The Place Where Bells Ring
An animist church of devotional community practice around caring for our beloved dead:
We approach community deathcare as an act of resistance to an inert, extractive overculture and an invitation towards interdependence and beauty as innate forces of animacy. Through community ceremony for the living and the dead, education and advocacy, the ancient art of willow casketry, and tending to the needs around death and grief, the place where bells ring stitches the gap between state law and contextual practice - bringing people closer to caring for their own dead and strengthening the webs of care we weave around each other and the animate world.
The Place Where Bells Ring is a home for:
Death care and home funeral kits, tools, and supplies to be used by the community
Community woven willow vessels
Guidance for autonomous deathcare choices
Home funeral support and advocacy, body transport, vigils, et al
Fellowship
Gathering around death, grief, and life
Beauty making
Local efforts toward community held burial grounds, woven into local ecology
Community built structure as a home for our offerings and future gathering site
We are welcoming in donations to financially support this work and the building of a future gathering site as well as fund our first community offering Spring 2026 - where we will marry willow vessel weaving, home funeral/death care teachings, and immersive experiences connected with the death journey. If you feel moved by this work we welcome your support and you can donate below!
Our name ~
During an exploration of old southern Appalachian death rites, we learned about a tradition that when a person died a bell was rung the number of years of that person’s age. When the townspeople heard the tolls, everyone in the community would know who just died - and they would respond. So hence, The Place Where Bells Ring, bells for our dead and bells to call the spirit back to the living.
This project is the dreaming of a greater vision where every community has local burial grounds. Being composted in your neighborhood. Disposition being accessible and free to those who need it. People show up to care for the dead with a knowing, bringing their particular gifts. Digging the grave, stitching the shroud, making the food, giving the blessings.
When death arrives, people will know how to respond, and they will come together, a vision where people know that when their time comes, they will be held this way. That is the spirit within the baskets and this project. The vision that no one will fall through this net of care. Death care back into hands of the people and the land. It’s not new, and it’s happening in the margins.
