Nine Keys as Conceptual Art Piece

The Nine Keys death midwifery apprenticeship is a living, breathing conceptual art piece—one that extends beyond any singular vision, weaving an intricate web of healing across communities far beyond my knowing. Each apprentice, through their own presence and practice, becomes a thread in this vast tapestry, creating a network of care, remembrance, and transformation. Kind of like an artist working with invisible mediums, the apprenticeship does not just teach skills; it awakens something ancient and intuitive, a knowing that death work is not just service but vast well of creation, a composition of tenderness, courage, and devotion.

Within the training, the art of the apprentices is not only encouraged but sometimes revived—often surfacing as ritual, writing, sculpture, movement, or sound. The death midwife is an artist of liminality after all, crafting spaces where the unseen can be honored and expressed. Death and art are best friends, constant companions in the realm of transformation. They both ask us to surrender, to lean in to Uncertainty, to translate the ineffable, to shape meaning from what feels uncontainable.

This apprenticeship, like the work of death itself, is something beyond me. It is a force that moves through me rather than from me. It is divinely guided, unfolding in ways I could never dictate or control. Just as death resists ownership, this work belongs to something greater, something woven through time and spirit. I am merely a conduit, a steward of the vision that is meant to emerge. I love trying to figure out this creative force that is Nine Keys, and know I never will. Through this training, through these apprentices, the art of death midwifery is not only preserved but continually reimagined—an ever-unfolding constellation of devotion, where death and art entwine to birth new ways of being, seeding life in the sacred spaces left by what is passing away.