Rocks, Flowers & Time: Opposites Attract

Bowing to the Mystery

I’m in love with these poppies that reseeded themselves amongst the stones of our front garden.

Aren’t they precious and beautiful?

They chose to rise again in a bed of small stones rather than in the soil where they started life last spring because we had a dry winter and rocks help retain water and sustain life.

Moving to the Southwest taught me how essential and powerful rocks are. Lifting and carrying hundreds of heavy stones, I have personally experienced their mysterious healing powers and am constantly amazed at the way they seem both immovable and always willing to nestle and conform to each other when I arrange them.

Surrounding myself with the quiet dignity of large stones has also expanded my appreciation of lowly gravel as well. When I think of how I used to perceive gravel as unnatural or somehow “not-nature,” I shake my head at myself.

Rocks are anything but inert and lifeless. I see them now as the primordial unsung heroes of planet earth.

Almost every new plant I put in the ground now gets a small stone or three to help it along.

The first time I gathered large stones to build retaining walls (permit in hand), I felt strangely elated. Soothed. Connected. As I scrambled back into the truck, I kept thinking, “I love this. I love this.” It’s like I was given a part of myself I didn’t know about.

Even when I exhaust myself heaving and ho-ing rocks to hug raised beds of soil into place, lifting and holding the stones seems to regulate my nervous system and return me to myself. I’ve spoken to other people who carry and move a lot of stones, and they feel the same way.

It’s fascinating how stones and flowers are ancient, wise, and beautiful in opposite ways—one so ephemeral, delicate, and cyclic, the other permanent, heavy, and solid.

They remind me that our human turmoil is a blink of an eye in both flower and rock years—and my own physical life a mere nano second, a single cell in the giant body of the ever morphing, living Earth. This gives me a more cosmic perspective that soothes me and I trust our partners from nature to have the last word—or perhaps, in their generosity, to lead us out of our confusion.

I often think about how we humans aren’t good at large numbers. We might casually say “light year” or “trillion” or “quantum” but really, we can’t fathom these concepts. But when I was surrounded by the breathtaking rock formations that exude their infinity at Arches National Park last fall, I felt like I could almost grasp the phrase “hundreds of millions of years.”

This is the gift the Southwest offers—not the history of human culture like the East Coast or Europe, but the ancient history of the physical world itself—as a body, as a presence.

Living in New Mexico, I have learned that stones are as integral to my gardening as the flowers and shrubs I put in the ground. Together, they radiate a life-affirming ju-ju that feeds me daily. I marvel at their differences and relish in their communion.

If someone came from another planet and asked me, “What is joy?” I’d walk them to a flower.

If they then asked, “What is silence?” I’d hand them a rock.