What the dead want us to know: Light and shadow at The Old Burying Grounds
The Old Burying Ground is located in Beaufort, NC. The graves at this site date back to the early 1700s. If you’re interested in more details, there are many resources online. There’s a map of some of the graves with names and dates, and even a walking tour you can download.
For each body and soul in this graveyard, as in any graveyard, there’s a unique human story fused with some balance between adventure and the mundane, love and loss, joy and sorrow. Weave those tales together and you’ve got a scaffold on which to build more nuance, and more understanding. The individual lives form the collective community and we can begin to absorb the history of a place and time. Give it enough pondering, and you can begin to relate it to your here and now.
Words etched onto headstones give us hints – Infant Daughter, Father, Beloved Wife, To My Brother, Our Darling Maud, Annie . . . each of them someone important to someone else.
And all them gently reminding us, the living, that our time here is finite and sacred.
I’ve long believed that we don’t have to wait for the afterlife to find the sacred. It’s all around us, everyday.
Before lifting my camera to my eye, I set an intention of honoring the place and the people long resting here. I invite you to let the shadows and light, the textures and form, the bricks and stones against the live oaks enchant you, as they did me.
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