Capsula Mundi

I am as in love with this image as I am with this project, Capsula Mundi. For a truly green burial, two Italian designers reinvent the coffin as a biodegradable cocoon and replace the traditional headstone with a tree. Beautiful.

This description is from their website - capsulamundi.it/
It’s the first Italian project created to promote the realization of green cemeteries in our country.
Capsula Mundi is a container with an old perfect shape, just like an egg, made with modern material -starch plastic- in which the dead body is put in a fetal position. Capsula Mundi is planted like a seed in the soil, and on a tree is planted on top of it. The tree is chosen when the person is alive, relatives and friends look after it when death occurs. A cemetery will no longer be full of tombstones and will become a sacred forest.

Get Lost! I'm Grieving!

The other day I was in my local food market, dragging my feet along like a car with square tires, my knees buckling under the weight of the basket I had managed to stuff with a full cart’s worth of food. I wouldn’t put in the effort to engage in such a struggle, time and time again, if it didn’t give me rightful access to the “baskets only” line. This timesaver is a nice reward for those shoppers who have learned to carefully edit, or in my case, carefully arrange and balance, the items on their grocery list.

Every now and again, though, there will be, in this premier “baskets only” line, an able-bodied rule-breaker waiting with a cart, repeat, a cart, of groceries. They will be in plain sight, having made no attempt at all to even disguise their cart with a cape or hide their identity under big, red clown nose.

Photography Portrait - Walter Schels

Life Before Death: Portraits of the Dying

Photographs by Walter Schels and text by Beate Lakotta

Click here to view this beautiful photo essay

A friend on facebook recently posted something that caught my eye:

"Question of the day: Are cemetery photos disrespectful? Please advise before I post a picture I took at Calvary Cemetery today."

The response was in favor of posting. But it's just a big slab of stone, I thought. How offensive could that be? And while it's true that it is just a big slab of stone, that stone still belongs to someone who has died and the hesitation to post a picture of it just reinforced, for me, how undefined and murky the etiquette around death still is.  

So if a headstone can cause such hesitation, then what about this one: Are photos of the dying and of dead people disrespectful?