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.
Amidst the serene backdrop of weathered gravestones and trees whispering in the wind, this year’s Nightfall invites you to reflect on the fleeting nature of time itself. As dusk settles and darkness fills the cemetery, explore tales of lives lived and moments lost, revel in nostalgia for a grand past, and grieve for all the things that … Read moreNightfall: Time Flies (October 17-18 at Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, NYC)
In this article for the BBC, Becca Warner explores a variety of ecologically sustainable funeral options: “In the face of death, we seek consolation. And it’s been really interesting seeing how there’s been a conflict, in some cases, between what is sustainable and what people find consoling,” she says. Bags of bone ash and compost … Read more“How to plan a sustainable funeral”
YouTube documentarian Tom Scott presents this item on the revival of long barrows; Neolithic constructions that might have been churches, graveyards or landmarks, but which are now used as commercial columbaria and as ritual spaces. More at The Soulton Long Barrow and via the Sacred Stones website.
Click here to learn all about Seven Stones, a Denver cemetery/botanical garden that will – hopefully – provide the aesthetic and conceptual model for future institutions. Here’s a presentation by Seven Stones co-founder Doug Flin –
The notably arts-friendly Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York City has hosted a number of artistic installations including works of sculpture, dance, poetry, photography and ritual.
A new memorial ritual emerges at Green-Wood Cemetery in NYC, where people have begun leaving sticks for Rex, a Very Good Boy whose statue may date back to the year 1884.
Jesse Bering writes for the Scientific American on the psychology of green burial practices, especially regarding the psychological mechanism of essentialism: I’ll go out on a limb here and say that even if one doesn’t believe in some ethereal or religious version of the afterlife, it’s rather difficult to escape the cognitive illusion that the … Read more“My Dead Mother, the Tree That Never Was: The Psychology of ‘Green Burial’ Practices”