Sit Spot in the Graveyard
Weeping Willow by Evan Clendenin
Along with younger folks at Beulah Presbyterian church we stepped closer toward the underside of life and green growth this summer. We tried to more fully appreciate the place that death and decay, disturbing as these can be, in the created ecologies God brings forth.
John brought materials for making worm-composting bins one Wednesday. The bins house red worms (Eisenia fetida), which eat, and thereby transform, kitchen scraps and other organic materials into rich soil-makings. The worms help recycle and transform waste and waste-making habits. The ‘worm castings’ contribute nutrients, humus compounds, hormones and enzymes, bacteria, and other mysterious stuff that can aid soil and plant life.
These younger folks stepped right in. They did not complain ‘gross!’ They dirtied their hands making bins. A few of them talked with their parents about bringing home a bin for their household composting. Some of them already had worm-bins at home. They were curious and at ease with looking at these processes of decomposition and decay, and assisting the worms, who do much of the decay work in the creaturely economy.
Youth at Beulah moving worms from our bin to their new one.
We also invited them this summer, like we invite all Wild Indigo Guilds, to find a sit spot. The sit spot furnishes a foundational practice for both our 8 week formation series, and stepping into ongoing contemplative engagement with earth-tending and Spirit.
We invite you to find a place relatively near you, where you pause, and dwell with the place, paying attention to God with the place and with you there. A sit spot can be a place you return to over and over. A sit spot finds you.
What in a place calls out to your spirit to stay a while?
What called out to them was the cemetery. They stayed a while in that hallowed patch of the first presbyterian congregation in what we now call western pennsylvania. They said they felt peaceful as they sat, writing, drawing, looking around.
Later, John showed them how to take charcoal rubbings off of the old stones. They spoke with startlingly mature insight, appreciation and clarity about death and decay as part of the created order, wondering about the people’s lives, and the meaning of that place among the church grounds.
These younger folks stepped right into that place. They aid us and others to pay attention to such places on the church grounds and elsewhere where land is tended for the deposition of the bodies of the dead and their remembrance among us.
We might wonder with them at God’s presence and working in this place where the dead rest, and their place in our spiritual practice of life, death and resurrection.
We would follow their example in such a ‘long, loving look at the real’ against forces that keep us from seeing in this way. We’re captive to the ‘american way of death’ and the burial grounds it fabricates. Broad expanses of mown, irrigated turfgrass kept greenish by an embalming fluid of insecticide, herbicide and synthetic nitrogren fertilizer incarnate a kind of undead ecology. Concrete boxes keep the thought far away that a children’s rhyme so humorously brings near The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out The worms play pinochle on your snout!
That undead landscape wants to keep trees out. Messy apples attract ‘bees’. And leaves fall. What would happen if someone visiting a grave were struck by a falling leaf! They might be suddenly graced with a moment of contemplation… a grave intrusion.
My wife and I like to stop by and walk a little pioneer graveyard near home, settled down beyond view of the expanding olympia suburbs. The old stones, with weathered names, bits of scripture, and chipped symbols, stand amidst massive firs and aged fruit trees. In the autumn we find pink blush crab apples, and tiny sweet pears. American chestnuts grow where squirrels plant nuts from two large specimens planted nearby 150 years ago.
And garry oaks, the native white oak of western washington, still grace this hallowed ground. The Nisqually, Squaxin, Cowlitz and Chehalis peoples of the south salish sea region continue to collect garry oak acorns, and tend camas lilly patches, that once were part of an extensive agro-ecological landscape based on this cascadian oak savannah. And in little patches, even a fading pioneer cemetery, such fragments and refugia hang on.
A tree planted in the cemetery of Beulah Church
What do you notice in the cemeteries and other burial grounds near you?
In what ways might you, your community, your church, see and tend these places?
What steps might you take to incarnate a more humane, humble and interconnected earthly habitat in such places and beyond?
