Rock On

I’ve mentioned before that when Carl Jung was still finding his way, at one point he began working with rocks -- building a stone city, investing his spiritual and psycholigical self in a project that was, pardon the pun, concrete.


I find myself doing the same thing as my life moves through a turbulent passage. I’ve been gathering stones and doing some landscaping, trying to live in the moment with things of timeless age. Almost like I’m moved to do it, from some inner voice. Looking out the window at a garden patch in the backyard, I realized what it needed, and the image arose in my mind. So I went off to the hardware store and bought some bags of “river rock” -- stones scooped from some quarry and sifted to be about one inch in diameter. These were not tagged as “decorative rock”, those cost more and I guess are selected for perceived beauty. The stones I bought come out of the bag brown and dusty (or muddy), plain and boring. But as time goes by and the rains come, the inner beauty of these small rocks begins to show, and they turn out to be a panoply of colors and shapes and patterns.

Kind of symbolic of people or even the universe at large. There’s beauty everywhere, if one has time and patience and opportunity to look. Things ignored by us all may in fact hold wonder and beauty. In several places in the Bible mention is made of the stones that were rejected ultimately become the capstones. Or as William Blake said, “to see infinity in a grain of sand.”

Be that as it may, I dumped the rock around the edge of the flower bed, behind the circle of brick that I laid out a couple years back. I then added some larger stones, salvaged from construction sites or places where dirt is dumped. These rocks, too, rarely show themselves until the accumulated dirt of centuries is washed off during their return to the surface. Like the huge rock in my front yard, salvaged from utility workers who were putting in gas lines and had to drag it out; I asked for it and they dumped it on my lawn, a big tan lump. Which washed out to gray, which in turn began to show patterns and even to sparkle with micaceous crystals.

After of these are the end point of a long journey that began in higher ground as the rains and weather -- or glaciers in the Ice Age -- wore down (“weathered”) the mountains and other high points, and stones from all sources were pushed together and jumbled in tumultuous torrents. Hard eges mostly worn off, surfaces glazed and polished, and so on. So they could end up as lawn decorations.

As if they cared or if it mattered in the long run. It doesn’t; my life and all its accoutrements are but the merest mite of wink in the time of a stone. Long after I’m gone the stones will survive. But no matter. Working with infinity helps keep me focused in the moment. Since it will all be taken from me soon enough anyway.