May 2012
4 posts
An Offering to My Demons. ~ Safia Radha →
A raw and insightful reflection on grief and the transformation of suffering.
Tonglen is a Buddhist meditation that cultivates compassion through contemplating, breathing in, and getting to know the textures of our suffering. The natural tendency for the ego is to push away and resist pain, but when we face it down, tear away our conditioning and perceptions around it and welcome it as part of...
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April 2012
9 posts
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WatchBuddhist roshi, Joan Halifax speaks on compassion and the true meaning of empathy. This TED video is worth every second of your time. Ten years ago I spent a week studying with Joan at her monastery for her Being With Dying training, a contemplative and powerful program for end-of-life care. Perhaps one of the most valuable weeks anyone working in palliative care could give themselves. Or...
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This incredibly poignant and articulate article is taken from Daily Undertaker www.dailyundertaker.com, I didn’t have the heart to paraphrase, it’s perfect as it stands:
Following his father’s death, Singaporean designer and artist, Darryl Ng created a series of ten illustrations based upon 5 proverbs relating to death. The proverbs are taken from Chinese, Latin and English...
“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so...”
– Alan Watts
(via wethinkwedream)
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Fake Flowers: Unexpected Beauty from Artist, Asher
Fake flowers find the height of their beauty after withering away for years in graveyards.
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March 2012
7 posts
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james wright poem--"back to my skull, that is our...
So She Said
“I’d rather not. I’m confused.”
I did not plow her darkenesses, Only because I’d rather not Flop rampant on the secrecies. They are easy enough to violate. Easy enough. As when my hand Exploded my fantastic self I did not know nor understand The beauty of my lonely life.
She knew me lonely so she took My bare body into her bed, Yet could not bear to let me look Her over, naked....
February 2012
3 posts
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January 2012
6 posts
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NOX - Anne Carson
“I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds,” Carson begins in Nox, written for her estranged brother ten years dead. “But death makes us stingy.” Noxis a history as well as an elegy, charting her brother’s life through memories, photographs and letters, and recording Carson’s own process of translating Catullus’ poem 101, an elegy for a brother. The methodical, laborious working out...
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Watch“there’s only one word to describe the picture here, and that’s grief. and much of it.”
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December 2011
2 posts
City Room: Preserving Memories of Pets, and Then... →
Some pet owners will go to extreme lengths to preserve their pets long after they are dead, and Amy Finkel is working on a documentary of their efforts.
November 2011
3 posts
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WatchPortland band Starfucker’s official Bury Us Alive video. Flesh to dirt to flowers. That’s it, isn’t it.
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October 2011
6 posts
A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs →
At a memorial service for her brother, Mona Simpson recalled his love of beauty and his family, and his final moments.
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Notes From a Dragon Mom
An incredible reflection on an egoless love and facing the inevitable every day through that love.
Emily Rapp is the author of “Poster Child: A Memoir,” and a professor of creative writing at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design.
Santa Fe, N.M.
MY son, Ronan, looks at me and raises one eyebrow. His eyes are bright and focused. Ronan means “little seal” in Irish and it suits him.
I...
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September 2011
4 posts
how strange that just hours before my dad died, he scotch taped a comic from the daily newspaper onto his bathroom mirror. a figure stands at the base of a mountain looking up. caption: ”life is but a game. too bad the batteries aren’t included.”
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August 2011
5 posts
when Reddit becomes a place for a community to...
this is my dad’s last bow. he did not make it till the encore.
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something about coffins →
something about coffins
coffins are a ritual behavior that denies death
the coffin protects the living from the image of the dead person, of the person they once knew alive and in motion
the coffin protects the imagination of the living from the image of a person without the living electricity of self-spirit joined to the body in some harmony of breath and life
the coffin protects the...
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A very personal and powerful story as a family creates a loved one’s memorial stone. Please follow the facebook link so you can read all the photo captions and comments, it’s simultaneously heart wrenching and inspiring.
On the back:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends
It gives a lovely light.
On the front:
Aileen...
July 2011
5 posts
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