"The Spell of the Sensuous" One!

Perhaps it's because of my recent dance with death that made this portion of chapter stand out so much, but whatever the reason, I chose to react to pages 15 and 16, more specifically where the Abram begins with:

"Each indigenous culture elaborates this recognition of metamorphosis in its own fashion..." (Referring to the change of living to dead.)
My piece originally sparked from the description from cremation: "Some cultures may burn, or "cremate," the body in order to more completely return the person, as smoke, to the swirling air, while that which departs as flame is offered to the sun and stars, and that which lingers as ash is fed to the dense earth."

(This was all done in a glass jar.) I wanted to represent that cremation, I wanted to have that physical smoke, so at first I burned some paper to create ashes. But I really wanted to add more to it, so I added pieces of the land around me to represent being reunited with the land (and the tradition being shaped by the terrain around us) and burned some of those as well. I was also thinking about other traditions of celebrating death or making that transition, such as dismembering body parts, so I left the matches in the jar to represent those parts. I added a flower on top as well to represent the common way that we in our culture put our dead in caskets and put flowers on top. (Although I realized when I was done, in a way the jar was like a casket, holding everything inside.) I also used tape on the lid to represent mummification. Basically the entire description just got me thinking of all of the ways that we try and celebrate death, or try and get out dead to "next place", and I represented a few of those ways. My favorite though, is that if you unscrew the lid right now, a little bit of smoke will still come swirling out, reminding me of the sentence that inspired this whole creation in the first place.