Melancholy
Some places call to us, and loudly, by their silence; a silence that teaches when we most need its lessons.
Prelude:
I wasn’t very inspired this week to write given the events of the past two weeks out of our nation’s capital. And this even given I’ve cut way back on my media consumption to preserve the fragile pieces of remnant mental health. I posted this Note the other day:
I have many drafts of potential essays in my drafts folder so I skimmed over them to see if any might be close to being ready for now. Because this one, especially its title, matched my mood, typical for me during the winter months, I thought I’d go with it.
I wrote this in the latter months of 2023 after we had buried the remains of my Dad’s body. As happens when one wants to write to current events, the draft was kinda forgotten, and when I would stumble over it periodically in the months since, I thought I had lost the window of time on relevancy. But I never deleted it completely. I don’t think good writers delete their stuff—they just stuff it in drawers because, who knows, relevancy has ways of coming back in vogue.
I wondered if what I had written back then is becoming relevant again—if for no one else, but for me.
The title I picked back then sure has.
Here is Melancholy.
The One Not Yet Sent… On Cemeteries
No, I’m not obsessed—I just have too many drafts that haven’t been sent—this one written back in late April, 2023 when we were fulfilling our obligation to our Dad’s final wishes—Dad’s funeral services and inurnment was just over one year ago on April 15 and 16, 2023. On April 17, 2023, the rest of our lives continued on.
Cemeteries, those human made creations of hubris and paradox, truly are astonishing places. For me, they are compelling—each placement of stone a marker of a story buried deeply within [echoing a previous blog post found here]; and it is as if those stories and stones call to my soul, from some deep, darkly mysterious place, to come and read who they were whenever I drive by. Most times, I never stop. Some times, I do. And when I do, there is a compelling draw to walk through the cemetery to read who’s there—even as no one’s really there. That’s a part of the paradox.
And it always feels as if I’m changed after I do, though it is hard to explain just how, or why. Changed down into the deep and darkly mysterious soul that holds us all. It’s no wonder there’s resonance.
Having recently buried Dad’s cremains in Holy Rosary Cemetery in Moxee, which likely served as a motivation for this post, though cemeteries have always held fascination for me, most of the family did take time to walk about that sacred place—as we should. Other family members and friends are buried there (except they’re not). No one really needed to be told to do so although mention was made to do so in order to ground ourselves intentionally into the earth and clay of the place—and into that moment in our collective lives. Taking intentional time to ground oneself into the silence of a place like that changes you. You won’t know why, but it will. I dare say that if it doesn’t, if you don’t/didn’t feel a change to your depths, then you weren’t offering yourself to the whole experience, you weren’t approaching with reverence. In other words, you cheated yourself and maybe all “those” buried there who need you to be changed. Because THAT is how they continue to live.
You can’t really and truly BE anywhere until you ground yourself into the place you find yourself. And THAT takes intention and effort. In our busy lives of noise, and work, and “must do’s,” and routines, and “obligations,” and blue screens, we are way too often groundless. We are way too often NOT where are bodies are.
Think about how rarely we are in the places our bodies inhabit throughout our noisy and busy days, our noisy and busy lives.
Think then of the irony of cemeteries—the silent, VERY silent places where bodies lay without the “selves” that animated them. Cemeteries are the places where bodies are literally grounded, while the selves return to their rightful home of eternal groundlessness.
another way to live
“gone but not forgotten”
read the etched stone that by all appearances
looked forgotten by whomever should be visiting,
and keeping its upkeep,
and remembering.
markers like this cause me to wonder:
“not forgotten” by whom?
it is said the human condition is fated
for two deaths potentially:
the one at the last breath and
the one when the last rememberer
finally forgets
or dies twice themselves.
most of us hold deep sorrow
at the first.
and we are always indifferent
at the second,
should the second actually come.
and for most, it does.
memory, nowadays, doesn’t last even one generation
in a world too concerned with noise.
the stone’s whole purpose in that sacred place
was to keep the second death
from coming.
but even stone weathers
and disintegrates.
stone forgets too, eventually.
cemeteries are full of quiet, forgotten souls
who have died twice.
for proof,
just look at the stones.
this is why i don’t want to spend my eternity
at rest there,
risking a second death that if i have lived correctly,
should never come.
instead, spread me to the winds and the waters
and the soil;
plant me in the landscape,
and your heart.
if i die a second time,
and i might,
at least i’ll die within you.
together, we’ll watch
how seeds and saplings and the tides
carry the almost forgotten dna
of our remembrance.
[~ original after burying my Dad and walking among the stones in Moxee (April, 2023)]
If you are ever in a place that has existed through time for a long time, add to your list of places to visit any of its local cemeteries. I’ve been drawn to visit some amazing and some heart-breaking “places of rest”: in New England (specifically Boston), in Philadelphia, in Germany, in the old ghettos of Jewish Eastern Europe, in Arlington Virginia…in Moxee.
An aside: it was only recently in my life when I first visited Washington D.C. I think every American should visit Washington D.C. And when you are there, you MUST take the short train shuttle to Arlington, Virginia. And spend at least one half day in Arlington National Cemetery. At least one half day—longer if you can. Consider it a gift from you to you that will offer something so deep, there are no words that can describe it. I’ve been back to D.C. twice, now, since my first visit. And Arlington National Cemetery is the first place I visited each time. It will always be the first place I’ll visit. I can’t fully describe why—you just have to go to experience it for yourself. And trust.
