52.41... graveyards
Not a great image, but nicer this way View On Black
One of the panoply of paradoxical conundrums that is me is the fact that I love graveyards, but almost never visit the ones where my ancestors are buried. I think that's because I like cemeteries for their aesthetic qualities and the abstract concept of them, but have issues with both the reality of modern day funerary customs- which aside from cremation are so terribly unecological- and the concept that life ends in some final way. Decades before I was buddhist I had in my head my own little notion of what happens to the powerful energy force that is a human being after their "earthly body" gives out. Much too complicated and abstruse to try to describe; suffice it to say the concept of this being one of many lives we will have always made sense to me.
From my childhood I don't remember my mother being afraid of much, but she was quite superstitious. When I broke a mirror last week accidentally while trying to make my weekly portrait, I could hear her in my head cluck-clucking about the seven years of bad luck that would no doubt be coming my way. So I clearly remember her making us cross streets so we would avoid walking by a graveyard. Which- of course- made them forbidden, and therefore terribly terribly appealing.
Having grown up in a large family I had developed pretty good skills for studying in loud cacophony, but was not prepared when I arrived at college for how often someone in the dorm would interrupt your paper-writing with some tempting suggested outing. Also, having lived in quarters for so many years with six other people and a dog, freshman year was the first opportunity I'd ever had to experience solitude once in a while- and I loved it! So it wasn't long before I discovered that the small 1700's graveyard that sat half-way between my hillside dormitory and the main part of the campus was a pleasant place to study. If I leaned against the back of one of the larger headstones high on the hill noone would be disturbed if they were visiting, and the birds, like me, found it the most peaceful place on campus, so I had companions who were not trying to lure me to a bar or a movie. The gravestones were beautiful in that simple colonial way, and because I didn't know better then about the damage it can cause, my dorm room was decorated with rubbings from a few of my favorites.
From that point on, whenever I saw a pretty graveyard in a new place, small or grand, I would visit it. Not a compulsion, but always a pleasant excursion. Years passed, and sometime in the early 80s I think it was my housemate John who introduced me to Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, MA which is truly about my favorite place on earth. It's acres and acres of landscaped cemetery that is so large it has two sizeable ponds, a high hill with a tower that gives a view of several miles, a picturesque dell with a vernal pool the size of a pond, and so much land that the paths have street-signs (Wysteria Path, Holly Lane, ...), New visitors are well advised to make the tiny donation to obtain a map lest they spend a bit more time there than planned when they can't find their way out. I've been visiting this magical place for over 20 years, to the point where I'm just recently bold enough to visit without my dog-eared map, but sure enough, when I was there last Thursday I found myself in a section I'd never explored before, and was lost for a pleasant but disorienting half hour. The map is also useful because it points out the many many famous graves there; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mary Baker Eddy, Robert Gould Shaw, and a bevy of names- some of which don't have three components :-) - that are well known in literary or history-loving households. If anyone's interested in how beautiful the place is here are a few of my humble sets of images from there (soon I'll post a set of Thursday's autumn photos).
www.flickr.com/photos/43071680@N00/sets/72157600177014949/
www.flickr.com/photos/43071680@N00/sets/72157594561145209/
www.flickr.com/photos/43071680@N00/sets/72157594373853228/
And better photographs on the official website- www.mountauburn.org/ Unlike so many historical cemeteries, this one is still a very active burial ground- I had to carefully skirt three funerals on Thursday lest I intrude on people's grief- and there are two beautiful chapels and a crematorium on the grounds. It's also, because the substantial and knowledgeable grounds crew keeps this "museum of trees" so lush and healthy, the premier birding location in greater Boston with birders given a key to enter before the official early morning opening. I try to go at least every couple of months to enjoy watching the seasons change and unfold.
So why am I so drawn to this place where I know noone buried, and avoid going to the places where my ancestors are interred? Part of it, I know, is because I've been spoiled by beautiful cemeteries and for various practical and complex family reasons my relations all seem to be buried in hideous modern graveyards where there are precious few natural plantings and rules about what you are and are not allowed to place at a grave. Where my father's parents are interred you can place nothing! at a grave so as to make it easier for the lawn mowing staff. It's a bleak and barren place unconducive to happy memories of loved ones. My mother is buried near her parents in Indiana, a bit too far away for frequent visits, and it's a more pleasant place than the aforementioned (odd, too, to know my Uncle Bobby is buried there near mom since he was one of the groundskeepers there for years). But the design of it is a bit helter-skelter, and the modern tombstones lack the elegance of the places I love, and I prefer to think of my mother more in day to day moments than there. That's not to say I think a graveyard needs to be fancy. I think the most spiritual burying ground I ever visited was a small dirt plot with simple hand-fashioned crosses on the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico. There was something so profoundly personal about those crosses, that you knew were made by those who loved the deceased, that it was moving beyond belief.
