In the Granite Forest

The place is just two hundred yards behind the building where I live. It is called Greenwood, and it's one of the larger of our nation's burial grounds. Of course, it should be called Granite Forest, for there is more of stone than there is of wood in that vast field of bodies.

Every time I walk past Greenwood, I wonder: could people be so lacking in trust of the universe and the realities of the formless, that they must leave behind these massive rocks and tablets in the ground where their dark matter rots, free of the light that now lives in another dimension? Is this as firm a grip as they could take of memory?

2500 years ago, Lao Tzu told us something different:

To live in the Tao means abiding in the eternal—
Perceiving completely, with all one’s being:
Life is never exhausted;
It is only delusion that dies.