β€œGlance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of the Earth's greenings. Now, think.” ~Hildegard von BingenΝβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ 
 

BLOG | RESOURCES
some links may require subscription
 

Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of the Earth's greenings. Now, think.

~ Hildegard von Bingen

Seventh Sense Home, Clinton Corners NY

The summer solstice this week brings us the longest sunlit days of the year, and beckons us to consider this as a time to honor the source of light within us all.  Here in our home at The Seventh Sense,  we continue to grow and embody our relationship to sentience & presence as pillars to our end of life work, and our sense of place grows more powerful and firmly rooted in the care and stewardship of the land itself. We are grateful for, and awed by, the comforting embrace here, and to those who called it their sacred home before we arrived, and allow us now to share its bounty with them. ~ Karen
 

NYT

Time spent during the pandemic brought many unknown needs and beliefs to the forefront, and we are highlighting some now lest we forget the importance of what we gleaned during that time of collective introspection. In this photographic essay Stories of Belief from Across the Nation…the personal need to rekindle and honor ritual is documented beautifully in all of its diversity.


Read the New York Times piece American Rituals: Stories of belief from across the nation… in its entirety here.
 

Michael Cruz Kayne, Sorry for Your Loss

In this New York Times piece, That’s The Funny Thing About Grief…, highlights the art of balancing light and dark in modern stand-up around a culture of mourning. A reason grief is an unexpectedly great subject for comedy is that in a fragmented, polarized culture, with a shrinking common collection of references, it’s universal and relatable in a way few other topics are. It’s a relief to hear comics not just poking fun at the stale jargon of condolences, but also demystifying the hidden world of the grieving, which can be messy and petty. 

Read the New York Times article here.

Listen to Liz Glazer’s A Very Particular Experience (a comedy show meets shiva) about the stillbirth of her daughter here. 

Read more about Michael Cruz Kayne’s Sorry for Your Loss about the death of his son here. 
 

Maansi Srivastava

For photographer Maansi Srivastava, creating Roots Hanging from the Banyan Tree was her therapy as she grappled with loss, grief and racial reckoning over the course of the pandemic. During those years, the search for her identity became intertwined with the struggle to ground herself after her grandmother died from COVID-19. Through capturing the shared time and grief with her family in her images, recollections of cultural rituals from her childhood began to flood back in. These shared experiences were transformative and helped her to feel less isolated in her grief and her experience as an Indian American third-culture woman.

Find the photo essay here at NPR.
 

Daniel Barreto

During the pandemic, the rise of somatic-based therapies surged enormously, bringing with it the promise that true healing may reside within the body, as opposed to the mind. In this informative article about one brand of body-based work, Somatic Experiencing, the core principle is that we live from the bottom up, not from the top down as has been commonly assumed. Many clients of S.E. come to feel the intense relief that they have been seeking from traditional therapy but have not found.

Read or listen to the article here.

Isabel Seliger

In this NYT article on the Biology of Grief, published during the pandemic,  the somatic-based territory explored that when someone you love dies, experts have a pretty good sense of the path that grief takes through the mind, but have only a general sense of how it progresses through the rest of the body. 

Read the article here.
 

This feature documentary Tukdam: Between Worlds explores a phenomenon that blurs life and death to an unprecedented degree. In what Tibetan Buddhists call tukdam, advanced meditators die in a consciously controlled manner. Though dead according to our biomedical standards, they often stay sitting upright in meditation; remarkably, their bodies remain fresh and lifelike, without signs of decay for days, sometimes weeks after clinical death. The film juxtaposes scientific and Tibetan perspectives as it tries to unravel the mystery of tukdam.

Watch the trailer for Tukdam: Between Worlds  here. 

Associated Press

Hundreds of people visited the body of Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster at the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles Abbey on Sunday, May 28, 2023 to see the nun's body that has barely decomposed since 2019. Some in Catholicism are saying it's a sign of holiness, while others are saying the lack of decomposition may not be as rare as people think.

Read the Associated Press article here.
 

This Emergence Magazine piece, Arriving With Every Step, invites us to embark on the practice of pilgrimage. It reminds us that it isn’t about the destination but the journey. Not necessarily a beginning nor an end but perhaps an in-between. The pilgrimage route is not an imposed or fleeting human path; it is an enduring one that the land invites us to travel. Mountains, trees, waterβ€”the natural world is inseparable from the human feet that touch the ground. With each step, the pilgrim arrives into an unfolding song.

  1. Where will you go?

  2. What will you carry? 

  3. How will you travel?

  4. How will you arrive?

  5. How will you return?

Read more at Emergence Magazine here.
 

Resources

In Everything is Temporary: Illustrated Contemplations on How Death Shapes Our Lives, Iris Gottlieb explores what it means to be alive, how we grapple with fear, anxiety and grief around death, and why we should talk about it.  

Purchase the book here.

Paul Simon has always been a seeker, exploring the deeper, more profound aspects of being human in his writing. On his 15th solo album, Seven Psalms, Simon describes this work as an argument I’m having with myself about beliefβ€”or not. Over and over, he imagines a divine presence, and then interrogates its borders…

Read about Seven Psalms here
You can listen to the album here
 

Exit Strategy’s Art & Culture Monthly Reader is curated by Karen Bellone and Kirby Lee, death doulas at The Seventh Sense serving Hudson Valley, NY. Our intention is to refocus the narrative around death, dying and grief to raise awareness and consciousness, through the lens of arts, culture, storytelling and innovation.

Please feel free to forward this newsletter to anyone you feel might benefit from these resources and articles.

instagram twitter facebook

1640 Bulls Head Road, Clinton Corners, NY 12514, USA

Unsubscribe