The Bardo

In response to my engagement with the works of Andil Gosine, particularly his book Nature’s Wild, I was inspired to reflect on my own wildness, investigating my existence as animal through the transitional lens of decay. During this time I was mourning the loss of a long and meaningful relationship, while also studying various spiritual traditions, their rituals around death, and perspectives of the afterlife. Whether there is the belief of a heaven one transcends to or various lives through which the soul incarnates, it is clear that within many spiritual traditions, death is not seen as an ending. When an organism dies, that very death sustains the lives of scavengers and decomposers, who keep that energy flowing through the ecosystem. So despite any belief that us humans can ascend beyond earth after death, in the most physical sense, we return and remain within it, feeding the lives of other species. I couldn’t help but parallel this personal loss to a kind of death, of both the relationship and the person I was within it. I began to recognize heartbreak, much like decomposition, as a transitional process that is required before a rebirth can take place. This work, entitled The Bardo, is representative of the liminal space after death. Described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, this word is most often used to describe the “intermediate state between death and rebirth, but in reality bardos are occurring continuously throughout both life and death, and are junctures when the possibility of liberation, or enlightenment, is heightened” (Rinpoche 11). This notion of rebirth is not reserved only for the physical time of death. In Zen Buddhism, for example, it “is often taken in a more figurative way, as that the process of rebirth is from moment to moment, so that one is being reborn so long as one identifies himself with a continuing ego which reincarnates itself afresh at each moment of time”, and to that, I do (Watts 69).

So as part of the processing of this ending I created a textile installation to represent the multispecies collaboration that is decomposition. Recognizing all the possibilities that are present within death, decay, and loss and how we are never quite alone in that process. In recent years, ethnographers have begun examining these realities through storytelling and art, working to understand “how ‘the human’ has been formed and transformed aid encounters with multiple species of plants, animals, fungi, and microbes. [Not just celebrating] multispecies mingling, [but exploring] a central question: Who benefits, cui bono, when species meet?” (Kirksey, 2014, p. 2)