(Image: Andy Goldsworthy)
“It’s time for you to have it,” my father announced, heaving the rock into my hands. The heft of an infant. Skin smooth except for one pit, clipped with quartzite. Rose-colored. Cold not as in chilled but as in still, molecules vibrating with such intensity as to produce the illusion of solidity. Turning her in my hands, I recognized the rock immediately. For years she had lived half-submerged in dirt and mountain laurel roots, overlooking the crooked path to the summit of Mount Guardian. For years I had passed her, noting her unusual color. What was she? Not the conglomerate, shale, or limestone so ubiquitous in the Catskills. She stood out against the glacial heaves of bluestone.
He could offer very little explanation for the removal of the rock from the mountain or his need to give it to me. Something about a dream. Journeys. Planted as we were, in the Hudson Valley, a place where for hundreds of years the Munsee Lenape viewed dream realization as highly important, I understood I must accept the rock. And whatever its weight in my hands might come to mean.
The rock arrives at a critical moment. Mid-summer 2020. Heat spread thickly on the landscape like butter. Sunshine sunk so deeply in water it can’t surface, flickers like lucky pennies in the silt spines of rivers. At first, I sleep with the rock below my pillow as an anti-ode to the princess and the pea. I imagine it as a holograph of the mountain it once lived on, buffeting up my dreams, infusing me with schist and starlight and rattlesnakes. But then one morning the rock tumbles from the bed onto the floor, making a thump I can only explain as desirous. Matter flung to matter, longing to touch, flush with gravity’s lust to connect.
It’s the hottest day of the summer but I know what I must do. I put the rock in my backpack and set out. We drive across the river, the rock and I. We weave through farm fields, sneak under the frothy arms of willows reaching across asphalt to another willow, always trying to sew the world back into greenness, close with branch and leaf and root the long wounds the roads keep open. Finally, we arrive at the little river town I lived in years before. “Here is where I buried my heart morning and after morning,” I whisper to the rock as I park on the side of a field.
The rock is heavy in my pack, pinching in my shoulder blades. The sky is heavier still, asphyxiate blue, pressing us like flowers in an encyclopedia. But I take the rock through miles of country side, across the train tracks, down to the river banks where the gulls and the clouds reciprocally sculpt each other’s whiteness. By the time I finally return home that night the rock feels both lighter and denser, as if its journey changed it elementally.
(Sculpture by Michael Heizer)
From then on, I take the rock on “field trips”. I wash it in lymphatic pulse where the Beaverkill and the Esopus Creek meet. I bury it under my favorite locust tree on a full moon night and retrieve it in the morning. I carry it miles up another mountain and then stand at the summit, holding it out to see its original mountain. I imagine an invisible tightrope strung between my rock and its former resting spot. What if my rock is more like a needle, stitching together place that haven’t touched in millions of years? What does it mean to move these molecules around a landscape? Am I facilitating reunions and homecomings many millions of years in the making? Or is the rock an exile? Sharing stories from faraway lands as I drag it from summit to river to farm field?
Finally, I take the rock on a long, long journey. To the edge of this continent. Early September, the moon blousy, barely hung above the sea line, I wash the rock in saltwater. I think of my English grandmother and great grandmother. I imagine electrons hopping from the molecules in my hands, the molecules in the rock, fusing, jumping, flipping across this great Atlantic ocean fabric, until they wash up on that distant shore.
We travel and carry spores, burrs, pollen, from beings we hardly even notice. We are the voyaging body for stories too small for us to even notice. How many of our actions are more than human? Matter's impulse to go on pilgrimage, back to the mountains and oceans it originally lay inside of. As I bring the rock back to my home in the Hudson Valley I feel it as an accretion of sacred spots. My favorite summits, streams, fields, furrows, look outs. But it is also stone shedding stone. Is my rock the spore of Mount Guardian? And have I, unwittingly, carrying this smooth stone seed to faraway lands, helped aid the reproductive effort of mountains?
As I finish my upcoming book on disability and ecology, I find myself with a surplus of short pieces that did not neatly fit in the narrative arc of the final manuscript. I’ll be sharing them here over the next couple of months, mainly for my paid subscribership.
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I love this story! Having lived and “ worked” with stones and minerals for years in healing and energy work, I so appreciate the living energetic presence and identity of each rock in my “ collection “. Thank you for this beautiful connective story Sophie!🙏❤️
This is so beautiful :) I have this same feeling sometimes, with stones, with crystals, with feathers even. About their need sometimes to move via a human interaction. I really love how you have written this