Carpe Diem

“Memento Morbid”: new podcast series from Morbid Anatomy

Click here to listen to episodes of Memento Morbid, a new podcast series from our friends at Morbid Anatomy: Fascinating, poignant, and surprisingly life-affirming conversations about death, the human condition, and life’s great mysteries.Join Joanna Ebenstein, founder of Morbid Anatomy, for Memento Morbid, a series of surprisingly life-affirming conversations around topics that tend to be deemed morbid. Meet … Read more“Memento Morbid”: new podcast series from Morbid Anatomy

“The Little Book of Maudism” (2016)

I can’t recall the first time I saw the countercultural classic movie Harold and Maude, but I’m sure that I was too young then to pick up on the film’s bittersweet, positive existentialist message except in very broad strokes. Sometime around 2020 – peak pandemic – I became aware that English author Lucy Coleman Talbot … Read more“The Little Book of Maudism” (2016)

Floralia 2026

Living in the future … the first wildflowers are appearing in the park and along the riverbanks, trees are budding or starting to leaf, and so another Floralia has arrived. I’ve repositioned the skull on my vanitas shrine – facing to the right, symbolizing “looking forward” – and re-dressed the flowered caplet in honor of … Read moreFloralia 2026

“… the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts …”

“Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good … Read more“… the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts …”