Zen Sundays

(an excerpt from today's crawl)

My students and I are holding class in a cemetery today, honoring the dead in the best English major way possible - doing a writing crawl. Or, rather, most of us are doing a writing crawl. Some of them are chatting in a circle about special education. But the vast majority of people, I would guess, are wandering through the rows of graves and writing.

I didn't know how many old graves there would be here. Some of them are seriously around 150 years old. And it's interesting to look at the etchings of the names on the graves; for the youngest children, the graves track how many years and/or days they were alive. And some of the graves have flags brushing against them like lovers, gentle fluttering in the wind. Soldiers. Children. Couples. Families. They all rest here, in the cold, under the trees, with only each other and the sound of cars in the distance for company. It seems like it would be a lonely life, if only they still breathed.

The trees echo in their loneliness as they shed their skins for winter, preparing to brace for the long months ahead. Some of their hands reach down, toward the graves, as if to say, "I am here with you, brother, sister, child. I am in this with you." Extensions of God, of immortality, in a brashly mortal world.