Municipal Cemetery, Przemyśl, Poland, September 2006

The Season of Light and Silence
Caracas, November 2025

I’ve always loved cemeteries.
Not in a morbid way, but as places of quiet beauty — spaces where time softens and the world whispers. I think this love began in childhood, rooted deep in Polish soil, in those sacred November evenings when my mother and I would walk among candles flickering in the dusk. All Saints’ Day was never sad. It was golden.

Every year, around this time, cemeteries back home glow with thousands of lanterns — amber lights floating in the autumn mist. The air smells of fallen leaves, wax, and pine. Cold often arrives early. Sometimes snow. But somehow, it’s still colourful — chrysanthemums in fiery orange, crimson, and white, resting beside names carved in stone. People move gently. They speak in low voices. They clean the graves, place flowers, pause. There’s reverence in the air, and warmth, even in the frost. These are the days I carry with me wherever I go.

This year, I am in Caracas.

Last week, seeking that same spirit, I visited Cementerio del Este. It’s a very different kind of cemetery — wide, open, modern, without the stone angels or heavy ironwork I know so well. But it sits high on a hill, overlooking the city like a guardian. The silence there is lighter, more spacious, filled with tropical birdsong and the shimmer of heat. The green is lush, alive, unseasonal by European standards — but something in it stirred the same stillness in me.

I walked slowly among the graves, letting the names speak in silence. I thought of people I’ve lost — some long ago, others more recent — and of how memory works its gentle alchemy. The body may be gone, but the presence remains. In a phrase. In a gesture. In the warmth that returns, uninvited, on a quiet afternoon in October.

And somehow, despite the heat and the palms and the very un-November sun, I found myself fully inside the mood I cherish so deeply — the spirit of Wszystkich Świętych, the Polish All Saints’ Day. A season not of mourning, but of honouring. Of remembering. Of walking beside those who came before, if only for a few moments more.

Later that day, I shared a meal nearby with a friend. There were traditional Venezuelan dances, music, colour — as if the city itself wanted to remind me that life, too, continues. That remembrance can be joyful. That silence can be part of celebration.

I had hoped to be travelling at the end of the year — to Panama, perhaps even to Canada. But life, as it does, shifted. Work took unexpected turns. Plans changed. And so, it seems I’ll be staying in Caracas a while longer. I won’t be visiting friends just yet — but I will have the privilege of being here, in this resilient, surprising, vivid city. A city that offers its own kind of light.

And maybe that’s the deeper lesson of this season:
That presence matters more than place.
That memory travels with us.
That beauty finds its own way in.