This is a segment of episode 327 of Last Born In The Wilderness, “Death Keeps You Honest: Decentering The Individual, A Story Of Loss w/ Rachael Rice.” Listen to the full episode: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/rachael-rice

Follow Rachael and her work: https://rachaelrice.com

Artist, writer, and death worker Rachael Rice joins me to discuss death practice, entitlement, and honesty in our time of collapse and extinction.

This is an honest conversation, between friends. Both Rachael and I have very different lived experiences, but we align in several significant ways, especially when it comes to interpreting and navigating an extraordinarily messy time. The felt sense and scope of loss in the midst of the ongoing pandemic is shared between us. We bear witness to the wide-spread denial and full-faced First World entitlement — the “return to normal” and “I’ve-got-mine-ism” of it all, from top to bottom. It is a lot to bear. And yet, we acknowledge the time we are living through may be remembered as the good ol’ days in the years and decades to come.

It should be remembered, or learned, that pandemics are ecological. So are the droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and floods that are so common at this time. The pace of change is dizzying, and not letting up. How does an industrialized society, founded in the shadow of Manifest Destiny, bamboozled by the decrepit fantasy of the American Dream, handle such truths? In short, not well. There are ghosts here. Rachael and I are not separate from this, we don’t stand apart from the crude reality checks, and we acknowledge this. At the root, this discussion is about death — the shades of acceptance, and fear, of it. That’s what this conversation encircles and embraces. Death — as the event that unites all living beings; as a practice; as the elephant in the room; and finally, as the ultimate teacher.

Rachael Rice is an artist, writer, death worker and certified weirdo who crafts scroll-stopping content for people who want to shape change. Her work centers collapse-informed learnings about grief, death, myth, magic and meaning-making in pale times. A neurodivergent queer witch navigating multiple health diagnoses and broadly coded as a white cis woman, Rachael is of Swedish, Scottish, Irish, French, German and English ancestry living and loving with her partner whose income supports her work on the lands of the Chinook in Portland, Oregon. She works in a dozen kinds of media, plays four instruments, speaks three languages, parents two children, and hollers at one cat, usually not all at once.

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