Ancestral Grove

Why We Created the Ancestral Grove as A Natural Burial Ground

Heartward Sanctuary has the honor, responsibility and privilege to steward 27 acres of land in the Piedmont of NC. Several acres of forest, meadow and imminent orchard space have been dedicated for natural burial. This Ancestral Grove at Heartward Sanctuary provides a beautiful home for natural burial for humans and animal companions alike. Returning to ancient ways of honoring our dead, we seek to help restore balance, connection and wholeness for the living, the dead and the earth. One of our missions is to create space and meaningful rituals to honor the cycles of life, both the literal and symbolic deaths we experience on the journey of being human as part of the greater web of life on the planet.

The Heartward Sanctuary Ancestral Grove is a non-dogmatic, animist, natural burial ground. This is a place for earth-friendly burials–buried in simple shrouds or other natural materials with no embalming–and also a place for remembrance, ritual, reflection, grieving and celebration. Each grave becomes a unique garden that reflects the one nourishing the life growing there.

Over the past 150 years, our culture has dramatically shifted its way of tending our the dead. As medical and funeral industries have taken the place of traditional death rites and burial practices, the end-of-life passage has been packaged for profit and stripped of its sacrality, creating great economic strain on families in grief-stricken times. Some families cannot offer the desired rituals for body disposition due to lack of land or financial constraints. Our conventional burial and cremation options are environmentally toxic and disconnect our bodies from completing the life cycle: the return of our remains to the earth. There is a dire need for more ecological, relational, and ritually connective practices for meaningful transitions and soul processes. By changing the practices around death and burial, we seek to decolonize the end-of-life processes.

Religious organizations and spiritual communities have long been responsible for tending the dead and stewarding cemeteries. Plenty of people have adopted the religion of secular capitalism in tandem with an estrangement from the dominant religions of our culture for a variety of valid reasons. Heartward Sanctuary seeks to be part of the repair between the humans and the sacred, with moreness and mystery, by honoring the holiness of the body, all bodies, including the body of the earth. We’ve founded a church that welcomes the mystics and misfits, artists and musicians, witches, weird and queer folks, the spiritually poly, and earth and goddess worshippers of various traditions who have been less accepted if not straight out rejected by rigid versions of religion and patriarchy more broadly.

Since we took over stewardship of this place, we’ve spent the years getting to know the land through our senses, our dances, making offerings, consecrating the space and shrines, developing an earth liturgy based upon the seasons and cultivating community that includes the trees, fungi, spring and a wake of black vultures.

In addition to the other-than-humans, Heartward Sanctuary currently has developed relationships with a growing number of Founding Members who have decided to return to the earth here. Their initial contributions have helped us through the legal questions around burial and have enabled us to renovate the Barn Temple at Heartward Sanctuary.

Currently the Ancestral Grove hosts two grave gardens, a Water Soul Shrine, nine apple trees, wildflowers, fireflies, goldfinches, native persimmons, milkweed and monarchs. The meadow and surrounding forests are a thriving eco-system, a place of life, made more vital and magical from our loved ones who rest here, and the ongoing ritual, reverence and care.