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How might we imagine our way towards better endings?
Using the garden as a learning ground, Tending to Endings is a tool to help us enrich our shared vocabulary around endings. Drawing on ecological metaphors and imagery, we created a pack of 12 cards to help re-contextualise endings of all kinds - as a place of possibility, transformation and even renewal.
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Our project started from the belief that while it’s important to imagine the new, it is equally critical - and perhaps more challenging - to do good “hospicing & composting” work for the values, norms and processes whose time has come. A significant barrier to this work is the lack of a shared vocabulary that is both accessible and appropriate to our times.
"Many people want to think about hope and the future as a better place, but this better place depends on us building our capacity to compost this shit."
Vanessa Andreotti, Hospicing Modernity
Tending to Endings aims to address a cultural “stuckness” around death, declines & endings. We live in a culture that valorises the new and growing, and turns away from processes that are on a path of descent. On an individual level, we have all experienced being thrust into an ending that brings about feelings of grief and loss, only to find ourselves at sea in a culture that cannot seem to meet us until we’re “back to normal”. This is happening at a collective / systemic level too, as we are all living alongside devastation, depletion and collapse of living systems - though societal norms uphold the strategy of pretending it isn’t happening.
This imagination practice stems from a peer learning journey (huddle) I hosted in 2023 with CIPC’s support. We asked: instead of avoiding or ignoring death and grief, can we build richer imaginaries that allow us to live meaningfully alongside it? Can death and grief offer a portal to a more profound engagement with the challenges of our times?
One practice we explored involved the use of garden metaphors to broker difficult conversations about endings and their distinct qualities. The Tending to Endings card deck is an evolution of that practice. Through metaphor & visual imagery, it offers accessible prompts to help give death, grief and endings our deserved attention.
Our huddle, running for 3 months in 2023, gave twelve participants a container for community weaving and imagination practice around death and endings. But from application volumes and event attendance, it was clear there was wider appetite for grappling with this work.
Closing the huddle, we kept a curiosity about designing easy entry points to this inquiry, to feed a wider conversation beyond CIPC. One practice which offered a powerful start point was an exercise looking at endings in the garden, proposed by participant Will.