The Life of a Rock

In the PhotoBox’s unscripted alternating monthly between reflections on social behaviour and reflections on the journey within, the October PhotoBox, an examination of our deep motivations, was a jab to the heart, a deep incision into our human nature, how the necessary guarding of our identity of our competence and right-mindedness in the world can be offset by the perspective of another seeing us as a perpetrator of harm. Whew!! I know. A tough blow to take. One for which my contextualization cried out for help for me. And joy comes of it. A neighbour is coming over, and we’re going to explore the question together. A year of the PhotoBox experiment is well represented for me in having that conversation. I hope there are many others.

So this month, the inner journey is front and centre. What is beauty? How does the beautiful affect us? So, yes, way too big a topic. Written about for thousands of years. So much has been written about beauty from it being skin-deep to it mirroring the structural basis of our minds.

You are reading this because the image appealed to you in some way, enough for you to want a copy. Is it beautiful? Would you say that? What would you mean by that? I’d be interested to know.

The image is what you want it to be, of course. It is a photo of rock found around Lake Superior. As to a contextualization about beauty, let me offer a metaphor for beauty, that beauty is a well. To drink from a well, one has to stop, make an effort to draw the water, wait on the water to rise from the depth of the well, and only after some effort, benefit from drinking from the well. So yes, beauty is realized with time spent gazing into the beautiful, drawing on its depths.

I’m going to add another metaphor to that. I’d like to say experiencing beauty is more about falling into the well than one’s effort to raise up a bucket of water from the well.

Philip Shepherd in his book Radical Wholeness writes how our language can misdirect us. He suggests the language of achieving peace, or finding joy, or engaging beauty, misleads us. Peace, joy, the beautiful belong to the present and are not something we work toward. Peace, joy, the beautiful are what we surrender to, in the present moment. These qualities appear to us as we let go, as we listen, as we ground ourself in what is, the present we have.

Psychologist Robert Sardello writes about the soul of the world, that soul is not simply a possession we carry about in us, my soul and your soul; rather soul is of the world, the soul of the world, and so being soulful is more to be open to world’s soulfulness out there. The soul is not something we work on, get into shape, something we possess. Soul possesses us as we open to it. This is a different metaphor than our individualistic framed culture would recognize. That we are part of a bigger spirit, one we submit to, is an understanding imbued in Indigenous culture. 

Wisdom is a deep place, present to us, if we would but see. The inner journey to Self is expansive, embraces all of life, a discovery that we are in our separate identities, one and the same, with all things, with each other. Makes for a different way to be in the world if soul is what we are part of not soul a part of us, not them.

Rocks are in constant flow, don’t stop moving, but the movement is slow, to us imperceptible, even perhaps unimaginable, the millions of hours to move a nanometre. What wisdom is there in millions of years of the life of a rock, being made and remade, becoming what it is, something the photo can’t begin to capture, but something on contemplation, can take our breath away. Wisdom comes from a deep place. From the ancient of days.

If we allow ourselves to enter into the life of the rock, let ourselves peer into its beauty, wait on it, not rush on, then does the beauty in time, not our time, the rock’s time, does the beauty begin to possess us, we giving ourselves over to the beauty, recognizing the life of the rock as much alive as we are, the rock in its way, wise in a way we can’t ever be. That wisdom of the millions of ancient days can teach us, teach us our place, who really we are, what really this brief birth and death journey amounts to. It is a falling into, a trusting, a giving ourselves over, and in that perhaps we can say, a becoming, becoming beautiful, beauty possessing us and becoming us, being beautiful. And it is then that we feel able to say we are blessed. We are grateful for life, not for having things but for being; again, as has been said, more breath than thought.

The wise ones teach this. Wise ones guide us, point us the way. The wise ones can be elders, but surprisingly I have found, can be children, wise beyond their age. Wisdom seems to have nothing to do with our traditional categories. Wisdom might be found in the highly educated, but great teaching is also had from the most simple of people. Wisdom is not determined by economic standing, nothing, it seems, to do with categories of one’s sex or gender or sexual preference or age or ethnicity or nationality or race or personality or charisma. 

Surprisingly wisdom can come from one in great pain, from destitute people, simple people we ignore, from someone with nothing, living for example, in a refugee camp or in a prison cell – if we but heeded, let go of assumptions, let ourselves trust the universe, hear what the wise ones might whisper in our ear. Curious how it is, how we might learn much about life from someone unlike us, learn from them more than we can know ourself. If we could but see, see others and the plants and the sidewalks, see them as beautiful. And in seeing, see how we are all one, how connected we are, how much we belong to each other, are a part of each other’s wisdom, and see how all of us are connected to the land, the streams of water, the sunlight, the darkness, the air we breathe: there, in that domain, as the wise ones teach us, is the beginning of wisdom.Becoming wise seems to be is a letting go of our assumptions and letting the world itself, in its wisdom, tell us how things are. We live in a different place when letting go of how clever we are, experience another way of being in life when letting the way of the world come to us, whisper in our ear, to tell us, this is life, actually. Strange how wisdom is; what it is to feel blessed.