with ancestral meaning where we are laid, at last, to rest.

This designation of place remains an essential aspect of countless funerary traditions and ceremonies throughout history, serving both the dying and those who survive them by providing a physical space for commemoration and communion— but where do we lay those belonging nowhere, thrown into time with no place to inhabit, apart from the body that fails them? 

The death of a placeless person recalls to us the impermanence of all things. In time, cemeteries are raised and repurposed. A scenic byway slides into the sea. All matter exists in dynamic movement, reforming again and again, in perpetuity.  To understand the alliance of death and time is to acknowledge that our lives exist within numerous scales: the human, the geological, the cosmological.  Each of us belong everywhere and nowhere at once, our only home in one another. 

(2020.)