Why we pick up fallen stones in the cemetery
We need the kind of planetary care that I've learned from a cemetery’s tending to headstones.
Photo by Ian Chen, June 2024
Earlier this summer, I was taking a tour of Green-wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Green-wood is one of my favorite places in New York. It’s an oasis of contradictions: so full of life and a place of honoring death; in the middle of dense urbanized Brooklyn, yet home to thousands of trees, meandering hilltops, and flora and fauna you rarely see elsewhere in the city.
While on this tour, Gabrielle — our trusty guide, and the Public Programs Manager for the cemetery — noticed a crooked headstone in disrepair. Sliding off its base, the stone was worn down. Barely a trace remained of its original engraving, making it unclear who it may have belonged to. She could tell the damage was recent — even heavy stones can lose their footing.
Gabrielle made a report to her colleagues so that someone would come and repair it. But being so old, with no legible engraving, and likely no particular grievers mourning over it, it was easy to think, “Who is the headstone repair for?”
It’s a question akin to: if a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Like a zen koan, I think this question is meant to be unraveled, rather than answered.
The cemetery has a moral and spiritual (and perhaps aesthetic) obligation to tend to every ornament of loss with equal care. Most headstones at Green-wood are documented with who it belonged to, but not all lives — in life and in death — were always treated equally. Last year, while in residence at Green-wood, artist Rowan Renee documented, recognized, and honored the lives behind unmarked graves, lives often treated with less regard due to racism and classism. The artist described their work as “an act of care for those at the margins of our collective memory.”
This kind of care sticks with me as I think about climate planning and ecological loss. By and large, climate stewardship work is a kind of quiet, implicit tending-to that’s beyond doing right for a particular someone, but rather, extending care that’s about our relationship to life itself. There’s not often much direct visibility around this kind of care. No stadiums of applause, few if any heartfelt handshakes, no smashing the “like” buttons. Care such as this, like the falling tree in the forest, exists in the realm of mystery. The true reward of this work is the gift of living in reverence of life itself. The old headstone is a representation of a life lived, and thus, an embodiment of all lives lived. And so we adjust the askew headstone.
A little poem I scribbled in my notebook while on the walk:
Sets of sentient, sweet hands,
aided by tools of repair, adjusting a heavy stone,
in the silence and secludedness of the cemetery
Can we, too, hold this kind of reverence to honor what was and is? Can we thaw the ice of our inner libertarians, our inner “me vs everybody else” and “us versus them” parts that deludes us into thinking that I only need to care about what I own, what I’m in direct relationship with, what other people see me post online, or what I think affects me and “my people”?
I believe the answers towards ending suffering exist in how we tend to each leaf, a piece of trash on the sidewalk, the ants that search for food in my kitchen, or a landscape that once was floodplains and now regularly floods again. The path to liberation runs through these kinds of subtle, soft, interspecies interactions just as much as in how we show up for other humans and for ourselves.
In lives like ours, we need constant reminders that we are not separate. We are a mere moment — created by what came before and made to be potent matter for what comes next. We exist in the context, you might say.
How we show up for an old wobbly rock, with its etchings long faded away, feels like the perfect way in to think about how we honor our planet.
Ari and kwonyin in the catacombs at Green-wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, NY. Photo by Ian Chen, June 2024.
Join me on Tuesday, Sept 24, 2024 at Brooklyn’s beloved Green-wood Cemetery for an evening exploring Memorializing Ecological Loss. Beloved panelists and I will discuss our own changing relationships to place/land/ecology, how we honor those species and habitats that no longer are, and the role landscape itself can play in our grieving process.
Event includes a walking tour, a panel discussion, and an interactive group activity.
Sign up below for updates like this from Ari: