Memento Mori
Hamnet (2025)
A new addition to the canon; adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague, Hamnet is a heartbreaking, inspiring study of love, spirituality and the redemptive power of art.
Memoria 2025 (Part 2)
My daily riverside pilgrimages are becoming colder and much more colorful. Good apple doughnut weather … Flowers left by an unknown third party among the riverbank stones. The Duende skull is now placed on the right side of the vanitas shrine, facing left – “looking into the past” from the Memoria perspective – and is … Read moreMemoria 2025 (Part 2)
The International Necronautical Society
From the International Necronautical Society‘s Manifesto (1999):
Accept death, embrace life.
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 remember the smoke and consider … Read moreAccept death, embrace life.
Passing through the Veil at Nightfall (Green-Wood Cemetery, Fall 2025)
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.
Memoria 2025 (Part 1)
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)
“You, author of life, let hope be your final loss. Anything can be.”
Poetic graffiti found on a bridge railing in Chicago’s Humboldt Park.