Finding Shelter...At A Cemetery | Today's Transitions

**Cave Hill Cemetery | Photos courtesy of Cave Hill Cemetery**

Shelter is my guiding word for this year. It is a non-striving word. A shelter offers refuge, provides safety, and embraces calm and quiet.

The pandemic arrived just about the time I started to incorporate a regular walking routine into my daily activities. At first I strolled around my Clifton neighborhood, but soon tired of traffic, noise, uneven curbs, sidewalk detritus, dog droppings, and fumes.

So, I took to the trees and the timelessness of nearby Cave Hill Cemetery. I sought spiritual and physical solace among the tall trees, breezes, birdsong, clouds, and flowering shrubs. I enjoyed the changing lengths of shadows in every season.

A cemetery might seem a strange shelter, but think about it: for many of us it will be our final shelter.

One might shiver to think of it as only a place of the dead, but of course, there is also Life: trees and birds and ducks and swirling leaves and acorns falling onto the ground in autumn. There are also other walkers. I came to chat often with a bird watcher wearing binoculars around his neck. There was the woman who brought fresh roses almost every morning to tend to her husband’s grave. There were the two women friends who smiled and spoke softly to one another in conversation as they walked.

Then there is me. I walk alone. I enjoy the silence. I don’t listen to music or podcasts or talk on my phone. The whole point is to be with my thoughts. A walking meditation.

Interruptions are few. There are no dogs to be wary of. There are no men running sweaty and shirtless along the cemetery’s interior roads. Only an occasional car driving slowly past, the faint sound of Grinstead Drive traffic, the hum of the mowers of the landscape crew keeping the grounds beautiful and tidy for visitors like myself.

I am no flower, plant, or tree expert and can probably identify only a handful of the many varieties growing here. Of course, that doesn’t make me less appreciative of their beauty. I think of the cemetery as more of an outdoor sculpture garden with tombstones and grave markers as pieces of art as indeed many of them are.

The open space. The solitude. It is quite soothing to go to the same place almost every day and especially in those days of isolation, to face thoughts of life and death.

Cave Hill Cemetery is a historic burial place for many of the famous: Colonel Harlan Sanders, Muhammad Ali, Enid Yandell, and George Rogers Clark.

Although not famous, I too will be there one day resting next to my mother and father. My eternal shelter.