Susan Cross

Susan Cross is a certified Life-Cycle Celebrant® from the Celebrant Foundation & Institute. She lives in northern New Mexico, well-wisher to ravens and coyotes. Susan works from her tiny house on windy mesa as a Life Cycle Celebrant and a craftsperson. She’s a burial shroud maker, hand drum and rattle builder, a ceremony writer, a gardener, an old mother, a grief-stricken naturalist drinking single malt scotch, and strives to remain a humble student in the school of hard knocks. Susan has felt called in recent decades by the deep past which has led her on pilgrimages to many Neolithic and Bronze Age sites in the landscapes of her people, to ancestral healing, and trying to understand the impacts of diaspora. She’s exploring ways to “preserve the archaic whisper” by finding strategies to safeguard pieces of our humanity that are at ongoing risk of atrophy.

Rethinking Burial: Burial Shrouds and More Ideas

Burial shrouds offer a better way to tend to the dead, according to one shroud-m…

Ancient Monuments and Messages from the Neolithic

“The following are messages I received during my investigations of the Neolithic…

Immense Continuity: Neanderthal Line

“Sometimes I wonder if my desire for a tribe, a working family unit, a singing-s…

A Ramble through Lamentation: Rituals for Expressing Grief

Lamentation: the passionate expression of grief, mourning, sorrow, or regret: a …

Ancestral Lineage: You Are the Sum of Your Ancestors

“Our ancestors, even if neglected for 10,000 years, are still an ongoing part of…

Between Earth Day and Beltane

“It might be time to learn to hunker down, pace ourselves, and try to marinate i…