One of the delights of flickr has been discovering how many people there are who love graveyards as much as I do. The "graveyard groupies" group is full of them, and- understandably- I'm discovering more and more devotees this time of year as they upload seasonal images. One person who blows me away with his gentle and respectful and insightful images of graveyards is Sunset Sailor. He uploaded this lovely image today and I've been thinking about it ever since. www.flickr.com/photos/sunsetsailor/1652968042/ If you dig deeper into his photostream you'll find others.
It's easy, at Mount Auburn, to think about those in my family who've died with so many generations buried there... so many styles of headstone that are physical manifestations of the continuum of life. Whenever I'm there I like to sit at one of the ponds and remember, and contemplate, and honor those ancestors I've known and loved. I'd like to think they'd approve my visits to them from afar.
. . . . .
This image was, obviously, not taken at my beloved Mt. Auburn. I didn't have a tripod with me on Thursday, and besides was too stupid to think of taking an arm's length portrait. It's taken at the tiny sad sad little historic cemetery that is two blocks from my house. The oldest and most historic graveyard in Somerville, MA, it's bordered by an auto collision specialist, an extremely busy main street, an old brick manufacturing building that now houses a wrestling gym (the nicest of the vistas), and the parking lot of the busiest grocery store in town. It has a locked gate (I know how to sneak in and so do those less benign), rubbish and debris everywhere, is unkempt even after city workers have deigned to mow the grass, and if some respectful homeless folk did not live in the toolshed on the grounds- if you can call a place the size of a large house "grounds"- I expect vandals would have toppled most of the graves by now. Makes me sad every time I walk by, and I've been trying to figure out what can be done to help when it's in such a terribly inhospitable setting.
52.41... graveyards
Not a great image, but nicer this way View On Black
One of the panoply of paradoxical conundrums that is me is the fact that I love graveyards, but almost never visit the ones where my ancestors are buried. I think that's because I like cemeteries for their aesthetic qualities and the abstract concept of them, but have issues with both the reality of modern day funerary customs- which aside from cremation are so terribly unecological- and the concept that life ends in some final way. Decades before I was buddhist I had in my head my own little notion of what happens to the powerful energy force that is a human being after their "earthly body" gives out. Much too complicated and abstruse to try to describe; suffice it to say the concept of this being one of many lives we will have always made sense to me.
From my childhood I don't remember my mother being afraid of much, but she was quite superstitious. When I broke a mirror last week accidentally while trying to make my weekly portrait, I could hear her in my head cluck-clucking about the seven years of bad luck that would no doubt be coming my way. So I clearly remember her making us cross streets so we would avoid walking by a graveyard. Which- of course- made them forbidden, and therefore terribly terribly appealing.
Having grown up in a large family I had developed pretty good skills for studying in loud cacophony, but was not prepared when I arrived at college for how often someone in the dorm would interrupt your paper-writing with some tempting suggested outing. Also, having lived in quarters for so many years with six other people and a dog, freshman year was the first opportunity I'd ever had to experience solitude once in a while- and I loved it! So it wasn't long before I discovered that the small 1700's graveyard that sat half-way between my hillside dormitory and the main part of the campus was a pleasant place to study. If I leaned against the back of one of the larger headstones high on the hill noone would be disturbed if they were visiting, and the birds, like me, found it the most peaceful place on campus, so I had companions who were not trying to lure me to a bar or a movie. The gravestones were beautiful in that simple colonial way, and because I didn't know better then about the damage it can cause, my dorm room was decorated with rubbings from a few of my favorites.
