The School of Lost Borders specializes in offering rites of passage ceremonies for modern folk. At the heart of a rite of passage, a term first coined by the Dutch-German-French anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, are the three phases he described: severance, threshold, incorporation. Or put another way: dying, in between, rebirth. You might say that a rite of passage is a ?dying practice?: an opportunity to learn how to do the little deaths in life in preparation for the Big Death that awaits us all.

The Practice of Living and Dying is a special curriculum within the School that offers programs accentuating this dying-in between-rebirth process. It was started in 2003 by two of our guides: Meredith Little and Scott Eberle. Meredith, as one of the School?s co-founders, has been practicing ?symbolic death midwifery? for over 40 years. Scott, working as a hospice physician, has offered ?physical death midwifery? for over 30 years. Together they created this Practice of Living and Dying curriculum so that participants might move through their own ?dying? process. Well after its inception, this curriculum was further expanded by other School guides drawing upon their own living and dying experiences.

The PLD programs invite the asking of an inseparable pair of questions:

How do we live, so we may fully become our dying?

and

How do we accept our dying that we may fully embrace our living?

To mark this fall shedding season we are re-launching a limited edition of our Practice of Living and Dying dancing Skeleton shirts (design originally implemented by Scott and Meredith) with a percentage from each sale going towards supporting the School. 

"If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance" 

?George Bernard Shaw