Cemetery Cycle - Place Prompt #7

**Author's Note: Pictures will be added to this post at a later date. For now, enjoy the words.**

Let's do away with the formalities, shall we? None of that date here, time there, weather and temp this and that. We are old friends now, and instead of shaking hands, we hug and kiss cheeks.

Life is a series of patterns. The general way of things happens. Things flow forward, seemingly straight and horizontal. One day, the general way ends up back where it once began. Things repeat their flow, even with a bit of a skew, even with a lot of skew. They are still the same things as before. The cycle is circular. Sometimes I wonder why we cannot feel it when we slide down the far side.

Today the cycle is complete. It is not my last time here, but rather it is the beginning of a new relationship outside of this blog required for a grade in one of the last academic classes I'll ever take. I will return, this time without external motivation, because Homewood Cemetery is a new sort of home, a new sort of retreat, a place which envelopes me in its nature and gives to me when I rarely give back anything but my presence, my thoughts, my typed words. Things will move forward and I will continue to visit, without external motivators. There will be a slightly altered state between us, but not for the worst. It shall go on.

So it makes sense to me that today I see Homewood in the glory of what I first saw it in: precipitation. That first visit those short, quick months ago was in snow. The second in rain. Today, we embrace the tears of the sky again. Perhaps this time the sky weeps for the change in our relationship, never easy, but not always bad. And today it is good.

I finally see what this is all for. There is a funeral which disbands soon after I drive through the black wrought-iron gates by the discolored, weathered bricks of a building. In the distance there is a hearse, guests dressed in black with heads bowed, a fresh plot of dirt in the otherwise green curve of the hill's hip. Maybe this is what the sky mourns. It is the first funeral I've seen since coming to visit. And still, the cycle of peeling apart layers continues. One would think this relatively obvious layer would have been one of the first to be discovered, not the last. Or the last for now. I long to take a photo-- I am far away and the scene is movie-esque, beautiful in that intimate way, but I resist. I respect this place as it shows me perhaps the innermost part of itself.

Instead, I drive on, unsure of where to go. I realize that I no longer fear getting lost. These narrow roads, sometimes crumbling, have all become familiar. I know my way around without a map now. I have been here. And here. And here. I remember this. And this. And this. I stop to photograph an amazing green-tarnished relief on a huge stone behind a pillar surrounded by a circle of graves. It is strange, a crop circle, some odd occult set-up, and superb.

As I drive the roads, listening to mind.in.a.box's Lost Alone, singing just below my breath "I feel sad, so left alone. Words are not enough for me to go on" to the trancy EBM beat, I see it. I see what the cemetery wants to show me today.

It is a large tree, cracked into spiky shards at the very base of its trunk, fallen onto the graves downhill from it. It shrouds these graves, has dislodged some of the stones surrounding it, but is holds them close in its embracing branches. I work my way down the hill. I try not to step on the graves, but I know I do anyway. I rush to this tree. It pulls my heartstrings right to it.

I spend 30 minutes or more photographing this one tree. I get on my knees and peer up through it. I stand at the top of the hill and look down on it. I sit on limbs after I test their stability, photograph gravestones between other limbs. I photograph the little grave stone which sits rightat the base of the trunk, right below the crack. It sinks into the red-brown dirt, muddy from the moisture. I photograph it, the tree bent over it. I photograph the trunk, the bright green moss against the backdrop of grays and browns in the bark. I photograph the age rings of a branch. And then, I look up into the severed trunk of the tree.

This is what the inside of a tree looks like. This is what its organs are made of. This sawdust, this hollow drilled up its spine. It shows me its excruciatingly resplendent bowels, spreads itself wide open before me, a great, organic yaw with a spiked cowl, the most private and personal parts it could ever impress in my mind's eye-- its insides. This is what the cemetery has for me today. We have become this close that I may make love to the very core of its fibers.

And thus the cycle of this cemetery, the tree and funeral offering their death to me after I strove so hard to pick at its life. And this, this is what I came here for. The beauty of the decay. It took a while, but we're finally on that level. I can't wait to continue to discover the nuances of our intimacy from here.

"The world around me starts to spin. Suddenly it starts all over..."
-- "Hold My Ground"
     Funker Vogt