As remarkable and inspiring as the living, natural word is to me in all her abundance, rocks still enthrall me. Like most children, I loved collecting stones, putting them in my pockets, then lining them along a windowsill. Happily, my parents facilitated this early childhood fascination and took us on fossil-hunting expeditions. I hungered to find crystals and precious stones, and I coveted many a rock at stores and venues that sold such items.
I was thrilled to discover that my own children gathered stones in their pockets, and Santa even delivered a rock polisher to my eldest daughter one Christmas. Now, I love to watch my granddaughter sitting happily among the pebbles of our driveway at the lake, sifting them through her fingers.
I am flooded with many memories of rocks and stones as I write—watching my husband, Harvey, skip beautifully colored flat granite stones gathered from the shore of a glacial lake, buying a turquoise colored rock for my daughter just because it was pretty, the brain-shaped rock covered in fossilized coral that my father found and that still lives at my parents’ house, and gathering and saving small pebbles from my travels.
Then there are my memories of the solid stone walls of the Grand Canyon in all its multi-hued splendor, and the fantastical formations at Bryce Canyon and Arches National Park. Or the sheer cliffs of distant shores in England and Italy, and nearer ones in Yosemite. Or incredibly high pinnacles of majestic mountains of stone in Spain, Switzerland, and Colorado.
When I meditate, I like to place myself, in my mind’s eye, on a sunny rock in the middle of a stream situated in a deep forest. The solidness of the rock grounds me as the melody of the waters dance, and a breeze gently lifts the hairs on my arms. With all my senses engaged, I can just be.
As ephemeral as life is in all its varieties, the rocks endure. Yes, weathering does eventually erode, but stone will still outlast the longest living organism. Decay and rebirth of a plant or animal into another organism is a miracle, but so too is the persistence of mineral, even as it wears to sand.
It gives me comfort to know that my brief life is but a moment in the “life” of a stone. It places my problems and frustrations into a perspective that lessens their hold over me. Yes, what I do matters, but the rocks tell me that my concerns are but a brief moment. Because my time is brief, what I do and say really does matter if I want to make a difference and live a life of abundance, joy, and love.
Imagine all that the stones have seen and heard, bearing silent witness to life’s transitory passages. They lie still, and still the stones live on.