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I've discovered joy in a graveyard. My most peaceful and life-affirming moments are walking along the assorted paths of Greenwood Cemetery, among the trees, flowers and assorted headstones, monuments, mausoleums, and plaques. With robins hopping and tweeting, occasional herons, and a lone smiley face deflated balloon that someone left tied to a tombstone.
It's an odd-feeling walking there alone in the evening hours as the sun wanes in the sky...still bright but not quite so bright, mask just below my nostrils, until I hear voices rumbling in the distance, or see a walker coming towards me, eyes glued on their cell phone - and up the mask goes...And I find myself wondering why they are looking at their cell phones in such paradise? Is this why the pandemic strikes? Because we've grown so bored of the natural world - our eyes are glued to a screen - until that is literally all we see? I don't know. For myself, taking a break from the screens, the phones, and all of it - feels kind of like bricks falling off shoulders or a veil lifted from the eyes. Sure I raise my phone to capture images here and there - to share later on various social media platforms, this one among them, but that feels different somehow.
The breeze is crisp on the portion of the face uncovered by the mask. I'm like a bandit- only my eyes and the top of my nose are visible and barely underneath my sunglasses, which are slid quite close to my nostrils. This is to keep them from fogging up from the mask. My breath comes heavy against layers of cloth, a filter between them. Lowering the mask slightly beneath the nostrils when it becomes evident that I am alone, just me, the trees, and the birds, comes almost as a relief - but not quite enough of one to lower it all the way down.
The mask is a reminder of how fragile I am in this brave new world - where a disease could lurk in any or all human contact. The trees, the birds, the grass, the petals, the flowers, the graves are safe and my friends, but the lone human, potentially deadly. We circle around each other on the paths and sidewalks. Walking on grass or the street to avoid accidental contact. Some will see me - and go another direction or path if watching. If not, I'm the one who darts in another direction or path. On the way, a man with a handmade bandana mask, asks in a thick accent where Ocean Parkway is, he looks lost - and I point, stating it's right here, behind him.
They've opened more streets to pedestrian traffic. And established more bike lanes across the city. The neighbors are complaining about how - the streets are now crowded with teens and children, not their own, making a ruckus on skate-boards and scooters and bikes, treating it like their own personal playground. I tell this to my mother over the phone - in one of our daily phone chats - and she points out the obvious, the kids have no where else to play. I avoid the newest opened streets knowing that many will flock there and go instead to the far less crowded and peaceful grave yard - which alas, will only be packed this weekend - on Memorial day, when everyone makes time to visit the graves. And people have been visiting the graves. I see fresh leavings, tributes really, from the living to the dead - who I sense, while they do not, are no longer present. Merely the ghosts of long-shed or in the case of the newly dead, ever present grief lurks there now in the flags, balloons, plastic flowers, and crosses dotting the newly marked headstones and graves, alongside the ancient ones from a century past that sit faded, unremarked upon.
I wonder sometimes as I walk these pathways if this is my way of making peace with death?
The death of what I know. With my own mortality, and more importantly the death of those I love - which are a mere handful. I fear my own death less than theirs.
And death lurks in the shadows and the sunlight now (although less so the sunlight or so I'm told)..and in the unseen places, it's sting, invisible and deadly and closer than before. It lurks outside my doorway. In the steel furniture carrier that sits outside my neighbor's door, on the plastic bag of balloons welcoming a new life in big broad letters just beyond it, on the door handles of the front doors to my building, and on the mailboxes. On each piece of mail and every box delivered. On the innocent old black lady's face as she struggles with a cart down the street, mask less. Or the old man smoking outside the gas station wheezing between puffs of smoke, mask down below his chin. And finally on the woman and her family, walking her ever so slowly towards me on the sidewalk, none of which are wearing masks today.
According to the COVID MAP OF DOOM which I've been consulting since I discovered it in late January, prior to that I was consulting the New York Times Map (which isn't as accurate)...there are now ( Read more... )
It's an odd-feeling walking there alone in the evening hours as the sun wanes in the sky...still bright but not quite so bright, mask just below my nostrils, until I hear voices rumbling in the distance, or see a walker coming towards me, eyes glued on their cell phone - and up the mask goes...And I find myself wondering why they are looking at their cell phones in such paradise? Is this why the pandemic strikes? Because we've grown so bored of the natural world - our eyes are glued to a screen - until that is literally all we see? I don't know. For myself, taking a break from the screens, the phones, and all of it - feels kind of like bricks falling off shoulders or a veil lifted from the eyes. Sure I raise my phone to capture images here and there - to share later on various social media platforms, this one among them, but that feels different somehow.
The breeze is crisp on the portion of the face uncovered by the mask. I'm like a bandit- only my eyes and the top of my nose are visible and barely underneath my sunglasses, which are slid quite close to my nostrils. This is to keep them from fogging up from the mask. My breath comes heavy against layers of cloth, a filter between them. Lowering the mask slightly beneath the nostrils when it becomes evident that I am alone, just me, the trees, and the birds, comes almost as a relief - but not quite enough of one to lower it all the way down.
The mask is a reminder of how fragile I am in this brave new world - where a disease could lurk in any or all human contact. The trees, the birds, the grass, the petals, the flowers, the graves are safe and my friends, but the lone human, potentially deadly. We circle around each other on the paths and sidewalks. Walking on grass or the street to avoid accidental contact. Some will see me - and go another direction or path if watching. If not, I'm the one who darts in another direction or path. On the way, a man with a handmade bandana mask, asks in a thick accent where Ocean Parkway is, he looks lost - and I point, stating it's right here, behind him.
They've opened more streets to pedestrian traffic. And established more bike lanes across the city. The neighbors are complaining about how - the streets are now crowded with teens and children, not their own, making a ruckus on skate-boards and scooters and bikes, treating it like their own personal playground. I tell this to my mother over the phone - in one of our daily phone chats - and she points out the obvious, the kids have no where else to play. I avoid the newest opened streets knowing that many will flock there and go instead to the far less crowded and peaceful grave yard - which alas, will only be packed this weekend - on Memorial day, when everyone makes time to visit the graves. And people have been visiting the graves. I see fresh leavings, tributes really, from the living to the dead - who I sense, while they do not, are no longer present. Merely the ghosts of long-shed or in the case of the newly dead, ever present grief lurks there now in the flags, balloons, plastic flowers, and crosses dotting the newly marked headstones and graves, alongside the ancient ones from a century past that sit faded, unremarked upon.
I wonder sometimes as I walk these pathways if this is my way of making peace with death?
The death of what I know. With my own mortality, and more importantly the death of those I love - which are a mere handful. I fear my own death less than theirs.
And death lurks in the shadows and the sunlight now (although less so the sunlight or so I'm told)..and in the unseen places, it's sting, invisible and deadly and closer than before. It lurks outside my doorway. In the steel furniture carrier that sits outside my neighbor's door, on the plastic bag of balloons welcoming a new life in big broad letters just beyond it, on the door handles of the front doors to my building, and on the mailboxes. On each piece of mail and every box delivered. On the innocent old black lady's face as she struggles with a cart down the street, mask less. Or the old man smoking outside the gas station wheezing between puffs of smoke, mask down below his chin. And finally on the woman and her family, walking her ever so slowly towards me on the sidewalk, none of which are wearing masks today.
According to the COVID MAP OF DOOM which I've been consulting since I discovered it in late January, prior to that I was consulting the New York Times Map (which isn't as accurate)...there are now ( Read more... )
