Light a candle. Watch the flame for a while. Feel its heat, then blow it out. Watch the smoke drift away. Look at the blackened wick. That is birth, life, death, and non-existence. If you re-light the candle, that’s a new life; the original flame exists only in memory. Now consider where the flame went. … Read moreAccept death, embrace life.
Participants at the recent Nightfall event – an annual, nocturnal celebration of art, music and performance at Brooklyn, NYC’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery – were afforded the opportunity to “rehearse” passing through the Veil between life and death. This imaginative and surprisingly meaningful mobile performance piece/installation/ritual was the brainchild of Greedy Peasant, a NYC-based pageant troupe.
An unusually hot and dry Fall has delayed some of the usual seasonal cues, but now it is undeniable; Memoria has arrived once again. We actually began our observances very early by taking part in the annual Sacred Harvest event at Sky Meadow in Vermont. … and we’ve just returned from an anniversary vacation that … Read moreMemoria 2025 (Part 1)
(Cross-posted from our sister site, Cultpunk.art) In the futuristic world of Logan’s Run (1976), humanity – or at least that portion of humanity that the movie is concerned with – is sequestered away from the unknown “world outside”, living and dying inside vast Xanadu-like pleasure domes. Their lives and deaths are supervised by an AI … Read more“Renew! Renew!” The Cult of Carrousel in Logan’s Run (1976)
In this scene from the drama Apple Cider Vinegar, Lucy Guthrie, played by actress Tilda Cobham-Hervey, experiences a shamanic vision of her own death, dissolution and reintegration into Nature during an ayahuasca retreat.
Debby Waldman writes for the Washington Post on the emerging trend towards home-owners facilitating comfortable, homey venues for MAID patients traveling to states in which death with dignity is legal: In a pastoral Vermont valley, a former hospice chaplain named Suzanne runs a retreat center for artists, health-care workers and educators — and, since mid-2023, … Read more“Hospitality at the End of Life”
Chelsea Edgar writes for Seven Days on the traditions and legacies of the Bread and Puppet Theater, a mainstay of the East Coast (and particularly Vermont) counterculture: A short distance into the pine forest above the circus field, just beyond the remnants of a Baldwin piano that has been left to molder in the elements, … Read moreBread and Puppet Theater Memorial Shrines