As our story begins, I'm immediately transported to the edge of a bog with the decaying matter pungent in the air and thick underfoot. It's no bog like I've seen before with strange grasses and black water, trees that seem bigger than normal, and a niggle in my brain tells me I'm seeing something from centuries or millennia ago. I'm seeing a landscape that will be covered and become oil.

A landscape that will be uncovered or drilled and all of its secrets brought to the surface to be burned.

Without warning, I'm immediately transported to another landscape, a graveyard, where mere feet underground I can feel the artificially preserved bodies in tiny ticky tacky boxes, one beside each other, stretching over acres. A field of untransmuted energy pulsing inside coffins.

Energy that should be reclaimed by Earth so the field of consciousness can shift; energy that should anchor in this planet and help their lineage with healing the trauma of their life; energy that needs to be released to the cosmos to guide the future incarnations of their Souls.

Energy, that was improperly buried, not fully mourned or grieved, not fully celebrated or lived. Energy that will, over centuries and millennia, become something else entirely.

Energy that is holding, warping...waiting.

I'm hearing a deep disembodied voice say, "the improperly buried don't stay buried."

And then I see an old man with one foot in the grave, half lowering himself, half fighting the pull of the Earth. He's pleading with me from the precipice of a freshly dug grave to make sure what's dying stays dead. That this energy not be preserved underground, waiting to be resumed through his descendants.

With a craggy voice that seems to transmit a thousand other voices, I hear him beg, "Please, let it die with me."

We're facing a time of death rites: individual, collective, and planetary. How we perform them is important. What we do after is crucial.

Again, the disembodied voice says, "what goes in the ground will be claimed by the ground."

Yours,

Ash