Finding Morning--Blog Entry #1

Washington Cemetery Entrance

Dear good naked morning, it is me again. I cannot remember the last time we spoke, but I remember your face and the way it lights like the moon in its waking. I’m visiting you from the Washington Cemetery where my uncle spends his forever after. Today I am not here for him, but for you; to see your heavy and pure wash tub of a body drip another day onto the souls that do not remember your face. It is 7 am on a quiet Sunday in mid-January and for me you have just woken up. Your sky is bright as the tip of a just-lit cigarette. Your sky is snowing, morning. White stencils fall from her, expiring into each grave, the home of each still body, like fleeting prayers. A pigeon sweeps his breast against her skin, offering, for a moment, a long river in the snow. He knows, even under the snow’s weight, he will remain a part of her.

At this time of year, in this “thin place,” you do not get many visitors. I am the only breathing human body that I can see, but I do not feel alone. Your body, at 32 degrees, falls all around me, pierces my skin like wet strands of hair, to let me know you are here. I am sitting at the edge of a cedar bench, where the land gives a little under the slope of a hill. A squirrel sits on the top of a nameless stone engraved with the words “My Husband” as if she is waiting for someone, as if she has been there a very long time.

This cemetery is called a “thin place” because the boundary between the physical world and the spiritual world is blurred. This is a place where damage and beauty meet, where there is always life among the dead. Are you the mediator, morning; you so close to the spiritual and yet so a part of the natural? Where is my place here? Do you recognize me as among the living or am I too, a blur?

Cemeteries are a landscape for mourning or healing, but I do not feel up for either. It is nice to just be here with you, to be still as your fierce wind tries to level me.  Everything solid—my body, the gravestones, the thick pines—is a shield against him. He is strong and persistent as if mourning some great loss. Last night, in a seeming rage, he threw a tree on its back, tearing its spindling legs from their roots. It lies lifeless today surrounded by a crowd of gossiping headstones. I wonder if the wind feels my body the way I feel his. Do I penetrate his bones, chill his spine? Does his body calm after passing through mine? Does his body heal?

I begin this blog here, with you, as a way to know nature’s role in human suffering and perhaps human’s role in the sufferings of nature. My father visited his brother’s grave almost every day for years. I want to know what he found. Do you know him, morning? Do you know if he is healed? If he is still healing?

From “Forms of Prayer”

Miraculum

Ruth L. Schwartz

1.

Bring me all the days, I say. Beaten, weeping, scarred.

Bring me the blossoming, the hidden branches.

Bring me the promises, the limbs that break them.

Bring me the love, the history we can’t stop making:

sail-planes of the shoulder blades, slope of hip and thigh.

Relentless untamed life of flesh. Sweet grief.

Bring me before and after; wedge me in between.

Our lips and bodies, our burial grounds.

Together, we dig and undig ourselves

like children in sand.

Aerial Photo of Washington Cemetery