All Souls at Mountain View Cemetery

04/13/2026

I had the honour last week to facilitate a Ching Ming ritual at Mountain View Cemetery in the ‘Chinese Pavillion’ with Carnegie Community Centre Seniors programme.

My dear friend and fellow All Souls helper Yun Jou was helping both with Mandarin translations and cultural contexts.

All the Seniors were from different areas of Asia - mostly mainland China, and we shared our different regional practices and different styles of folding the Joss papers for the ting burner ( Thank you Walter Quan for teaching me your family tradition! It came in handy 😀).
We made offerings to both the ting burner and also the small fire in the copper burner I brought, that we fed with offerings of food ( grains, ghee and flower petals), and the silent prayer to our dead.

The food was prepared at Carnegie centre, and they even made some ‘Souls Cakes’ from a recipe I gave them.
It was a beautiful blending/ sharing of traditions and rituals to honour the ancestors and our beloved dead, and as is the practice, once the ritual was over and the ancestors has ‘eaten’ the food in spirit ( it is believed that the look and smell of the food is what they feast on), we gathered and shared in the feast ourselves.
So wonderful to be back, even for a few hours at Mountain View Cemetery, especially when it’s sunny!
Of course, as per usual, I went to see baby Caradoc’s grave and leave a little offering on his grave - the first person buried at the Cemetery

02/23/2026

Difficult Read, Scroll if Needed.

Her parents were shattered. In the middle of their grief, they knew one thing clearly was that they didn’t want brash lighting, cold tables, or strangers caring for their daughter. They wanted her back home.
After being told over and over that it “couldn’t be done,” they found me.

When I walked into their house, it was heavy with disbelief and love. We spoke softly about their options, and together we created something simple and sacred.
I went to the hospital to retrieve their precious angel. I placed her small body in a wicker basket lined with her own blanket and took her tiny body back to her family, her first and last trip home. They set her in the living room, surrounded by stuffed animals, flowers, and candlelight. Through the evening, friends came quietly to sit, cry, and say goodbye.

The next morning, her parents carried her bassinet casket to their car and drove to the green burial cemetery where I met them at the entrance. Her father and grandfather dug the grave themselves with shovels provided by the sexton. The children in attendance scattered rose petals over the earth, whispering farewell.

No fancy hearse, no invasive procedures, no fluorescent lights, none of that. Just the simplicity of family, love, and returning one small life to the land as gently as possible.

01/22/2026

I find this ancient practice ‘makes sense’ In so many ways.
Around the world traditional unbroken cultural linages have diverse death practices, and I find that if I image being in that space/ culture, there are things that make sense when I feel/ think with a different part of my brain/ heart than the usual contemporary ( dare I say, somewhat colonised) death rituals of our modern North American culture - this is one of them.

Nordic Animism is a multi-pronged cultural activist initiative built on the independent scholarship of Dr. Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen, exploring north European cu...

12/24/2025

Seasons greeting to you all

12/12/2025

I’m not sure what film this is from, and it’s not going to be everybody’s cup of tea to watch…but for those of you who are interested in such things, here one take on this subject. 🙏❤️

12/11/2025

I concur 🙏❤️

12/02/2025

Beautiful idea, especially as we get to that “ festive” time of year, when the overwhelming “holiday cheer” can make us feel even more alone in our grief.

*UPDATE: Deadline to submit is extended to end of day Monday, December 8!* You're invited to be part of Letters to the Sky: Conversations of the Heart, an interactive outdoor art experience on the Royer Pedestrian Bridge.

Write a message in one of four themes: Remembrance, Gratitude, Wishes or “What I Would Tell You If I Could.” Notes will be hung along the illuminated bridge Dec 12–Jan 2, creating a glowing community timeline of love, memory and hope.

📝 Pick up waterproof paper at the Downtown, Riley or Maidu Libraries and return your letter to any library location by Dec 8.

11/27/2025

11/25/2025

A door for the living and a door for the dead - this makes sense to me, and feels like a respectful and honouring ritual.