That sacred shrine has claimed me. And I am the better for it having done so.
I think it is still the practice in some countries, and some masters still instruct their students to do so, that monks in training spend time meditating in “the charnel grounds.” Now, here in America, we don’t “charnel” our deceased in the manner of a “charnel ground:” which is to say we don’t allow the bodies of our dead to rot, putrefy, and decompose above ground, exposed to the sun, the moon, the winds, the rain, the animals, and the eyes of passers-by. That would be too natural, now, wouldn’t it? But the purpose of meditating in such places, amidst the sensual onslaught of sights and smells of such a place, is to remind the student in a most unforgettable manner that they will die too. And their bodies will all too soon end up in exactly the same condition as those strewn about them.
It’s a different way to be when you are in a sanitized cemetery, but you can still do the same thing—meditate in such a manner, I mean. In addition to remembering and praying for those memorialized there, which I suspect most people who visit do, cemeteries are also for us, but in this different way: to remind us that life is impermanent and that soon our bodies will be decomposing too.
Cemeteries are symbolic metaphors for gratefulness. Now imagine that! Metaphors for gratefulness.
Whether you believe it or not, the experience of a death practice like this, adds a meaningful depth to one’s felt sensation of gratitude and joy.
“I’m alive right now! And anything is possible. Beauty exists, and I can choose kindness, compassion, and love.”
Cemeteries seem to be places where one can more easily approach, even feel, the heaviness and melancholy of Soul: the Anima Mundi. There is something about those places that cause living humans to need to go silent. It’s an astonishing phenomena. It’s a way of being in a place of deep presence, and our only appropriate response should be reverence. And then gratefulness.
Burial grounds are sacred places; humans have buried their ancestors, science is telling us, for over 78,000 years. The paradox is that when you go to visit a special person in your life who is buried in a specific place, you’ve actually brought that person with you, in the memories and emotions evoked from your heart: the one and only true cemetery of a loved one. So although they are sacred, these cemeteries I mean, we don’t need them. After all, no one is there.
What we create by the creation of cemeteries are reminders of what’s constantly in danger of being forgotten, or almost forgotten, written on weathering stone.
Right?
The same feeling of awe could come from the space around a grand oak tree, or a woodland’s brook, or the nesting site of ducks, or the ocean’s edge (especially the ocean’s edge). But we’d have to choose to feel that way—awe is a choice that requires an open heart, and imagination.
I rarely visit the cemetery in Moxee, being that I now live over 150 miles away—I may visit more often now, maybe. But I’ll go to feel something different than to feel closer to (or remember) either my dad or my mom or any of the others buried there whom I might have known in life. If I am melancholy for my dad, no matter where in the world I may be, I need only remember to simply open back up my mending heart.
He’s always there.
Always and Ubuntu,
~ kert
🙏🏼
PS: So now I’m back here in January 2025 adding this postscript after having read “Melancholy” looking for relevance. And I found it. You know up above in the Prelude how I allude to the fact we currently live in dark, cloud-covered times as illuminated for us by Native Lakota wisdom? It doesn’t matter who you voted for, or not—the dark and the clouds and the storms are enveloping us all. Such is the nature of storms; such is the truth that was the idea of America—e pluribus unum.
I firmly believe these times are gifts to us from the Universe to firmly ground us into the miracle that a true democracy is. It can be fleeting and lost if not valued and defended. I believe everyone will be convinced of this soon because too much is being taken away from us all.
As Viktor Frankl wrote in his epic Man’s Search for Meaning: “Everything can be taken from a [human] but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
This is important for each of us to remember. And as cemeteries teach us valuable lessons of remembrance, impermanence, and equanimity, they also remind us where love is always kept. And beauty:
“Those whom you look for are not here,” they seem to whisper upon our entrance onto their sacred soil. “So as you spend time here to call them to mind, and then when you leave, you will have remembered you take them with you still. Just as you always have. Simply…remember, then, touch your heart. See? They haven’t died if they live within you.”
“I’m alive right now! And anything is possible. Beauty exists, and I can choose kindness, compassion, and love.”
Clear skies are in the extended forecast. Even storms are impermanent.
Be a good human, please.
This week’s Bag of Mittens is
. I only hang with genuine, authentic people, even here on Substack. Lindsay is one of those. I may read others, but only those with whom an unspoken energy resonates deserves my on-going, mindful, life-affirming attention. Life’s just too short. These “bags of mittens” are meant to introduce them to you if not only to share my gratitude with them for what they’ve brought into my life—they, though most don’t know it, have become an Alchemy within my own life. Lindsay writes on Substack: she’s a guide, teacher, a guru, and an herbalist adept and at home in nature and often leads students into nature to further their own passion for, relationship to, and connection with our natural world.Lindsay and I have exchanged haiku. Here’s one of her latest:
Lichen on a branch
An entire universe
in Symbiosis
By the way…
Letting your words soak in. I like to think after death to live within the branches of a tree or better yet be a cloud. Love the thought of being in the endless cycle. Appreciate your insights very much 🌱
Beautifully written. My parents, grandparents and oldest brother are all buried in the same church cemetery. My living brother refers to visiting there as going to see the rest of the family. My late husband was cremated and I scattered his ashes in the forest. I will take the same route and have instructed family accordingly. I much prefer to rest among and become one with the trees.