A Walk In The Cemetery

I'd like to preempt this by saying that I am not a macabre person and I do not dwell in morbid thoughts.  I love life and the living, and I often go to noisy, crowded places to sit back and watch the world go by, connecting with the wonder of a present humanity so caught up in the mundane that its purpose and mortal presence is lost to all except to the observer. There is beauty around that speaks and images that disturb. These fuel my creativity. However, to feel alive and most connected when reaching for meaning to increase my self understanding, the most human, powerful and yet humbling experience for me is to go to the cemetery.
The cemetery need not be one where I have a connection to someone whose funeral I have attended, be it family or friend or acquaintance. I feel connected to all. I park my car randomly and walk over a carpet of well maintained green grass reading the names and dates of those buried in the area. Some are short lived lives, others long and longer.  There are mothers, fathers, sons and daughters, sisters, brothers, grandparents, aunts and uncles, the soldier, the doctor, the hero; all loving.  It is easy to observe the newly dead from those long buried. These are the headstones that are rubbed and polished to a gleam.  It is as if every stroke of polish by the living has brought with it a small measure of therapeutic comfort as memories mingle with grief. Many of them are young, too young, infants even. I take time to stop at each one to read their names and say a little prayer for those they've left behind in this world. What intrigues me are the ones whose last day on this earth spans decades into history and who do not have an obvious frequency of visitors, if any at all....Time diminishes the strokes of polish. Here, I linger a little longer.

My first impression of cemeteries was not one of rolling hills carpeted with a soft spread of green, a burst of color here and there and trees with their magnificently outstretched branches. No, I come from places where cemeteries are tight narrow plots confined between buildings, and church yards. Tombstones high and low, statues of all shapes and sizes marking graves of young and old casting long shadows in the twilight hour. These are cemeteries where the earth has moved and graves have shifted causing hazard to those who walk among them and who are not sure footed. To walk across and between the graves, one almost has to dance and skip from one marbled tomb to the other. But regardless of the maintenance of the place I love to walk the graveyards. My affinity for walking among the graves comes from when I was a child, and in my easily impressionable childhood brain, I read the poem "We Are Seven" by William Wordsworth. The narrator asks a little girl of perhaps 8 about her siblings.The girl explains that there are seven of them including two that are dead. The narrator tries in vain to persuade the little girl that her two deceased siblings cannot be counted among them because they are no longer alive.  "But they are dead, those two are dead! Their spirits are in heaven," he says. However, the child insists that these two be included in her count. She lives her life among them and they still exist, maybe not in a physical presence, but she feels she can sense them.
"And often after sunset, sir, When it is light and fair, I take my little porringer, And eat my supper there." She eats with them and plays among them. "Their graves are green, they may be seen." She insists. They are seven. The thought of that child possessing a sure instinct of immortality left an impression on me.  Just because the dead are not of this physical world doesn't mean they are not of the world. Their love lingers and mingles and strengthens. They just live in another form or state of reality.

A walk, a stroll through a cemetery, or if time permits, a sit down with those who are no longer of this world is comforting. The finest of people, the innocent, the guilty, the good, the rogue of rogues, all are buried within these walls and boundaries of the cemeteries.  But their worldly professions and adjectives that define them do not matter. Here, I find an absence of all human emotions except an infinite acceptance and a love that roams through and in between the space. An inexplicable peace reigns among the tombstones or headstones. It is peace that overflows through me with love from beyond. There Is something beyond the beyond. Something that connects me to the world behind what we see and feel and taste. I am neither provoked nor tested.  I have no fears, no doubts, no resentments. I am void of all human weakness of emotions. Only peace exists and a silent knowledge of a strengthening of kinship between souls centuries old and days young.  It is an implosive magnetic force of a love powered by those whose hearts beat with sorrow, joy, grief, peace, loss, triumph, ...and by those who have departed and whose loves  linger and float the atmosphere. A love supreme flows through me. It reigns. It Is, It just Is. And I am released of all entitlement to this world.
The experience of unity with All That Is brings me back to the truth...that none and nothing is greater than perfect love.  I am renewed with the experience and awareness of how precious every life on earth is and how much we are pulled by the need to do, more so, much more so than the need to be. My mortal years, like all who are privileged to breathe, are unknown and limited. Time is entrusted to me and the years lent are just that, lent to me.  I am struck by the power of connection by being fully there in the quiet unity of what Is--God's love linking my fingers with the soft caress of a love whispered from those no longer of this world.
A walk in the cemetery always changes me, and  always for the better.
This I humbly speak.