“The Two Doors of an Appalachian Home”
Most folks today look at an old mountain cabin and ask why on earth it’s got two front doors sitting side by side like twins that don’t speak to each other. They think it’s bad carpentry, or some old-timer’s half-finished idea.
But mountain people didn’t waste wood, and they sure didn’t build anything without a reason.
Let me tell you the one my people told, passed down like a hush over a burial:
The left-hand door was for the living.
The right-hand door was for the dead.
Why?
Because a mountain home was meant to hold life —but it wasn’t meant to keep death trapped inside.
In the old days, before funeral parlors and hearses, a body was washed and laid out in the front room. The family kept watch — a “setting up,” they called it. Stories told, hymns sung, coffee poured, quilts wrapped around shoulders. Death was part of the home, not an intruder.
But you didn’t carry a body back out the same door life walked through every day. That’d bring sorrow back around, like leaving the gate open for grief to wander in again.
So they built a second door.
The Dead Door.
You didn’t use it for company.
You didn’t open it for breeze.
You didn’t store firewood against it.
It was kept shut tight till the day it was needed.
When the time came, the menfolk would open that solemn door, carry the body out quiet and careful, and close it again. Some families would go so far as to lock it for a full year afterward, so no spirit, sadness, or lingering trouble could find its way back through.
Old folks said:
“Don’t mix the paths of the living and the dead each has their own door.”
There was another reason too, whispered by Granny women who knew more than they said:
The dead were carried feet-first through that door so they couldn’t look back and call anyone with them. If a spirit turned its eyes toward the hearth, toward the bed or the supper table, it might feel tempted to linger or tug at the heart of someone grieving.
Feet-first, dead door only.
That was the rule.
And the living door?
That one got all the laughter, the comings and goings, the muddy boots, the babies carried in blankets, the courting couples, the morning light and the evening goodnights.
The dead had their way out — the living had their way in.
Simple, sacred, practical.
Mountain logic always is.
These days, folks who don’t know better tear off the second door or nail it shut like it’s useless. But those who remember will tell you:
A house with two doors wasn’t confused. It was respectful.
It kept peace between worlds.
It kept grief from circling back.
And it let a soul leave the way it was meant to go.

11/01/2025

All Hallows Eve at the Cemetery:

After sheltering inside at home from the torrential rain today, making waterproof lanterns for my ancestors, a small but mighty group braved the weather and headed to Mountain View Cemetery…where amazingly the rain stopped just as we all arrived!

The evening was poignant and beautiful, and a reminder that our rituals of rememberance and honouring in public sacred spaces are needed and important….and we never know who is guided to come and why.

A small group of 15 of us gathered - some were our dear ‘crew’ of helpers from previous years and some were people who have participated each year and saw the previous FB post…and one couple arrived who we later found out had never been before.

A ritual unfolded - smudging (or saining as it’s also called in Celtic tradition) to clear each of us and add a layer of protection. I offered a prayer to the ancestors, the elements and directions and to the land we are blessed to walk upon, and to the people / ancestors who have tended these lands for thousands of years.

Together we wrote names we wished to remember on papers and offered foods to the beloved dead before we set off on our pilgrimage - to walk the ‘route’ of the previous shrines.

At each ‘shrine’ location, we spent a moment in remembrance and made offerings of incense, some of the souls cakes or special Eastern European mourning food made of wheat berries and honey. Someone offered a song and we all gave to***co to the ‘reDress tree’ and left a small lantern I’d made for the MMIW.

We all noticed how we could ‘see’ the shrines, ‘see’ all the hundreds of candles of the past, each light a symbol of the eternal flame in all sentient beings. 2 decades of this ritual at the cemetery has embedded our “sanctuary of beauty for tender feelings” into the physical landscape forevermore for those of us who have experienced it, even if it’s just once.
The saying “what is remembered, lives” is true of this community ritual in a public civic space.

