I saw time. It became almost palpable. I was wandering in a cemetery and spotted a tree that had swallowed three headstones. Jolted by an epiphany I don’t fully understand, I found something beautiful, and I can’t let go.
Cemeteries grow my time-sense. Neither clocks nor machines by which we can travel beyond the present, they are nevertheless places where the passage of years, decades, and centuries are manifest. Abounding in dates and ages which measure human life from infants to centenarians, they are also time capsules of culture in which typography, carving, sculpture, and epitaphs illustrate an evolution in the way communities engage the chronological limits of their world. They are rich with time-binding symbols like crosses, soul effigies, Masonic squares and compasses, and willow-and-urn designs that connect generations.
While consecrated to human corporeal mortality and spiritual eternity, other time scales appear in cemeteries from ephemeral flowers or snow in season, to long-lasting chunks and slabs of ancient geology in the form of inscribed monuments. But when exposed to water, frost, wind, and sun even the most durable materials erode. Sandstone flakes away, marble melts in acidic rainfall, and hard igneous granite weathers and fades.
Webster defines “time” as “a period during which something (as an action, process, or condition) exists or continues.” It’s an abstraction, an intangible phenomenon. It can be measured by celestial events or clocks from hourglasses to digital readouts. Although my life is largely regulated by time, it was nothing I truly visualized or could touch until I saw that tree.
It’s a large red maple with a lichen crusted colonial-era headstone partially buried within the trunk revealing only the left half of the inscription. On the tree’s other side, it has fully embraced the front of another gravestone so that the uninscribed back looks like an elfin-sized door fitted into the bark. A third headstone is caught among the roots, and appears to grow out of them.
I’d seen trees clutching tombstones before, but never three at once. Here was a collision of timescales—human, cultural, sylvan, and geologic. I don’t know how long the tree will continue growing around the stones, but eventually it will die. Once released from that woody grip, remnants of the sandstone will persist, but the carving inscribed in memory of the dead will likely be erased. Perhaps those names and dates are preserved in some church or government record on fragile paper or in ghostly digital form. Carving in stone may be the proverbial metaphor for permanence, but it doesn’t pass the test of time.
In a whirling, time-bending second, I found ordinary objects exposing a dizzying convergence of the instant and infinite. Time became something I could reach out and grab, at least for a moment.
