“The Earth is my body; my head is in the stars.”
— Ruth Gordon as Maude, Harold and Maude (1971)
I first heard this line years ago, and it has never left me. In a single breath, it captures everything I love about holding space at the thresholds of mortality, and about the way coming to terms with the inevitability of death informs life itself–how peace with both, twining together, is the thread weaving a life well-lived.
Maude, at the threshold time of her own death, reminds us that we are always both rooted and infinite. We belong to the soil and the stars at once. Our bodies nourish the land; our energy returns to the wider cosmos. There is no shame in this, no denial — only acceptance, humor, and love.
This is why I choose to speak of family involvement, green and conservation burial as acts of love. To give our bodies back to the earth is to affirm this truth: that we are not lost, but changed. That we continue in the roots of trees, in the flow of rivers, in the shine of starlight.
Harold and Maude is a film of unlikely companionship, of facing mortality with irreverence and tenderness. It reminds us that death does not end relationship — it transforms it. To live with that awareness is to live more fully.
May we all find the clarity and wisdom of Maude: to claim both the ground beneath our feet and the sky above us as home.
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