A Traveler's Heart

I pick my steps over the uneven cobblestone path and pause, struck by the simple beauty of this place. I just traipsed across the awe inspiring expanse of the moors, with their rolling yellow and green hillsides stained with purple heather patches. The vast landscape punctuated by jagged cliffs of monochromatic granite and the gray day reflected on glassy lakes and puddles. In the wake of such majesty, this secluded cemetery could seem mundane. But it isn’t.
I’ve never been to this place before, but I know it. This place feels like part of me, a part I’m just now discovering, or maybe, remembering. Like the faded voice of a lost loved one that you can’t conjure to memory anymore.
This place is stillness. The road behind me doesn’t matter and the journey ahead can wait just a few minutes. This cemetery, the here and now, grows so vivid that, for the moment, everything else pales in comparison. Dappled sunlight filters through the leaves, filling shadows with warm, living light. A sisterhood of green and gold, dance across worn stone slabs etched with names and dates. Lasting reminders of forgotten lives lived.
The majority of the headstones lay flat on the ground, most started that way, others decided to join them after years of weathering. Some stones still stand as sentinels, guarding their fallen comrades. The years have given the trees free reign of this grove, allowing their expanding trunks and wander roots to crack headstones.
This place may seem trivial, but it matters. I can feel it. The ages of the world have passed here and left their mark like a fly caught in liquid amber. For me, the concept of the world existing before my life and continuing on after is one of those big thoughts, the unfathomable kind. But in this place I see a map of lives lived in isolation from my own. I see a world bigger than myself, and, to me, it’s beautiful.
Beauty fills this cemetery, with the forgotten stories of great loves, broken hearts, betrayals, and premature losses. Home to stories that mattered so much to those who lived them, now dwarfed by time. This half forgotten place stands like the center of a wheel, still and watching, as everything spins endlessly around it. How many great stories has this place seen? Has the world seen? I can’t know, but I can imagine. And I can spread my own story across the world, to the new places and old ones. But, most importantly, to the forgotten places. Because there is beauty in the stillness.