WW: Football monk

(From the monks' graveyard. Evidently, Brother Lawrence also worshipped at the altar of the Seahawks.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: In the monks' graveyard

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

A Lament For Graveyards

I augur this the right moment to mention my regret at the passing of graveyards, which ironic development has left my society impoverished to a few woeful degrees.

Many of these are practical. For starters, a cemetery contains a wealth of historical data not easily acquired else. Just the demographics are a treasure. Where did past inhabitants come from? What religions did they practice? What organisations did they belong to, and what was their mission? What light does this shed on the present community? What have we lost? What gained?

In a cemetery you're surrounded by the final statements of multiple generations, reflecting successive changes in values and perspectives. Whenever I move house, one of my first outings is the nearest graveyard. An hour or so and I've got an earthier, more visceral understanding of where I am, more tactile, if not easily quantified, than the one I'll get from the local history books I'll study next.

Burial grounds encode a lot of culture, and if you're paying attention, the whole site, properly examined, amounts to a book in itself.

Then there's the simple peace of the place – the leafy green, the tranquil refuge from the fretting living. I've often botanised and foraged in cemeteries, as being mostly uncrushed by the pounding fist of development, and am especially fond of them as a mushrooming venue.

And of course, there's the sacredness of remains, an instinctive, non-religious kind of consecration we've never fully replicated. (Some cultures – First Nations, Catholic-majority societies, traditionally Buddhist peoples, Celtic homelands – find similar awe in sites that don't contain reliquaries, but industrial values have undermined even their ability to transmit such reverence to recent generations.)

Institutional Zen, in its Confucian attachment to human authority, practices a heretical adulation of the dead – disturbingly, even of pieces there-of – and while I'm reflexively uneasy with this, I do wholeheartedly embrace the sangha of the past as an indispensible source of companionship and insight. Their presence is felt strongly in cemeteries.

Still – speaking of irony – no-one on either side of my family has been interred for 70 years, making us yet another cause of death to the dead. The usual suspects are afield: the extreme expense of burial, for the most part, but also a callow, pseudo-logical insistence that we've no need of graves to honour and remember our loved ones.

Which is, of course, tripe. I would in fact greatly cherish a grave where I could visit my parents and grandparents, and the dear regretted friends now leaving this world at ever-greater rate despite my pleading insistence they reconsider.

No, the nondescript region where we will scatter my mother's ashes will not replace her grave: that specific plot of ground where what's left of her articulated body would drift toward new and different existences under a solid square of stone that I can see and touch.

Not even almost.

And as I myself will also receive no such treatment, I must eventually commit the same sin of cenotaphery, and drive yet another nail into the coffin of, well, coffins.

Not that I'd impose a traditional burial on my survivors, of course. I get it; things have changed. And although I accept that as a Zenner, I do much regret my headstone. Because I've got the most awesome epitaph ever:

"Nothing is carved in stone."

How happy I'd lie below such a koan.

Good hunting to all of us on this, the annual Druid crusade to keep the dead dead.

(Photo of Tomnahurich, my favourite graveyard to date, courtesy of Derek Brown and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: George Bush headstone

(This is the resting place of the first US settler in Thurston County, Washington, one George Bush. No, not that George Bush. This one died [at home, of natural causes] during the American Civil War.

He was also African-American.

But he's most remembered for his legendary generosity, lending food, equipment, draught animals, and seed to subsequent arrivals – often not insisting on repayment. He's a man much commented in the historical record, having literally laid the foundations of his community, and of whom I've yet to encounter a single criticism.

He was also the subject of a concerted [though fortunately unsuccessful] effort to deprive him of his vote and property, based solely on his race.

Beside him lies his wife Isabella, here in Thurston County's first public cemetery – which was established on a parcel of the Bush homestead that they donated for the purpose.)

Grave Advice

One day Nasrudin was walking down a country road when he saw a group of horsemen riding toward him at great speed. Fearing bandits, he quickly jumped over a nearby wall and found himself in a graveyard.

"Where to hide?" he cried. Looking desperately about, he spied an open grave.

Meanwhile, having seen his troubled behaviour, the riders dismounted and followed Nasrudin into the cemetery. At length they found him trembling with fear at the bottom of the hole.

"Ho, fellow traveller!" they called down. "We were riding this way and saw you flee something. Do you need any help? Why are you in this grave?"

