 Dying midst the 5 Elements This week Hospice UK hosts its annual death, dying and grief awareness event, Dying Matters. It’s a campaign which helps to create an open culture in which we’re comfortable talking about death, dying and grief, as multiple research has demonstrated that doing so, contributes towards better experiences of both living and dying.
I first became interested in how we die while working in a nursing home as a teenager in the late 80s. The nursing staff there gave good compassionate care to dying residents and those around them. Throughout my nursing training in my mid 20s I was able to apply this witnessed learning to my own developing nursing practice and my requested placement at St John’s hospice in Lancaster was by far my favourite one. My aim when I qualified as a general nurse was to work in specialist palliative care, which I started to do, alongside heading back to university to top up my HND to a BSc in Cancer and Palliative Care, around a year after qualifying. For nearly 20 years I worked in a variety of roles and spaces where specialist palliative care took place - a hospital palliative care unit in Cumbria, a hospital based Marie Curie service, a Hospice at Home team, a Sue Ryder hospice and as a hospital based clinical nurse specialist. Alongside my nursing role, I lived and worked as an upland farmer, using permaculture design to create regenerative ways to care for the land and animals. I started to explore how I could use this ethical design approach to improving how we die, outside of my nursing work. I ran workshops and wrote about about how wisdom gained from nature could contribute towards a Good Death, a good death for people, communities and Earth. I also learnt about and then started to run Death Cafes, spaces where people can talk openly about all things death related, in both my nursing and permaculture work. I returned to Death Cafe facilitation in connection with Bradford Death Cafe last year. In recent years, following a serious illness of my own, creating art and then creating spaces to support others using art as a wellbeing tool, has become a central part of my life. A few weeks ago I gained a place in the talent pool of Creative Practitioners for the Bradford 2025 City Of Culture city wide community arts programme Our Patch. Within days of being accepted I had a request to consider a placement at the Bradford Marie Curie hospice, facilitating a series of art sessions for some of the patients and carers there. I was then asked if I would consider doing some creative grief work with a community centre who were struggling following the death by suicide of a prominent member there. I said yes to both. And so over the past few days, during the 2025 Dying Matter Awareness week, I’ve spent time planning and facilitating these projects. I’m part way through my time with the community centre and my work at the hospice starts next week. It’s really powerful for me to be back working in an area which has been so important to me for much of my working life. Bringing my creative practice to a place where my nursing practice thrived is both grounding and exciting. It's so inspiring to witness where the Bradford 2025 City of Culture team are prioritising resources and focus. Yes the City of Culture year and legacy is about some truly amazing large scale arts projects for Bradford but its also about supporting the culture of the reality of day to day grassroots human experience. Yesterday I was at a Dying Matters exhibition which showcased a brilliant project where artist Shy Burhan and palliative medicine consultant, Jamilla Hussain have supported and empowered a group of Pakistani women in Bradford, to share stories and experiences about death and grief. This programme is such a fantastic example of how creativity can improve how we die. This year the theme for Dying Matters week is ‘Culture’ which feels incredibly serendipitous for Bradford in 2025. How does our culture impact how we die? But also how does our experience of death, dying and grief in Bradford shape our city’s culture? I look forward to exploring this in my creative practitioner role over the coming months.
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 Today is the Earth based spirituality festival of Beltane - considered to be an edge place, a time in the Earths cycle when the wild fecundity of life is so great that the edges blur, the veil between the worlds becomes thin and the spirits of nature are strong....its a time to be open to the unexpected and to our wildest edges, a time to dare and to reach out to our most expansive visions, to fire up what we want to see happen, know that all things are possible
Great things happen when we are open to what we truly wish to manifest in life and when we are open to our own abundance. New experiences propel us forward and help us to grown new insights and understandings. by Glennie Kindred ‘ Letting in the Wild Edges’ I’m marking this years Beltane with the launch of the new chapter of my right livelihood projects. I’ve been Kt Shepherd Permaculture for a full decade now and through that time my life has changed in so many ways. For the past year I’ve been thinking about what direction I want my work to be moving in, I don’t think there will be any sudden changes, just a slow flow there. Over the next few weeks I’ll be moving over here to Katie Shepherd Creates where permaculture design will remain at the centre of everything I do. Find Katie Shepherd Creates on - Blue Sky |