From that point on, whenever I saw a pretty graveyard in a new place, small or grand, I would visit it. Not a compulsion, but always a pleasant excursion. Years passed, and sometime in the early 80s I think it was my housemate John who introduced me to Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, MA which is truly about my favorite place on earth. It's acres and acres of landscaped cemetery that is so large it has two sizeable ponds, a high hill with a tower that gives a view of several miles, a picturesque dell with a vernal pool the size of a pond, and so much land that the paths have street-signs (Wysteria Path, Holly Lane, ...), New visitors are well advised to make the tiny donation to obtain a map lest they spend a bit more time there than planned when they can't find their way out. I've been visiting this magical place for over 20 years, to the point where I'm just recently bold enough to visit without my dog-eared map, but sure enough, when I was there last Thursday I found myself in a section I'd never explored before, and was lost for a pleasant but disorienting half hour. The map is also useful because it points out the many many famous graves there; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mary Baker Eddy, Robert Gould Shaw, and a bevy of names- some of which don't have three components :-) - that are well known in literary or history-loving households. If anyone's interested in how beautiful the place is here are a few of my humble sets of images from there (soon I'll post a set of Thursday's autumn photos).
www.flickr.com/photos/43071680@N00/sets/72157600177014949/
www.flickr.com/photos/43071680@N00/sets/72157594561145209/
www.flickr.com/photos/43071680@N00/sets/72157594373853228/
And better photographs on the official website- www.mountauburn.org/ Unlike so many historical cemeteries, this one is still a very active burial ground- I had to carefully skirt three funerals on Thursday lest I intrude on people's grief- and there are two beautiful chapels and a crematorium on the grounds. It's also, because the substantial and knowledgeable grounds crew keeps this "museum of trees" so lush and healthy, the premier birding location in greater Boston with birders given a key to enter before the official early morning opening. I try to go at least every couple of months to enjoy watching the seasons change and unfold.
So why am I so drawn to this place where I know noone buried, and avoid going to the places where my ancestors are interred? Part of it, I know, is because I've been spoiled by beautiful cemeteries and for various practical and complex family reasons my relations all seem to be buried in hideous modern graveyards where there are precious few natural plantings and rules about what you are and are not allowed to place at a grave. Where my father's parents are interred you can place nothing! at a grave so as to make it easier for the lawn mowing staff. It's a bleak and barren place unconducive to happy memories of loved ones. My mother is buried near her parents in Indiana, a bit too far away for frequent visits, and it's a more pleasant place than the aforementioned (odd, too, to know my Uncle Bobby is buried there near mom since he was one of the groundskeepers there for years). But the design of it is a bit helter-skelter, and the modern tombstones lack the elegance of the places I love, and I prefer to think of my mother more in day to day moments than there. That's not to say I think a graveyard needs to be fancy. I think the most spiritual burying ground I ever visited was a small dirt plot with simple hand-fashioned crosses on the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico. There was something so profoundly personal about those crosses, that you knew were made by those who loved the deceased, that it was moving beyond belief.
One of the delights of flickr has been discovering how many people there are who love graveyards as much as I do. The "graveyard groupies" group is full of them, and- understandably- I'm discovering more and more devotees this time of year as they upload seasonal images. One person who blows me away with his gentle and respectful and insightful images of graveyards is Sunset Sailor. He uploaded this lovely image today and I've been thinking about it ever since. www.flickr.com/photos/sunsetsailor/1652968042/ If you dig deeper into his photostream you'll find others.
It's easy, at Mount Auburn, to think about those in my family who've died with so many generations buried there... so many styles of headstone that are physical manifestations of the continuum of life. Whenever I'm there I like to sit at one of the ponds and remember, and contemplate, and honor those ancestors I've known and loved. I'd like to think they'd approve my visits to them from afar.
. . . . .
This image was, obviously, not taken at my beloved Mt. Auburn. I didn't have a tripod with me on Thursday, and besides was too stupid to think of taking an arm's length portrait. It's taken at the tiny sad sad little historic cemetery that is two blocks from my house. The oldest and most historic graveyard in Somerville, MA, it's bordered by an auto collision specialist, an extremely busy main street, an old brick manufacturing building that now houses a wrestling gym (the nicest of the vistas), and the parking lot of the busiest grocery store in town. It has a locked gate (I know how to sneak in and so do those less benign), rubbish and debris everywhere, is unkempt even after city workers have deigned to mow the grass, and if some respectful homeless folk did not live in the toolshed on the grounds- if you can call a place the size of a large house "grounds"- I expect vandals would have toppled most of the graves by now. Makes me sad every time I walk by, and I've been trying to figure out what can be done to help when it's in such a terribly inhospitable setting.