A public documentation project

We are not separate from the earth. We are made of it — breathing oxygen exhaled by trees, built from calcium borrowed from ancient oceans, carrying in our bodies more microbial lives than human cells. When we die, our elements will not disappear. They will change form, feed new life, continue.

This is not metaphor. This is ecology.

Death Is a Verb is a space to sense this — through art, sound, story, and science — and to practice the ways of living and dying that participate in earth’s regenerative cycles rather than reinforce the fiction that we can be severed from them.

Three Ways In

The Compost Heap (An-archive)

A living space where art, science, and experiments in language-ing sense into our deep belonging and intra-dependence with a vibrant and agential world. Contribute. Browse. Be composted.

Enter the Compost Heap

Rewilding Guides

Accessible resources for death literacy that braid the Ecological Psychology of Dr. Lori Pye, diverse Indigenous wisdom, quantum physics, and community wisdom — inviting you to notice your intra-relatedness and imagine response-able ways of living and dying on a damaged planet.

Explore the Guides

Accessibility Fund

Ecological death care should not be reserved for the already-resourced. Through partnerships with human-composting providers and mutual-aid networks, we offer need-based support for people seeking to compost their dead — and to seed community-held funds for those who come after.

Learn More & Apply

Begin Here: Five Vibrational Thresholds

Our founding contemplative practices — Elemental Belonging, Lichen Intra-Action, Deep Touch: Soil Attunement, Microbial Murmuration, and Ecotones of Becoming — are the first contributions to the Compost Heap. Audio offerings that dissolve the boundary between listener and living world. Begin with any one.

Enter the Compost Heap