Making our way back to where we started ( near where we used to have the Swedish fire) we gathered again and used my fancy new ‘Ting Burner’ to burn the notes people had written remembering their beloved dead. As the last piece burned, we sang ‘ Paula’s grandads song’ that we used to sing ever November 2nd at the closing ritual (we missed you Paula as I couldn’t remember all the words!), and when that fizzled out for lack of remembering the words, we then sang my favourite song ‘row row row your boat’.
That simple but powerful song at the end of this group ritual created a poignant moment for the couple who had never been to All Souls - they were moved to many tears and shared that their son had died from su***de in May this year, and that they happened to be walking past this evening, as they go visit his grave 3 times a day. They felt that his spirit had led them to find us and share this time of honouring and mourning together.
Every year I have spent at the cemetery during this sacred time, I have been humbled by how important it is for someone, often someone who ‘stumbled’ upon the gathering ‘just at the right time’.

Tonight, I’m sending prayers of comfort to the parents of Eugene, the young man who chose to leave this world in May and who said in a note that life’s too difficult living with AI / technology..and that the world felt soulless.

My prayer is that we continue to gather together in person, soul to soul, to remember and honour all the souls on both sides of the veil, and to connect with friends and strangers in the cemetery through ritual.

Row row row your boat,
Gently down the stream
Merrily merrily merrily
Life is but a dream

10/14/2025

Just incase someone thinks All Souls deserves a Governor General award……😍
Nominations deadline is November 5th 🙂
Edit: Meaning, those of you who commented ‘yes’ the link takes you to the website to enter the nomination - obviously Paula and I can’t nominate ourselves 😜

The Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts are Canada’s foremost distinctions for excellence in visual and media arts.

10/10/2025

When Paula and I first started our work with death and dying and unpacking what is the artists role in this sacred work - it was over 25 years ago….and our dream was always that one day the public would ( without our help) take over the cemetery, ( all cemeteries) reclaiming their ancestral traditions of spending the night at the cemetery with their beloved dead, cleaning and decorating the grave, lighting candles, singing, playing music, sharing food, telling stories together, or gently walking around with lanterns with photos, honouring their people or furry families.

The loss of All Souls doesn't mean we, the community, cannot honour our ancestors and beloved dead at this important time of year for many of us, in fact, for me personally, I feel it’s important to continue our honouring, so they dead don't feel like we have forgotten them or we are ‘ghosting’ them😜

While All Souls was terminated by the City of Vancouver, the Cemetery website does state:

“All Souls at Mountain View Cemetery
While Mountain View Cemetery will not host a formal, artist-led All Souls commemoration event this year, the cemetery remains open to the public during this period.

Community members are warmly invited to continue the spirit of All Souls in their own way by visiting the grounds and bringing lanterns, candles, or other respectful items to honour and remember their loved ones.”

As for myself ( Marina), I have many beloveds who now rest at MVC, their bones now part of the sacred landscape there.
Geoff, a brilliant dancer and dear friend of Paula’s - Allan, a champion of Public dreams and Alls Souls from within his job at parks board, who changed this city in all good ways - Carmens dad, a lovely and inspiring man - and Bob, the cemetery grounds keeper who sported a wonderful mullet and loved his cats. There are also those who I have only got to know in death, but I feel them close through the love of their parents or their adult children, like Colin, or the little girl next to Carmen’s dad.

For me, October 31st is a potent time when even I can feel that the veil between the worlds is thin. As a Brit with an animist view, I know that for my ancient Celtic ancestors ( the Hwicce tribe to be precise) this is an important time of year in many ways, but especially for ancestor reverence, rituals and connecting to the dead.

So perhaps this year, around sundown on all hallows eve, I might, as suggested on the City’s website, go visit and honour my cemetery friends and my ancestors with lanterns. Maybe I’ll bring a few candles to put on Geoff’s, Colin’s and others friends graves, and maybe I’ll bring some offerings of flowers, sacred leaves and waters from my travels to Nepal incase I want to create a personal ritual of honouring.
I might bring some food to share if I bump into any others visiting their dead, and a thermos of a warm tea. I’ll bring a flashlight too as there will be no official shrines, no lights on - just 106 acres of beautiful darkness.
Maybe I’ll bump into you if you are also there, honouring your beloved dead, as our ancestors have done for thousands and thousands of years?

And for those of you not in Vancouver, if it feels right, I hope you’ll take the opportunity to honour your ancestors and beloved dead in ways that fit your traditions, and maybe even go to your local cemetery to light a candle or revive your ancestors traditions.

Blessed be 🙏