Death is a curious thing
Sitting on top of a hill aside a cemetery overlooking a dam.
It’s funny how cemeteries evoke thoughts of time. You only need a name and a date to begin to imagine someone’s life. A complete stranger yet you see their clothes, imagine their struggles, feel the heartache of their loved ones.
I’m new round here yet I can’t help but feel the age of the place. It’s not just the buildings, painstakingly hewn from stone. It’s not the worn paths or the gnarly old trees. This land just feels carved. It makes everyone feel new around here.
The scars of wind, rain, fire, volcanoes, colonisation are everywhere you look. Like one of those centenarian WW1 vets you see being pushed at the annual ANZAC parade. You look at someone like that and can’t help but imagine the weight of 100 years of emotion.
I look around this cemetery and see giant old pines. Some of them are so old they are beginning to come down. How many tears have been shed under these great, gnarly limbs? Even their next generation is here at the ready. Young saplings, not 5 years old grow strong and straight. In a century they will be the old guard, and these giant pines standing like sentinels over the gravestones will exist only as memories in the old people waiting their turn to lay their bones here.
Yet like the old bones, these old trees will break down and live on in this soil. As the wind, rain and sun slowly sculpts the landscape. As the grasses and weeds come and go with the seasons. Nothing really leaves from here; rather slowly shifts and heaves and breathes into something new.
We’re interesting us white fullas. We have these special places for death to live. We see death as some kind of full stop. Even when the evidence is all around us that nature comes and goes; ebbs and flows. We bend and break like the big branches on the giant old trees. Sometimes we break off and a new tree will grow. Sometimes we just need to start again from seed. In soil, made from the broken down bodies of our ancestors.
Still all we see is a full stop. This blind determination to see ourselves as something apart from wilderness. A fight to be in control of it. All it ever seems to do is make us less able to see.
I was talking to a friend about how abundance makes us blind. As the old saying goes “we can’t see the wood for the trees”.
Reforming relationships with each other and this great land we stand on is a journey everyone is now on; whether they like it or not.
Perhaps we need to start with death.
Maybe it’s time to strip away the strange layers of ceremony we put up to shield ourselves from facing, embracing and celebrating death. Death is simply a part of a cycle that must go on for us all to exist.
There’s been a lot of death recently. One is too many, one billion is unfathomable.
But perhaps all this death is the start of our collective new life? I hope this new life comes with new listening, understanding and appreciation.
