I want to tell you where we are, honestly, before anything else. Baharestan Gardens does not exist yet. Not as a place you can visit, not as a cemetery that can receive the dead. What exists is the vision, the design, a licensing process that has begun, and a growing circle of people who believe this should happen.

I am building a Persian garden cemetery in California. The form is the chahar bagh: four quadrants, water at the center, paths that orient the body in space and the spirit in time. The intention is that it is green, that burials here return fully to the earth, that it is available to anyone who feels called to it regardless of faith or origin, and that it is beautiful enough to be visited while you are still living.

It will take several years and a great deal of work to open. There is a Certificate of Authority to obtain from the state. There is land to secure, likely in Marin or the Santa Monica Mountains, a place where the hills are old and the air remembers things. There is a team to build, financing to structure, and a community to gather before any of that is possible.

I am writing to you because you have found your way to this page, which means something drew you here. I would like to know what it was. And I would like to tell you three things you can do right now. Not because I am asking you to transact, but because I am asking you to be here with me while this is still becoming what it will be.

If you are here because of a loss, or because you are thinking ahead about your own, I want you to know that I see that, and I take it seriously. The grief that brings someone to research a cemetery is not a small thing. I cannot receive the dead today. But I would like to know who you are, and what kind of resting place you are looking for, and what matters to you. That knowledge shapes what this garden becomes.

There are five ways to be held in this garden. These are the current design concepts; exact types, availability, and pricing will be confirmed when the garden holds its California Cemetery license.

If you are here not because of a loss but because something about this place called to you, the idea of it, the form, what it might mean to have somewhere like this in California, then I want you here too. There is a role for people who care about what this garden becomes before it opens, and I am learning to ask for it plainly.

There is a way to put something real behind this. Not a membership fee, not an annual subscription — a founding contribution toward what we are building. Any amount that feels meaningful to you. A suggested starting point is $150, but we mean it when we say any amount: $25 from someone who can't give more matters as much to us as $500 from someone who can.

This is a contribution, not an investment. It does not buy cemetery services, hold a placement, or create a financial return. What it does is put your name on the founding patron wall in the garden when it opens, bring you into every event and gathering we hold between now and then, and give you a direct line to me. Mostly it means you were here before the garden existed and you believed in it anyway.

• Your name on the founding patron wall in the garden itself
• Invitation to all founding events: salons, garden walks, seasonal ceremonies, workshops
• A journal from the founding process: seasonal writing, plant dispatches, cultural essays
• First notification when the garden opens
• A direct line to me, your questions answered, your voice in what this becomes

If you want to give more than the suggested amount, there will be a note in the form. We are grateful for whatever you can offer.

If you are here because you have something to offer, expertise, connection, craft, time, I want to hear from you perhaps most of all. The people who can help this garden come into being are not all investors or funders. Some of them know how to read a conservation easement. Some of them have spent thirty years planting things. Some of them know someone at the county planning commission, or speak Farsi and have roots in the diaspora communities we want to reach, or have worked in death care and know what families need when the phone call comes.

This is a partial list of where we need people:

And if you feel pulled to this and don't know why, or your skill isn't on the list, tell me anyway. The people who surprise me are often the ones who matter most.