Featured: Water Burial

Water Burial was inspired by a week of watching documentaries about mountain climbing, scuba diving, cave diving and cave exploration in general. Often there's a scientific aspect to the explorations, but more often than not it seems to be curiosity and adventure that drives the endeavors. 

To each his own. I wouldn't be caught dead repelling into a deep cave let alone diving into a narrow shaft hundreds of feet underwater; if other's want to it's no skin off my back. The thing I find interesting is that, not only are the locations often sacred places for past communities and cultures, but many are also modern resting places or the cause of death for countless explorers from the last few decades. Some locations, like Mt. Everest for instance, still hold the bodies of their victims that are unable to be retrieved.

You often see reverence and empathy when explorers enter such locations (many are even closed or sealed off from further exploration), but it does provide an interesting juxtaposition with how we treat these places in comparison to more accessible counterparts. We'd never allow a casual hiking trail to pass by a decaying corpse for instance...

I'm not sure what I would do if my trek required walking through a sacred place, if I stumbled across an ancient burial ground or found remnants of a recent tragedy...but simply passing through for the sake of continued exploration seems a bit impersonal. I'm not really arguing that these explorations shouldn't take place or that it's unique to these specific endeavors (science and "progress" regularly disregard individuals or the feelings of those that came before us for better or worse)...I'm not even really criticizing the specific people who take part as most do seem aware of the spaces, history and emotions attached...but I do think there is a question of respect versus necessity and, at some point, the entire enterprise seems somewhat imbalanced.