Bear Witness

I went to Lakewood Cemetery late last week to make ICM photographs for my final photography class assignment (a 3-week class that I am enjoying immensely). My intention was to go there and somehow in some way

Bear Witness

to all of my feelings swirling in the midst of this winter’s events, both positive and negative. Somehow I thought that I could use the setting to express the mix of phenomenal beauty and pain of living in this world.

Essentially, all expression has two noble intentions: to try to say what is unsayable and to bear witness to what is.
― Mark Nepo, Drinking from the River of Light: The Life of Expression

I thought that I could meet my grief in the cemetery, a well-defined territory of grief, and transform, express or understand grief better somehow.

What I found there

surprised me and filled me with awe and joy. Astonishing  beauty in a simple sunny blue sky day! A mob of wild turkeys with males displaying their beautiful tails to the lady turkeys and lots of gabbling and gobbling—a reminder that springtime is a time when new life begins. I also found reminders of lives lived, lost loved ones, countless stories, beautiful sculptures, and many many simple plaques with a name inscribed.

What I didn’t find surprised me. I didn’t find a sense grief or loss, rather I sensed the circle of life ever turning. As far as my eye could see, I gazed on markers of someone’s loved ones who had gone before. We are not alone in our grief, we are encircled by a community of living beings and an earth which knows loss and also knows birth, all connected in an unbroken circle of love.

Geese flew overhead, honking loudly. The still bare trees traced beautiful designs across the sky. Cool air caressed my skin, and sunshine warmed it. And the view through my camera showed me the fullness and rightness of life, just as it is.

…

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled —
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing —
that the light is everything — that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

   — Mary Oliver, part of the poem, The Ponds

Wishing you a beautiful week.

May you walk in beauty.