Do you, like me, believe that stones are sentient beings? That they contain some form of aliveness? That we humans, so trapped in our finite physical bodies, may not be able to see or hear what a stone is communicating … but we can sense it with our hearts?
If so, dear reader: Press on!
On my bedside table is a miniature basket brimming with rocks and shells.
I’ve collected these treasures during decades of travel. I wanted to remember places that are special to me, some of them in far-flung locales. I love this collection of colors, shapes, and textures. It’s a basketful of the Earth’s beauty.
There’s one problem: I can’t remember where any of these objects are from. I didn’t label them. I didn’t keep a list somewhere. So I have no idea of what came from where. Dammit!
It took awhile, but eventually I learned to accept that I could simply love these chunks of Mother Earth in their essence. It doesn’t matter where they came from. They are a mineral record of my rambles around this breathtaking planet.
What to take, what to leave
I also keep an earth altar in my house. (I wrote about it here.) This too is a tactile record of my nature-based discoveries.
Most of these lovelies I picked up during walks on my own land, or during a hike nearby. Some came from farther away.
That bowl of smooth pinkish stones on the bottom shelf? I gathered them from the Green River in Utah. Those bleached white bones behind the bowl? Remnants of the bighorn sheep that live in the sandstone canyons along the Green.
To be honest, I’m sorry I brought those riverine treasures home with me. Why did I do that? Why didn’t I resist the greedy urge to collect talismans of that rafting trip?
I wish I had left the stones and bones there. I wish I had thought it through more carefully. I wish I’d remembered this tried-and-true rule of the wilderness:
Leave only footprints, take only photographs.
‘Dem bones
My friend Betsy George is a retired science teacher and a naturalist. When I posted here last year about my nature altar, she said something important in the comments.
Some natural elements are better left in the wild, Betsy cautioned. Animal bones, for example, can be an important dietary supplement for creatures such as deer, opossum, coyotes, and rats. As they chew on bones scattered in the woods, they’re ingesting calcium and phosphorus.
I think I have learned that lesson. The last time I saw a bone lying in our woods—a deer’s shin, maybe?—I ignored the impulse to pick it up and take it home. A few days later, the bone was gone. Somebody’s snack.
I did the right thing.
Returning a stone
Okay, here’s where we get to the story of the sentient stone.
There are millions of beautiful rocks in the creek that winds through our bottomland, and I admire them every time we walk past. Some are boulders, others tiny pebbles. The water sings as it rushes over them.
This particular stone was extra special: nicely round and smooth, about the size of a silver-dollar pancake, a pleasing shade of silver-gray.
What really caught my eye, though, was the pair of perfectly straight white lines crossing its diameter. Two parallel stripes, like the double line down the middle of a highway. How intriguing! What caused those? I’m not a geologist, so I’ll never know.
What I do know is that I coveted that rock as soon as I saw it. I wanted to have it. Bring it home with me. Possess it.
(See that theme of greed, again? How my attachment to a concrete object was flooding my mind and driving my actions?)
I lifted the stone out of the sandy bed where it lay, underwater, and slipped it into my pocket.
When we got back to the house, I immediately started looking for a place to showcase my new treasure. On the earth altar? Maybe. On the table by the front door where I display my huge snapping turtle shell? Maybe. In my meditation room, where only very special things go? Maybe.
By then, the stone had dried out. Its color was much lighter, a wan shade of white. It looked like a flattened moon rock.
And …. oh, no! Those fascinating parallel stripes were gone. Invisible.
I quickly felt the wrongness of what I’d done. The stone was in mourning. Its soul starved of moisture, yearning for home. And I was the agent of that.
For several days, the misdeed gnawed at my conscience. I had taken this being from its natural habitat, and it was grieving. Clearly the stone belonged back in the creek. It was telling me that.
Meanwhile, I saw social media posts by rangers at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and a group called the Pisgah River Rangers. They cautioned against the popular practice of creating cairns—artful stacks of rocks that invite passersby to add more…and more. The park rangers explained that moving rocks, particularly in streams, can damage aquatic habitats, kill fragile invertebrates, disturb soil and cause erosion and sedimentation.
Lesson learned … again.
On a cloudy afternoon several days after I kidnapped the striped stone, we descended through the woods to the place where I remembered finding it, next to a fallen log that spanned the stream. I knelt at the water’s edge and lowered my friend back into its soft bed of sand and pebbles.
It took only thirty seconds for the stone’s color to deepen back to its original gray. As I watched, the two stripes rose into view like magic, nourished by water flowing over them. Life, flooding back!
My heart sang. Free of guilt, happy I had righted my wrong. Happy for the stone’s happiness.
Happy for the rightness of all things.
I think a lot of us that walk amongst nature have our small stash of collectibles, Earth alters, small wooden bowls full of mementos.
Small pieces of driftwood from Alaska’s Arctic Ocean north coast, sand dollars from the west coast of Washington State, pebbles from the beaches of Canada’s Maritime Provinces, hawk feathers, the ones we don’t talk about taken within the boundaries of a state park. Most I can remember the place from which they came, occasionally I must ask my wife, a woman with a video camera of a memory.
Stone as a sentient being is an interesting concept; there’s no question soil is alive, each tablespoon contain millions of microbes. Rock? Quite possibly too. But either sentient? Science might say otherwise. But is not all of Earth one living system?
I respect trees as I walk by them. They speak to me, I listen and respond back.
Flowers and small green plants; always step over them, following bare spots or the tracks of others.
Leave only footprints, take only photographs; but nature sometimes tempts us otherwise.
Dear Jeanne. I don’t know why you should give yourself such a hard time for wanting to borrow something beautiful and hold it to your heart. It wasn’t greed. It was mutual recognition and then you returned it to its natural place and its parallel lines returned. So you took it on a trip and brought it back home. No problem. 🤷🏼♂️🐸🪷