Nothing has escaped the invisible shaping hand of the virus.

Humans had the funeral thing down, a cozy little service industry that knew how to move us at an acceptable pace into and hopefully through grieving.

Now significantly disrupted.

Zoom alternatives have emerged and have provided relief to some. But just Google ‘Zoom Funerals’ and you’ll see the prevailing tone is thumbs-down on experiences that will not continue in the safe and secure imagined future.

Of course there may never be a safe and secure future and Zoom is not the only communications technology getting a big boost in weird times.

Despite the way Virtual Reality is consistently portrayed as a platform for gaming and self-indulgent escapism, actual people all over the world are discovering for themselves, often accidentally, that VR is fundamentally about connecting with other people.

Connecting deeply.

I’m not giving anything away to say we are on auto-pilot in real life most of the time. Following routines, interacting in predictable, comfortable ways, same old, same old.

VR is not same old, same old.

Everyone who takes part in any event on a social VR platform such as AltspaceVR feels it in one second. Something is different.

There is implicit permission to behave more freely. To show vulnerability. To care. These are not new and unusual modes of behavior, it’s just that they aren’t necessarily featured in the real world.

In early March, 2020 at the beginning of the world wide disruption, I was hosting events in VR every day. One of them was a long-form talk show called, Conversations.

Skye was my first conversation.

I enjoy long-form podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience or The Unregistered Podcast. I didn’t know if I could keep up a conversation that would be interesting to an audience with someone who was pretty much a complete stranger to me, but I wanted to give it a try.

I could not have gotten off to a better start. Skye’s story turned out to have something for everyone.

There was hardship. She shared the outlines of her tough life growing up in New York. She was a creative person who had to make herself into a tougher, do-whatever-it-takes person to get by.

When she couldn’t stand it any more, she left. Escape!

Remade herself in a different place, different part of the country. She could breathe. So she could work on herself. Start to heal all there was to heal. Alone. Until she wasn’t.

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Until she met someone. And she knew in every part of her hurting physical body that this was the person she had been looking for her whole life.

They didn’t just build a world together. They built an interconnected network of worlds together. Dedicated to their love first and then to the rest of us.

Reverend Jeremy Nickel presided.

He knew Skye well. She has been a central figure in the EvolVR community for several years, which is decades in VR-Time.

He began the ceremony with a loving appreciation in the tone of someone who knows how to do this. I am drawing attention to the reverential spirit to be completely clear to anyone who has never been in VR — this felt right. It felt like someone’s funeral.

It felt like the funeral of someone who was part of a community. The people there knew her. The minister knew that she was a poet, so three of her poems were read, by people who had some relationship with Skye.

Because she is Skye, Builder of Worlds, many of her poems are immortalized in Skye’s World of Poetry.

Source: https://arvrjourney.com/skyes-beautiful-vr-funeral-adc09dea278b?source=rss—-d01820283d6d—4