Carole L. Trepanier

12/17/2025

If you like to cozy up with a good book...

12/16/2025

I've opened up my calendar for “New Year Stone Reading/Healing” bookings, starting now! :)

This 90min ceremony is an opportunity to peer into what 2026 holds for you, but it doesn’t end there. This is a healing—a blend of predictive Divination using sacred bundle stones, Spirit communication, healing work and time/space shifting. Together we get to see the Big Picture, work the stones to heal the relevant past/present/future wounds in play on your timeline, and bring about the needed course-correction toward a Healed Outcome for your 2026. (No small thing!) You can choose a theme for your New Year Stone Reading (health, purpose, relationships, work, home, growth, etc.), or see what life theme arises in the stones.

This ceremony is one of my favorites to facilitate, as it's such sweet time together with clients, the stones and other supportive Spirits, and it always ends with powerful healed outcomes, lightness and joy. Such a beautiful way to start 2026!

12/12/2025

No, MAID isn't a secret organ-harvesting operation. Consent to donate is separate from the decision to choose MAID. Also, underlying health conditions often disqualify MAID recipients from donation. There is a strong misinformation campaign spreading across Canada about medical assistance in dying.

For accurate information about MAID in Canada, please consult the Dying With Dignity Canada website here: https://www.dyingwithdignity.ca/

Organ donation is not required to receive medical assistance in dying (MAID) in Canada. Despite conspiratorial social media posts alluding to an organ-harvesting operation, whether to donate organs remains a personal choice — no one can be forced to do it.

Visit our Media Centre at the link below to get the real facts from AFP Fact Check.

Read more. https://ow.ly/pxN850XIumU

12/07/2025

My "The Death of Me -- Spiritual Death Planning" series is for you if you shudder at the specter of Death, dodge/distract/hide from your own mortality, are a caregiver/healer, attend to the dying, tend to vulnerable populations on the frontline, or long to touch that which is deeply human...that you may remember how to fully LIVE. Get in.

Registration: https://thedeathofme.as.me/spiritualdeathplanning

Meaning in life leads to less anxiety around dying

12/03/2025

As the light wanes and the nights grow long, the Cailleach awakens. She is the ancient winter hag of the Highlands, the old woman of storms and stone, the keeper of frost and the quiet turning of the year. In Scottish tradition, her presence is not abstract—she is woven into the very landscape. With her staff she shapes mountains, summons blizzards, and freezes rivers into stillness. Her arrival is felt in the first hard frost, the bare trees, the wind that seems to carry an older voice through empty fields.

The Cailleach embodies endurance, sovereignty, and the sacredness of endings. She is the crone who knows that decay feeds new life, that the death of the year’s light is not a loss but a necessary pause. Folklore describes her as veiled and formidable, her hair white as spindrift, her eyes keen as ice. Sometimes she strides through the storm; other times she moves silently through frost-blackened forests, leaving the world transformed in her wake. To encounter her is to understand winter’s truth: stillness is not emptiness, but a deep, generative quiet.

Her stories are older than memory. In some traditions she rules the dark half of the year, handing over her power to Brigid at Imbolc when the first signs of thaw appear. In others, she renews her age each Samhain, drinking from the Well of Youth before stepping into her season of sovereignty. She counts the snows as markers of her rule, and with the planting of her staff she can freeze a loch, bring down a storm, or hush the land beneath a mantle of white. Her magic is elemental—patient, deliberate, and absolute.

The Cailleach is not a figure of fear but a presence to honor. She teaches that winter’s austerity has purpose, that the world—and our inner lives—require this quieting. As she moves across mountains and moors, her touch brings clarity: the stripping away of what cannot endure, the sharpening of what must. Under her watch, the land rests, seeds sleep, and the bones of the world show through. Her lessons are carved in frost—surrender, resilience, and the strength found in stillness.

Imagine her moving through the hills around you: heavy-footed across stone, brushing branches with a cold hand, drawing the hush deeper. Notice what is settling in your own life—what is falling away, what is being cleared, what lies dormant beneath the surface. Let her presence remind you that winter is not absence but preparation, and that the quiet season is holy in its own way.

In her wake, endings are honored. In her silence, wisdom roots. In her frost, the hidden world prepares to bloom again.

11/26/2025

Movies and Earth-honouring deathy musings, anyone?

Conversation on Conservation: Movie and Discussion

Come join Conservation Burial Ottawa at the Sunnyside Public Library for a special movie screening followed by an engaging discussion on conservation. This event is an opportunity to learn more about important environmental issues and connect with like-minded individuals. Get inspired and educated on how we can all make a difference in protecting our planet!
Featured films are Death Out of the Shadows and Steelmantown

This event is free to attend and all are welcome!

11/14/2025

Resource Recommendation: “Becoming Earth” by Robin Wall Kimmerer, for Emergence Magazine (Essay | 15-minute read)

What does it mean to belong to the Earth - not just in life, but in death?

In this powerful essay, botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer invites us to reflect on reciprocity, grief, and what it means to return to the land as kin. With tenderness and clarity, she explores how our end-of-life choices can become acts of belonging... not separations from nature, but reunions.

As End-of-Life Doulas, we are often witness to the ways people seek meaning in their final days. This essay speaks deeply to those longings: for continuity, for connection, for becoming part of something larger than ourselves.

Whether you're supporting others at the end of life, or simply reflecting on your own path, Becoming Earth offers quiet wisdom and poetic guidance.

“To become earth again is not a punishment, but a gift.” - Robin Wall Kimmerer

🔗 URL: https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/becoming-earth/

11/10/2025

“We’ve been going to these pop-up discussion groups at the public library, where people discuss death. I don’t think Tony would go if it wasn’t for me. Most people don’t like to talk about it, but I have questions. Not so much about death anymore. But I have questions about living as I get old. You know how people always say that you walk forward into the future? It’s not true. You walk backwards into the future. You can’t see what’s ahead. Maybe occasionally you can look over your shoulder, and get a glimpse. But mostly you can only see your past receding behind you. And the past that’s receding behind me is getting bigger and bigger. I’m trying to learn to say goodbye, and move forward. But how do you do that? When every week you hear about some other beloved person who’s died, that you’re never going to see again? I feel like I walk around with a retinue of ghosts, beloved ghosts. All the time I see images from the past: the people and the pleasures and the adventures and the beautiful places. And I could just go there and live there. You know how they say about some people: ‘She’s lost in the past?’ I can see how it happens. I could get there. It’s comfortable there, and nothing is demanded of me. And it’s not just the comfort of the past. It’s the danger and uncertainty of what’s ahead of you. I’m fine, and pretty functional, and strong. But I could have a stroke or a heart attack any minute. It could happen at any moment I’m walking down the street. Is this going to be it? Is this going to be the walk? I don’t think of it constantly. I can still be captured by a wonderful play, or a beautiful river, or a child that is so sweet looking at his parents. But it increasingly feels like I’m leaping over chasms from joy to joy.”

11/06/2025

Here's a quick peek at the "Memento Mori Art Show" currently on at Anina's Café in Vanier/Ottawa (my favorite coffee chats place in my 'hood). Pop by!