River Rocks

I have a secret addiction. I cannot pass by a jumble of river rocks -- those small stones gathered together and sold for landscaping purposes -- without glancing down at them and, at the risk of seeming odd to any passerby, picking up one or two that momentarily pique my interest. And I've found some intriguing ones: a small agate (not of commercial value), some fossiliferous limestone (seashells and the like that have accumulated and become incorporated into stone), a piece of conglomerate (mostly sandstone with some pebbles and fragments of shells incorporated into it, debris left in some ancient riverbed that had current enough to move the "larger" rocks around on the sandy bottom), not to mention things like shale and glistening granite, and so on.

One thing I like about them is that they tell stories about the world that was, so many, many, years back. If one takes the time to read them.

My latest find is a piece of what seems mostly quartz, half dull gray, half dull white, but at one end there's a small quartz crystal -- its glistening is what caught my eye -- and, barely visible to the naked eye, that crystal is surrounded by tiny sinuous reddish lines, their details visible only under a magnifying glass.

That's another thing I like about these rocks, the way that careful examination reveals hidden beauty.

And I think it's not only a matter of hidden beauty, it's also a matter of familiar beauty. The world around us is filled with things that have something to say, if we only take the time to savor them. Not only river rocks, but rivers themselves, and hillsides and meadows and mountains, sunshine and storms, a faint summer breeze or a harsh winter wind, wormholes in decaying stumps and fabulous patterns in frost and ice, the sparkle of the sun on still lake. Imagine if the sun somehow rose only once a year, how we would look forward to that event and watch for the growing rosy shine on the clouds.

And the same goes for the people around us. It's so easy to look through and past them. In the aggregate we're just a jumble of river rocks. But each of us is an agate, a diamond, a history.

A miracle waiting to be seen.