"Well," said Nasrudin, "as to that, simple questions often have complex answers.

"About all I can tell you is, I am here because you are, and you are here because I am."


(Photo of Adolph Schreyer painting courtesy of Sotheby's and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Monks' graveyard

(Brothers' cemetery in the forest behind the Benedictine monastery in my home town. One of my favourite places since childhood. Plus I saw a mountain beaver here today.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Cemetery fudo

(Eight-strand kongo kumihimo in funerary white, red, and
black on a joss coin ring. Hung in a stand of bamboo.)

WW: Largest and oldest chestnut in the US

(The plaque below lays out the basics of the story. This American chestnut [Castanea dentata] is thought to be the largest, and possibly the oldest, left on the continent, after an introduced blight killed off virtually all of the once-ubiquitous trees. Because they're not native to the North Coast, this one had no peers to communicate the fungus. Today it's the centrepiece of a cemetery in Tumwater, Washington.)

Graduation Meditation

I made this fistful of fudos for a friend's daughter who just graduated from high school. Graduation is an odd rite; we tell young people their lives have changed overnight, utterly and irreversibly, and encourage them, by our silence if nothing else, to party like all their problems are over.

We really don't do this in any other context. We celebrate New Year's, we celebrate weddings, we even celebrate graduation from other institutions, but we never say "all is attained!" This already bothered me when I graduated. I get it that we want to emphasise the accomplishment and celebrate the opportunities. I'm for that. But "free at last!" is simply – maybe even tragically – a lie. (As I put it myself all those years ago, the truth is more like: "Responsible at last". But I guess that doesn't look as festive on a cake.)

And now that I'm old, I've noticed something even more sinister: the near-universal insistence of grups that a person knows nothing at 18. Yet people that age are in fact not children. (Neither are 16-year-olds, or even 14-year-olds for that matter, but that's another rant.) I don't know if we do this because it makes us feel inadequate to see these dynamic young adults gallivanting about, or because we still have a retinal image of them in diapers, or maybe we just like wielding power over others. But 18 is grown-up. Newly grown-up, sure. Still in need of counsel, of course. But grown-up. (And let's be honest, homies: that second one never changes.)

Therefore, by way of conceding to this young lady some of the power that's hers by right, I included the following note:

At your age there are a lot of older people telling you that you haven't had any life experience, and therefore you have no wisdom. Now that I'm old, I can tell you that 18 is in fact not as much as 50. (And I'm beginning to suspect there may be numbers even larger than that.) But 18 is still a lot – much more than old people think. (Or maybe just more than they remember; the years take things away, too.) Fact is, I had wisdom at 18 that I've since lost, somewhere along the way.

So here are 18 fudos, one for each year of wisdom you've accrued. Hang them in places that are special to you, or will become special to you later; mark your own trail, blaze it for others who follow; give some to friends and strangers. They're yours to do what you want with.

Remember that the more abused the ring, the more power it has. Just like people. Some of these have added meaning as well. The diamond one recalls the Diamond Sutra. The square one proclaims the Four Noble Truths. The Chinese coin with cord in the colours of the Three Bardos of Death is a cemetery fudo. And the one with the broken ring and four Franciscan knots is my own proprietary design. All fudos say, "The world is full of bastards, but an army of compassionate seekers has your back." Mine adds: "… and they'll have to get through me first."

All peace and good fortune to you, young sister. No time for small minds; eyes on the prize.

Eighteen is enough.

Robin

PS: And if anybody still tries to tell you it's not, tell them you won't hear until they've made 18 fudos. That crap takes forever.

WW: Jewish cemetery

The Jewish community in the North Coast town where I grew up kept a low profile; though it gave us a few influential pioneers, I never met a practicing Jew until I grew up and moved away. But we knew they were there, thanks to a discreetly dignified synagogue downtown – which never seemed to be open – and this tiny section of the Odd Fellows graveyard. Giving rise to the following explanation: "One day a Jewish person came to town, built a synagogue, and died." Judging by the pebbles lining the memorials, rumours of the community's demise are greatly exaggerated.

Another mystery for us young goyim: "Who's Beth Hatfiloh?" Solved by my Lutheran friends: "She's a friend of Gloria Dei!"

WW: Candid capture of my practice

(Glasses put down on the way back in from the beach, before a bundle of Chinese coins for making cemetery fudos; reflection of me in the left lens and my Buddha bowl in the right.)