HOCUS POCUS

Casey was not afraid of ghost.  But, every night when she walked home she had to pass the City Cemetery and the thought of all those hundreds of putrefying bodies buried just a few feet away creeped her out.

Can a child die from fright, from his own…imagination?

‘Johnny, there is no monster under the bed.  I just looked.’

‘Yes, but Dad, he isn’t there until you leave!’

Molly is blind.   Her parents don’t believe her when she says that for the past two nights there has been tapping at her window and a voice whispers ‘Please let me in.’    Her mom says it is just wind and rain; but Molly doesn’t think so.   Tonight she will leave the window open.

How hungry do you have to be to eat the flesh of another human being?  Some might call it cannibalism, but I call it survival.
 

I knew grandma was dead when I opened the front door, but I still called her name as I climbed the stairs.  Outside her bedroom door I hesitated; I put my hand on the knob, but couldn’t turn it: that smell

Three days till Halloween
the Ol'Buzzard

use it you want.  You are welcome.O'B

BURIAL OF THE DEAD AND OTHER CUSTOMS

Cemeteries are a pet peeve of mine.   These massive plots of land in almost every city and town could be put to better use.

There are over seven billion people in the world today and that means that within the next fifty years those seven billion will have to buried somewhere.  By 2050 the population prediction will be over ten billion and still growing making human landfills a serious problem.

Catharine Arnold wrote the book London and its Dead.   People have been buried in the area of London since before the Roman invasion; you can hardly dig a cellar hole without finding human remains. 

I find the whole concept of burial macabre.   People are terrified of being placed in confined spaces – especially the idea of being buried alive.   Yet they place their deceased love ones in expensive coffins and bury them to putrefy and mummify beneath the ground so they can visit the spot and remember them as they were.  One hundred years from now no one will remember, no one will care; but the remains will still be there.

Eliot Patterson wrote a series of Tibetan mysteries.   In one of his books he described a burial practice still existing in some remote areas of Tibet.   There are small communities with generations of families that have earn their living by processing the dead.   Bodies are brought to these communities for religious disposal.  The body is eviscerated and then carried to one of many high mountain caves where it is deposited.  The high altitude and dry cold winds quickly mummify the body where it will remain.  

They also practice ‘sky burial’ where the body is butchered and then the body parts are transported to high peaks where they are left for carrion birds to recycle. 

In India bodies are often cremated by the Ganges river.  Families pay for wood for the cremation fire, and when the fire burns out the ashes and what remains are placed in the river.  Jeremy, on River Monsters on the Animal Planet network says that the catfish near these cremation sites grow to monstrous size from a constant supply of human body remains. 

My stepfather retired as a landscape architect with the Corps of Engineers.  In his later years he lived in Arlington, Virginia where he attended the Falls Episcopal Church in Fairfax, Va.   He designed a memorial wild flower garden behind the church and devised the lay out and policy for the internment of the cremation remains of church members and their families within the garden. 

A grid system is laid out for 847 lots each one-foot square at three separate depths.  The garden can house up to 2,541 cremation remains.  There are no markers but the names of the people interred there are placed on a bronze plaque in the church cloister.  

Myself, I would like to be dressed in a Superman outfit and thrown out of an airplane over New York City, or burned on a funeral pyre at a wild drunken debauchery biker rally, or cremated and have my ashes put in a douche bag and run through one more time – but my wife hasn’t agreed. 

the Ol’Buzzard

THE MEANING OF LIFE – AGAIN

You live you die: get over it. 

Most of us have, at some point, walked through an old cemetery.   The tombstones from the sixteen, seventeen and eighteen hundreds can’t help but fascinate us with their death heads and epitaphs.

Especially in New England the ground is rich with markers from the past.  

Years ago, while hunting partridge outside of Brunswick, Maine, I discovered five small blocks of granite marking grave sites.    Each stone was roughly chiseled with one word: Mother, Father, Son, Daughter, Baby.   I have often wondered about a family that died and no one knew their names.   Was it the plague or an accident that beset a family traveling through the area?   We will never know, for the only memory that is left of these people is five small weathered blocks of stone.   How many people have been buried in the Maine woods with no marker or wooden markers that deteriorated?

The only unique things about the dead in the old cemeteries are the monuments and epitaphs, because we don't know the dead or care about them.    Some of my favorite are:

From a grave in Pennsylvania:   In memory of Ellen Shannon, Aged 26 years, Who was fatally burned March 21^st. 1870 by the explosion of a lamp filled with R.E. Danforth’s Non Explosive Burning Fluid.

From a grave in Massachusetts:   death was caused by bathing.

Another in Massachusetts:   Here lies the body of James Vernon, the only surviving son of Admiral Vernon.

Another Massachusetts: She was very Excellent for Reading and Soberness.

In Vermont:   The Old Nuisance.

And lastly:   She finally shut her mouth.

The point is that someone died and except for the unique stones (and eventually these will wear away) they are forgotten.   Their lives, in fact, had no more point or meaning than some Neanderthal that died in the ice fields of northern Europe; unless it is referenced to present human record.   Unless we say… their descendants…  which is to say that our life and the lives of our descendants is the point. 

After all what would the world be without us, and that is a circumstance that will surely come to pass.

I think that unconsciously we flatter ourselves that the earth exists solely for human habitation.   If we don’t believe the earth is six thousand years old and created for mankind (which means we accept the indisputable proof of science and evolution) we must come to the realization that humans have not always existed on this earth and will not always exist.  It  somewhat takes the wind out of our sails when we realize that nations and governments and leaders and wars and armies are the social concepts of human beings and in the scale of the cosmos are meaningless.    Perhaps we should consider the conundrum that Steve Hagen poses in his book buddhism Plain and Simple  that perhaps “we face the woeful prospect that we’re intelligent creatures living in a meaningless world.” (Though, I have a problem accepting the concept of blanket ‘human intelligence.)

At some point in the future our sun will burn out; at some point our galaxy will collide with Andromeda; at some point our earth will be hit by giant space objects; human climate change is effecting the chemical make up of our air and at some point will be irreversible; at some point a pandemic virus will evolve or be developed and released; or more likely, at some point a fanatical nation or group will bring about nuclear annihilation. 

The short form is that the human race, and the earth as we know it, will not always exist – and the lives of our forefathers and ourselves and our descendants will amount to a meaningless blink in space time.

Back to Steve Hagen and buddhism  Plain and Simple  - this should not be a downer, a reason for despair.   Through what ever accident of evolution, we have our time on this wonderful planet; and because our lives are finite we should not waste a day or an hour or a minute without being consciously aware and meditating on the wonder of the moment. 

Live in the moment, because you don’t matter. 

the Ol'Buzzard