Memento Mori
Living Fully Through Death Awareness
This talk was given at a local TEDxSnoIsleLibraries event and produced independently of the TED Conferences. Cultural anthropologist, Jennifer James, believes embracing the awareness of our mortality is a key to fully living. Jennifer’s lifetime of curiosity about beliefs, human behavior and the human spirit has roots in her childhood. That curiosity has underpinned her … Read moreLiving Fully Through Death Awareness
“Dancing with the Dead: Two Techniques for Spiritual Rejuvenation”
Humanist poet, speaker, organizer and ritualist Daniel Lev Shkolnik writes for Patheos on a self-devised memento mori/carpe diem rite: When I pass into a cemetery alone, a calm settles over me. I watch the hawks hunt from the pines. The hares dash through among the stones and the bones of slower hares. The puffball mushrooms … Read more“Dancing with the Dead: Two Techniques for Spiritual Rejuvenation”
“Lessons of Immortality and Mortality From My Father, Carl Sagan”
Click here to read Sasha Sagan’s 2014 essay for The Cut: My parents taught me that even though it’s not forever — because it’s not forever — being alive is a profoundly beautiful thing for which each of us should feel deeply grateful. If we lived forever it would not be so amazing. In this video, Sasha … Read more“Lessons of Immortality and Mortality From My Father, Carl Sagan”
Living in the Time of Dying
A sobering and urgent documentary on the challenges of living in the face of mass extinctions and climate catastrophe. For more on this subject, visit the Living in the Time of Dying website.
Death is Nothing to Us: The Epicureans on Death
A concise presentation on the subject of mortality from the Epicurean philosophical perspective, from the Society of Friends of Epicurus.
Merlin on Self-Fulfilling Prophesy and Destiny (Knightriders, 1981)
In this scene from George Romero’s messy, mystical, countercultural take on the Arthurian mythos, Merlin (Brother Blue) councils King Billy (Ed Harris) on the tensions between notions of destiny and self-fulfilling prophecy. The clip includes some shots from a later scene in which Merlin’s prophecy (and Billy’s dreams) come true, in the form of a … Read moreMerlin on Self-Fulfilling Prophesy and Destiny (Knightriders, 1981)
Festival of the Dead in the UK
This massive touring festival event has been a sell-out smash in the UK for several years, though of course it’s currently on hold during the COVID-19 pandemic. Festival of the Dead offers a cross-cultural mash-up of secular Dia de Muertos-inspired aesthetics with new circus/new burlesque performance styles; not what you’d call “deep” in comparison with … Read moreFestival of the Dead in the UK
Poetic Faith (or, Why Oscar Wilde Declined to Join the London Thirteen Club)
Despite their distinct lack of streaming video options, the ladies and gentlemen of the late 19th century were not short of amusing and instructive pastimes. Late Victorian social media was centered around clubs running the thematic gamut from banal to whimsically outré. During the 1890s, examples of the latter kind ranged from the Whitechapel Club … Read morePoetic Faith (or, Why Oscar Wilde Declined to Join the London Thirteen Club)
“Into the Veil” with the Obscura Society
Here’s a gallery of atmospheric video memoirs from the Atlas Obscura’s semi-annual Into The Veil events, which have been staged at the arts-friendly Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, NYC and also at Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery.