Show Overview
Hey there tigers and tigresses! So good to have you all back. In my last show, I had a wonderful time talking with Kat the Wiccan Mortician, who dropped out of mortuary school to pursue her advocacy for a more sensitive way to care for the dead and dying. We pick it back up with Kat now in Part Two of that interview, starting with a discussion about slow medicine, which is the latest trend in taking back control from the medical machine, her vision for a natural burial ground in Alaska, death doulas, human compositing, and a whole bunch of other interesting things you can only talk about with a lovely and intelligent Wiccan Mortician. You won’t be bored! That I assure you. So please join me for Part Two of my two part interview with Kat the Wiccan Mortician.
In this episode with Kat the Wiccan Mortician, you will learn about:
- More about how the Wiccan religion shaped Kat’s views on death, dying and the afterlife
- Nurse Ratched, a fictional character from Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and a film of the same name starring a young Jack Nicholson. The book is one of America’s most highly challenged and banned novels. Nurse Ratched is often used as a metaphor for the corrupting influence of power and authority in bureaucracies.
- The slow medicine movement, which explores shared, nonrushed medical decision-making, palliative care, and comfort-giving treatment, especially near the end of life.
- The Promessa system, which transforms human remains into clean, green compost
- Kat’s plans for a natural burial ground in Alaska…the last frontier
- The Funeral Consumer’s Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting a consumer’s right to choose a meaningful, dignified, affordable funeral
- The Green Burial Council
- Death Doulas
- Hunter S. Thompson, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
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Presto and grazie!
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I Am a Racist
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
Mark Twain
I often hear nowadays, people being accused.
“He’s a racist.”
“She’s a racist.”
“Trump’s a racist.”
“So and so’s a racist.”
What I have yet to hear is: “I am a racist.”
So let me be the first.
I am a racist.
Yes.
I see the ugly thing, creeping around my soul like a roach in the kitchen. I squash it, but sometime later, there it is again.
I know there is a nest somewhere, eggs hatching, a source deep within me, hidden away where it’s easy to deny. There is where I'll find the library of my false beliefs, the lies I tell myself over and over, so often they become grooves cut into my gray matter, like fissures in rock where the water runs down, cutting deeper and deeper, until fissures become swales, and swales become canyons.
When did the first racist raindrop fall? I don’t know. As a child, for sure. How many drops of poison does it take to pollute the vessel of pure water of which we are born? When, exactly, does a person become a racist, and who gets to decide?
I don’t know, but then, neither does anyone else.
I don’t believe in permanence. That’s one thing the Buddhists have taught me.
Everything changes.
We can become aware of that library of false beliefs, that nest of nasties that colors our perception of things, often for the worse. Awareness alone brings change. We can cut new grooves. My challenge as a human being is not to deny that I am a racist, for that would be as foolish as denying I have cancer when I really do. My challenge is, rather, to stop the cancer from metastasizing and poisoning the whole man.
I doubt I will ever fully eradicate my racism. Unfortunately, I suspect some vestige of it will always be with me. But what I can do, and what I do do, is expose myself to experiences that lessen my racism, those being travel, kind and honest conversation, and breaking bread with “the others” whenever I can. These experiences, like wind and rain, smooth rock and, over time, lay low even the highest mountains.
So when I hear the angry crowd shouting, "He’s a racist,” I want to ask:
“Who among you is not a racist? Stand up then and take a bow...for you are surely a god.”
I moved to Substack!
Hi there. If you've read this far, then you enjoy, or are at least intrigued by, my ideas. If you want to learn more, jump over to my new website on Substack, where I continue to write about travel, the second half of life, and other mad musings.
