STONES

STONES

When we first bought the house, I used to have nightmares about stones.  Old man Quackenbush who built the house was stone mad apparently.  To the back of the first lot in 1946 he added a stonehouse of rubble masonry with walls 10 inches thick.  Then a pond, and inscrutable deep stone paths radiating out from the pond.  Stones piled into ersatz stone gardens, long overgrown and hidden by decades of rotting leaves.  The very ground grows stones, new ones heaved up and exposed each year by the frost.  An archeologist's dream: stone steps, stone boulders left in the middle of grass lawns and fields, old stone walls from the original Powell Farm. These last have been there a hundred or more years untouched- too daunting even for the old man to deal with.

I've come to terms with the stones, learned to befriend and even love them actually.  And now I'm the wacky sort that picks up stones wherever I happen to travel.  Just a short list includes terminal moraine aggregate from Long Island, a black rock with a white cross intrusion from Dachau, red sandstone from The Great Divide, white crystalline quartz from Block Island, granite ledge rock from the Maine coast, oil shale from Montana, pink granite from the Maine woods in Jefferson, small stalactite from Howe Cavern, fossil calyx and flexicalymine meeki trilobite from Ordovician strata in Richmond, Indiana, arrowheads skillfully chipped from chert centuries ago in Pennsylvania.

In many ocean places I have picked up stones, such as the pure white lozenges at Harding Beach. Stones that sound to my ears with each wave as applause for the rise and fall of countless tides of life.

I take stones home where they find their way into purses, drawers, pockets, baskets- almost any place that would hold them. I have collected quartz crystals, perfect hexagonal pillars of light.  I have been gifted a pinkish quartz crystal ball with a butterfly occlusion on one side and angelic white wings on the other. This is a stone of dreams.  See above how it photographs and you'll believe me.

A have marveled at some of the great sacred stones of the world that I have seen:  Stonehenge, The Blarney Stone, The Herms in Ireland and Brittany at Carnac.  My own ancestors' bones lie beneath great square granite markers with  deeply carved block letters:  REED, JUDD SHAFER, SEITZER-stones and letters stalwart as the lives they remind me of.  I read in wonder about worship around The Great Black Stone of Mecca. Interesting that the earliest known alphabets were carved into stone:   Elder Futhark is thought to be the oldest version of the Runic alphabet, and was used in the parts of Europe which were home to Germanic peoples, including Scandinavia.

There are many references to stones in Bible that signify faith: “I will also give him a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to him who receives it.” – Revelation 2:17

J. C. Philpot wrote: "So when the Lord is pleased to speak peace to the soul, he drops into the heart a white stone, to proclaim him discharged from the law’s accusations, and interested in his love and blood. And on the stone a new name written. What is this new name? Is it not a new heart, a new nature–Christ in the soul the hope of glory? This is the 'new name which no man knows except he that receives it.' New thoughts of Jesus, new openings up of Scripture, new meltings of heart, new softenings of spirit, everything made new by him who renews us “in the renewing of our mind”–no man knows these things but he who receives them."

The smooth round stones I collect remind me that rudeness, roughness, all manner of hurting sharpness will be smoothed grain by grain in the process of becoming again part of the All.