8-7-16

Our dog Rosie and I (and dog Lucky for many years before this) go for a walk up beyond the house on the county road as often as weather and inclination allow. The land around us is packed with rocks and nature periodically thrusts them up through her skin and they protrude at all angles. Some around here charge money for others to come and gather just certain ones for sale to landscapers and home developers in distant places, as far away as California we are told. Sometimes the county scrapes the old road and lays up stones along the way, some bigger than 4-wheelers. When the road is scraped down and widened, the stones are shoved to the side and piled up in new places.

It has been my weakness to fall in love with stonescaping. I am not one of those purchasing rocks for clients in California. I am someone who uses them to build walls and rock gardens, all of which are designed to be small and inviting. I make stone paths to and from the gardens and around the old farmhouse that is our refuge. I have helped build cairns along the side of the county road where the stones are obvious. When I am building I am thinking about how each stone has a better face and a better edge and how that stone will fit in with all the others. No stone is left behind. There is no discard pile of rocks. The walls and gardens are nature's things and she does not discriminate in the beauty of each rock. Every rock has a place in the wall somewhere. Who am I to favor one over another?

Many of my walls were being built when something else was on my mind. When my dad was sick and I worried about him dying, I was building a wall and I dedicated the work to him. When I developed a space in the front of the house for a garden and was beginning the wall around it, the planes crashed into the World Trade Center. I had my portable radio on those days and as the tragic scene unfolded and the nation reeled I dedicated the wall to the victims and their families. I wished into every stone of the wall memories and commitment and healing. Somehow I knew that my hard work to construct something that had heft and stability was what I had to do. I knew that my wall was a small effort at counteracting encroaching death and immeasurable suffering. It was all I could do at the time.

Now, as time has passed and my walls remain much as they were when I first built them, I have taken them for granted. They continue to serve as they did when I laid them in along the garden's edge. But I have forgotten how they came to be metaphors for aspects of the human condition. When I read about someone in the Middle East being stoned, I don't think of my walls. When I hear that someone is "stoned" from drugs, I don't think of them. I am reminded to begin again with the things I take for granted. I am reminded to awaken to those things that have shaped me and which I have shaped. When I do this, I am in a dialogue with the earth. I am once more a resident of this place in our solar system amidst the multiplying galaxies that lie far beyond our measly comprehension. I could be swallowed by the incomprehensibility of it all, were it not for the stones stacked in the walls outside the door of my house. What else can I do but embrace each stone as a marker of this life all of us are leading?

So, one day, Rosie and I were on our walk and the cairn we had helped construct on the county road from all the stones cast up by the grader had been pushed over. In my earlier life, I might have lamented the loss. I might have been angry at the scattering of a precious thing. Stones are precious because of what we make of them. They have our memories and our intentions and dedication. This was a new and different day and the new cairn we began that day was fresh and common, as rocks are common and taken for granted. But we handle each one as though the whole wall could not be built without it. And in truth it would not be the same wall without it. So rocks are like minutes in our lives and like our intentions, too. They are like our commitments and our compassion. They are all the versions of love. They are elemental but we often take them for granted.