Lawrence A.
Hall of Famer
- Location
- New Mexico
- Name
- Larry
I'm glad what I said had meaning for you, and I admire your whole response, especially, " Love may not save us from time, but it does save us from ourselves. "HI Ruby. Thank you for letting me know your thoughts about the picture. I found the cross fallen from its base, but still held in place by a bit of wire, very moving. I've become not so much a pagan as a heretic (when I was 17, the ideas I shared with a kindly local priest shocked him, and I never looked back), but the symbols and icons one grew up with remain powerful. I certainly remember going to the stations of the cross every Friday through Lent (against my -- even as a little boy -- rebellious will). Rebellious or not, though, the sheer mantra-like incantation of the text becomes seared into one's soul.
What this little, neglected cemetery demonstrates powerfully to me is the need to love one another -- not in some fluffy, whimsical, squishy at the edges sense, but within the hard-scrabble world where time and age -- as well as anger and self-righteousness -- will overcome us. (I don't claim to be especially good at it.) Love may not save us from time, but it does save us from ourselves.
No, Bill, I think you have got it right. New Mexico is still one of the poorer states, and when most of these graves were marked, was poorer still. It is, as you suspected, a Catholic cemetery, and many of the markers are homemade -- wire, metal, rebar and concrete. It's one of the things I find so touching about the place, brave even. I suspect it was never a pretty place, even when it was at the city's edge and the highway did not run next to it, but I find these acts of remembrance (many graves still are decorated at times) in the face of obvious adversity very moving, personal in a way that a large, purchased monument isn't.
Two more in this ongoing series, this time shot with the new (to me) X-Pro 1, with the 27mm lens.
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