Field Stones

You know that comment about how the unexamined life is not worth living?  Well, it doesn't apply to me!  Goodness me, I never stop thinking.  The older I get, the more the focus of my thoughts are about the accumulation of knowledge for the purpose of connecting dots and creating meaning.  I think it's not a particular unique modus operandi, but I'm sure others are engaged in it.

Even seemingly innocuous things hold meaning.  Take the rocks in my garden.  Most of them are field stones brough with me back in 1994 when I moved here from Kentucky where I was living at the time.  These were literally pried from the fields near my home.  The meaning of field stones for me is the presence even today all across the landscape of the rolling hills of much of the bluegrass state of walls made from these.  thousands of miles of walls and wall fragments made by enslaved people who ancestors were kidnapped and sold.  Pried from the ground and so expertly stacked that they remain a testament to these nameless multitudes of unfranchised black men and women and children. 

The stones themselves are the shattered sedimentary fragments of Cambrian oceans that teamed with the first forms of multicellular life to evolve on our fragile planet home over perhaps as long ago as 550 million years.  So besides a testament to the lives of enslaved people, they are a repository of the fossil remains of ancient life.  And they are exceeding rich with fossils. 

One of my favorites, in fact, is not only full of strange animal/plant fossils, but also hosts a handful of those hollow, crystal lined "bubbly" geological formations called geodes. 

Other stones of note are sprinkled here and there in my garden.  One that resembles an ostrich egg, is a granite stone churned smooth and oval by the formation, movement and retreat of millennia of glaciers.  The same massive sheets of ice that formed the Great Lakes.  A relatively flat and pear-shaped bluish stone was found in the Fundy Bay region of Canada.  There is a also a large striated cream colored piece of quartz.  A set of bluish-green rocks with tinges of rust and shaped very angularly come from the remains of the excavations of the earth during construction of the school where I teach.  In the bast Japanese gardening tradition, I have arranged them to mimic a mountain range.  Amazing things are all around us if we but care to spend a little time looking, a little time wondering, a little time seeking answers to the questions about which we wonder.