It is said that Mother Nature is the greatest artist. The folks at Bios Incube are using their creativity to help her show her best side.
The Bios Incube system nurtures the growth of a tree from human or animal companion ashes within the Bios Urn (pictured above). The core principle is quite simple: Place ashes in a planter with a seed and some water, and watch new life grow from the remains of your loved one. The urn is designed with a water reservoir to make sure the tree always gets enough water.
What makes the Bios Incube system unlike any other is that it involves new technology that helps you give your seedling exactly the right elements it needs to thrive, using a sensor designed to detect humidity, temperature and light. This sensor can be controlled by a remote app accessed from a smartphone.
The sensor detects moisture content in the soil and evaluates the conditions based on your seedling’s precise needs and conducts water from the reservoir chamber to the soil, preventing over and under watering. It will also send a notification through the app to let you know if your seedling needs more or less sunlight, or if it needs cooler or warmer conditions.
Aside from its brilliantly sensitive technology, the Bios Incube provides several interesting opportunities for healthfully relating to our dead. Because it’s uncommon in modern times for families to own and live on one piece of land for many generations, the home burial and natural burial have fallen out of fashion. They have also been made illegal in many parts of North America due to land ownership and disposition laws. As a result, the concept that bodies return to the earth to nurture new life has been reduced to just that — a concept, abstracted from the reality of how we deal with our dead on physical terms, often embalmed with toxic chemicals and buried in cement-lined graves. The days of keeping cremains at home on the mantle may be coming to an end, as more people seek ways to return their loved one’s body to the earth in a gentle way that is integrated with the natural rhythm of life and death.
The Bios Incube also offers us the experience of caring for our dead, albeit in a transformed state. This impulse is as old as human consciousness as we know it today. Every human culture has its ways of speaking with the dead and understanding their influence in the present moment, carrying them into the future to help all of us live whole and balanced lives. Caring for the natural world is indeed a way of caring for the dead in a very real and material way — and they care for us too, through the abundance that flows from healthy lands and waters.