Mindful Tip: A Graveyard Stroll

If you’re looking for a quiet, enjoyable time to connect with your children, take a walk through a graveyard. Graveyards are often in beautiful park like settings–quiet, with no traffic and provide interesting historical information to activate your imaginations.

Children, like adults, instinctively slow down in a graveyard. Though, you’ll most likely need to remind your youngest and most boisterous, not to actually walk on the gravestones and to be respectful as the stones represent someone who once lived, like you and I.

Explore the graveyard and take time to wander the paths and read some of the oldest gravestones. Every grave tells a life story and it is interesting to speculate, with your children, on the lives of some of the deceased.

As the children and I read the gravestones, our minds filled with questions and stories. Who were these people? How did they live and die?

Despite the chilly temperatures, our greatest yearning was to simply sit in the graveyard, in late afternoon sun, soaking up the landscape; giving our minds the space to recreate a time and a place over one hundred years ago when the graves were people, breathing in the smells of the thawing spring grasses like us.