Mariam Vahradyan writes for Psyche: Many cultures around the world actively maintain relationships with the dead through storytelling, prayer and ritual. In Japan, for example, the spirits of the dead are welcomed during the Obon festival. For four days each year, families remember their ancestors by tending to graves, lighting small fires, and making offerings. … Read more“Why you should talk to your dead ancestors”
Sally Hayden writes for the Literary Hub: The road wound upwards, past a sloping graveyard and cedar trees. We passed another hamlet of houses, and I started to spot various signs pointing towards the drifting post. Through a final flurry of trees, it at last became visible. There was a rectangular yellow post box—the “real” … Read more“Mail Between Heaven and Earth: On Japan’s Post Office For Letters to the Dead”
‘Let it be like a lullaby that holds you.’ Threshold Choir is an international charity that provides people who are dying with soothing, non-religious songs of peace and comfort, sung by three-person volunteer groups. This short documentary profiles one Threshold Choir chapter in Devon in south-west England.
In the 28 Days franchise, much of the world is laid to waste by an accidentally-released pathogen called the Rage Virus, which reduces human beings to almost mindless biting and eating machines. The third installment is set 28 years after the original movie and takes place in a radically re-wilded England. Nature has largely reclaimed … Read moreMemento Mori Religion in “28 Years Later”
Japanese conceptual artist Aya Kichi describes “After the Rain”: (…) incorporating a series of optical prisms into the centres of tombstones, which as a result, create a spectrum of light on the ground where the grave would be situated. Influenced by rainy days and the grieving process, the project takes these elements and translates them … Read more“After the Rain”
Petals fell, poetry was spoken and honey tasted today in commemoration of the life and death of Wellington, New Zealand filmmaker and documentarist Costa Botes. Costa was a decade older than I am, born in Turkey but raised from a young age in Wellington, as I was. We attended the same high school, ten years … Read moreIn memoriam: Costa Botes (1958-2025)
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)
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