Moving rocks is something I love very much. Last summer it began as hauling beautiful round ones up to surround the tree. This summer I have an eye only for quartz.
Hauling stones is rewarding in two ways:
the hauling, and the stones themselves.The exercise of carrying a great stone is magnificent, and I’ll get to that in a moment; the stone itself is a treasure, an improvement to where it is being placed. The locust tree is festooned with bits of quartz, and now it is ringed almost entirely with the stuff. It is a beauty, but moving that beauty was not very hard. Most everything on the branches I could fit in my pocket, and virtually every piece of quartz ringing it was an easy carry.
As the homestead is more saturated with stones their value ceases to be in their physical beauty, and begins then to be in the process of getting them up here. There may come a day when their sheer numbers have an aesthetic value, but not yet
Yukio Mishima wrote in Sun & Steel about seeing a group of men carrying a temple on their backs.I saw something similar while in Japan: men carrying vast tree-sized bundles of bamboo set on fire but that’s neither here nor there.
He said he wondered what the sky looked like to those men, insensate with exertion as they were. He went on to explain that he eventually came to haul that very same temple and looked up at the sky as he did so.
He said it was not a thing of words, but in classic fashion, he did his best: the sky seen by men in such throes is invariably the same. To be so exhausted and so deeply plunged into the physicality one’s own body is to cease to be an individual and to somehow touch the divine between consciousnesses.
Carrying stones is like that.