Memento Mori - Stories in Stone

The stone slabs stand and lay fallen in long forgotten cemeteries overgrown with grass and foliage, amongst empty cans of special brew and cider bottles, fast food wrappers, tab ends and hypodermic needles, these once sacred grounds & final resting places of the long forgotten now offer solace to the cities socially forgotten, the outsiders living on the fringes of society, the homeless, the drunkards & the drug ravaged, the damaged & mentally ill, those who find sanctuary amongst the ghosts of the past as they are equally left behind, ghosts of the living kind.

The slabs worn and faded broken and cracked ravaged by the river of time, the masonry, the scribing, the last surviving evidence of the once lived & loved souls of the past, the loss the love the pain etched in stone, touching and reading the slab is to reach back through time and feel a brief but real connection through the medium of empathy & humanity with the souls of the past. Messages sent generations ago over the worst days of life, the days of grief, of loss of loved ones by those survived. The message a beacon of the life that once was and of the love that lives eternal, the message that stands and identifies the last resting place of loved ones that would be quickly overcome by nature but not so quickly in grief, a message that shouts out through time that they were here! and they lived! and they loved! and they breathed and spoke and saw and touched and thought and laughed and danced and now, back then, we miss them! and we cried! and stood by their grave side every day and every week and as we healed in loss we never forgot them, we came back to this spot, to this place and grieved again, we remembered them and paid our respect and we grieved on birthdays and anniversaries in summer and autumn & winter and spring again we sat and talked and thought and cried some more, and laid flowers and poured drinks and kissed the grass and patted the stone until at last we joined them again. These messages still transmitted, still sailing the river of time, received again today or tomorrow to me, to anyone and everyone who cares to look and read and think and reflect, messages of love and grief, of life and death. Statements of existence, records of love that themselves do not last forever as with every passing day, one after another with each gust of wind and each drop of rain gradually reduce the slabs to bald weathered stone and then broken stones on the ground, until they are grains of sand on the banks of the river of time yet the stone that stands is not the only legacy left from the people of the past as we are them and they are us until we come to pass, until humanities time comes to pass.

Until then when I walk through these deserted graveyards camera in hand I soak up the silence and the beauty of the still sacred but long forgotten resting grounds, I think of the people of all those that I never knew resting in the ground below, I read the weathered scribing’s and etchings and wonder how many more rain falls and winds until these messages sent through time are gone forever, until they never where and in turn until we never where too. So I follow the light where ever it takes me down these overgrown paths and I read the hard worked stories in stone and I connect to the people in my mind, in my soul and in a some way they live again, in the heart of humanity downstream of time and I take the photo and share them with you so they can live some more.