Stone Pillows

Hannah went to bed with a rock last night. Bethany told me about it this morning. That’s how it is when you’re 18 months apart. The youngest tells everything. Hannah has been loading up her backpack with schoolyard rocks and lugging them home to show me—every day. This one has sparkles. That one writes in chalk. I toss them out the back door and the next day she raids the playground again.

When Bethany learned to walk, she also headed straight for the rocks. She still does and the smoother and bigger the rock, the greater the value. We can’t take a walk by the creek without stopping for every chunk of concrete strewn by the sidewalk and those black river rocks are more desirable than a teddy bear. The Japanese Gardens adjacent to the Houston Zoo was a favorite picnic spot where we would go to feed the magnificent orange and white Koi but Bethany wouldn’t let go of the smooth, dark stones to throw the bread. They come by it honestly enough, I suppose. I loved rocks, collected rocks, read books about rocks, dreamed of spending my life walking all up and down and over rocks.

I dined with an amethyst when Derek and Jemma had their wedding reception at the Houston Museum of Natural History. We danced around Tyrannosaurus Rex, threw rose petals under Pterosaur, ate cake with diamonds, emeralds, and a 2000-carat topaz in the darkened corridors of the gem display lit only by the fiber optic glow on crystals. But this was a cold and distant affection. I could only stare in awe.


Now I throw my daughter’s granite pieces out the back door and beg her to stop bringing them home. Somewhere along the paved asphalt of my adulthood I forgot what rock-cold smoothness felt like—the weight and heft in my fingers—the pleasure of holding a pebble worn to glass by water. I forgot the way granite glittered in the sun like a thousand minute rainbows and made me feel so rich, so wealthy. I have forgotten how to love a rock so much I’d want to sleep with it underneath my pillow. Or, like Jacob, use it as a pillow.

In Houston, I once had dinner with a NASA engineer and his wife. Their home was a typical, early 60’s architecture desperate for remodeling. I entered their spare living room strewn with a first-grader’s toys, devoid of decoration save one very tall display case with a glass front. Glass shelves sparkled and glowed with rock formations, fossilized Trilobite, asteroids, and jeweled minerals. The man, a geologist, had scoured the world for his collection. Some were Christmas gifts from his wife. One was from somewhere beyond this planet. I held it in my palm for a very long while, mesmerized. The permanence, the history, the physicality of the stone in my hand whispered a name.

If we ever forget what it is to be a child, the rocks and stones will cry out.

Even the Rocks shall Cry Out

Before things were written in stone, there were pillars of stone: cairns, altars, mani stones, monoliths. One by one, the builder found stones and stacked them into a tower. Often the reason was known only to the builder. A meditative marker of time, of place, or experience of the holy. A mound of rough stones. A memory. A prayer.

Then others passing by found their way to a destination. They located themselves in time and space. They too remembered, and the history became shared. A community was born before things were written in stone.

Asleep on a stone, Jacob had a dream. He saw a stairway to heaven, a gate through time and space, a future and a hope. He took the stone pillow and stood it on end, then poured oil on it. As the oil glided down the crevasses and into the dirt, Jacob named the stone, the dirt and the oil, Bethel - House of God.

These posts are my stone pillars. Though I am tutored by the Master Builder, my cairns are still rather wobbly. Still, I like their effect against the barrenness of the land I live in.
(permission for photo granted by creative commons)