I live in some of the oldest mountains, where mind-bogglingly ancient peaks have been rounded by so much time and weather. I have always felt it is the deep bedrock here that helps write the story of our lives… it sends me to other places to meet other rocks.. and pulls me back again to tell about it. Ken Wilber once used a rock as an example of something that will not respond to you if you speak to it and I felt so unimpressed by his inability to relate. I agree with Don McKay about the eloquence of rocks. I’ve never once addressed a rock that did not address me back.
I’ve heard that if you really want to commit to something, tell a rock about it. I once told a pleasingly smooth chunk of sooty basalt that I wanted to be free from the chokehold of my father’s abuses, and we are still in this good conversation.
I once carried seven large stones in the back of my pick up truck--it was like divination, to see their configurations after each drive. I had a mysterious incident in that truck, in which I did not die, and not long after that, I carried these stones on a canoe, with my beloved, and dropped them near the center of an 800ft-deep lake. I return to them in my mind often, to learn about those deep, impossibly deep places.
When I am in need of grounding, I find some exposed bedrock and sit with my back to it. I imagine my bones are remembering something from the stone, or that the stone is listening to me through my bones.
I can’t wait to hear everyone’s stone stories here!
Jo, your writing always moves me, and this is no exception. I love all of this. But the idea that rocks address us back, that your bones and the bedrock are in conversation? Yes. Thank you for this gift.
This is exquisite! You write like someone who knows stone not as object but as ancestor.
Everything you said -- the eloquence of rocks, the basalt that still speaks with you, the seven stones divining themselves in the back of your truck -- it all felt like reading the field notes of a fellow witch.
And that canoe journey...dropping those stones into the dark center of an 800-foot lake...this is ceremony. That is spellwork. That is ritual and release. Deep-time prayer. That is the kind of offering only someone who listens to stone could make.
Your practice of leaning your back against bedrock so your bones can remember -- yes. That's how I listen too. Stone speaks through marrow.
What you say here brought some emotion for me which I will write about later in this glorious New England day!
“I’ve never addressed a rock that did not address me back”. They do have a way with language. Our own existence, depending on what you believe, may have come from an explosion.
Serendipitiously, this poem by Forrest Gander just appeared in my inbox - it's about the rocks he encountered as he travelled through all fifty-eight counties in the state of California...
Thank you all for another week of generous, thoughtful writing. Thank you, Pádraig, for this prompt and for Don McKay's voice in my ears. His description of rocks as "extremely visible, extremely eloquent” and the way they give us access to deep time struck a chord with me.
The first thing that came to mind from your prompt is a memory from an essay I wrote for Family Stories a few years back about meeting my brother Miles. My brother Miles was adopted before me, though he's younger, as an infant. I arrived on the scene years later at the age of 8.
Here's the extract:
My adoptive parents brought me into the house before the placement was even finalized. During that first full day and night with them, I was certain that this would only be trouble. I didn't trust a soul and had seen from experience that adults were not to be trusted.
Miles took me by the hand and showed me the house. Then the two of us slipped out the front door, sat on the cracked front stoop for a minute, where I stayed silent, pouting. After a few minutes of side-eying me, he pulled me over to the side of the house, where he showed me some rocks.
"This is mica, and they call this 'fool's gold,' and this is my favorite sandstone," he said.
"What's so great about sandstone?" I asked, kicking at the grass.
He took a pale red piece of sandstone, picked up another larger rock and broke the soft red rock into pieces, crushing it with the harder rock. He ground it down as if he were using a mortar and pestle.
Then he picked up the hose, filled a plastic bucket with water, and returned to me. He cupped some water in his hand and let a few drops fall onto our mound of red rock dust. Then, he rubbed it between his fingers to form a kind of paste. He then — very seriously — drew lines on my cheeks and forehead, after his own, and said: "Now we're ready for anything. War paint!"
That red sandstone held everything Miles was trying to tell me. You belong here. I've got you. We're in this together. He called it "war paint”, borrowing language from childhood imagination, not understanding its weight, but what he meant was simpler and deep. We're a team now, we're protected, we're ready. The rock became a bridge between two kids who didn't know how to trust anyone yet, and somehow, through dust and water and ritual, we began. Don McKay was right, rocks are eloquent. That pale red sandstone spoke for my brother when he couldn’t find words himself.
Gorgeous writing of a wonderful story. As a 16 year old father who with my then girlfriend offered our newborn child for adoption and who, as a birth father, began my search for my daughter on her 21st birthday, and with whom I was reunited two years later (it took that long) and with whom I have been in relationship with fir 25 years, I see this story from many beautiful angles. I will forward it to my daughter Linda. Her son, my -what? - birth-grandson (?) is getting married in October. It is all so strange. I met my daughter when she was 21, both of her adoptive parents are dead, as is her birth mother. I am all that’s left. Our reunion has had its twists and turns. I am her father but a different man was her Dad. I “gave her away” but I was also the one who searched and found her with war paint on her cheeks, brows, and in her eyes. It’s still there but somehow different now. Your story helps me know my daughter better and more clearly. You help me heal. Thank you very much.
Dwight, thank you for trusting us with this. The way you speak of all these angles, birth father, searcher, the one who found her, "father but not Dad”, with such honesty and care is deeply moving. That image of war paint still in her eyes, but different now, after 25 years of relationship and all its twists and turns…That's the truth of reunion, isn't it? Not simple, not always tied up neatly. I've written about searching for and finding my birth mother, and also documented the search for my birth father, and I recognize so much of what you describe. The strangeness, the layers, the healing that happens slowly. I'm honored that this story helped you know Linda better. Congratulations on the upcoming wedding, and every good thing to you, your birth-grandson, (yes!) and the rest of your family.
Lisa and Dwight, I read your interaction to my wife in a coffee shop as we were travelling. Tears flowed… so much here that moves and touches the heart and soul so deeply. Thanks to you both for sharing this!
The way you wrote about Miles -- the sandstone, the dust, the water, the war paint -- it felt like watching trust form in real time. That pale red rock became a bridge, a language, a belonging. Children know how to speak through ritual long before they know how to speak through words. Believe me -- I work with non-verbal children, so I am well-versed.
Your story reminded me how eloquent stone can be. How it holds what we can't yet say. How it becomes the first elder some of us ever meet. Thank you for sharing this memory -- it's beautiful. XO
My rock is part of the coast of Genoa, Nervi. Not everybody likes it because it doesn't take the shape of your body when you lie down to either sunbathe or watch the winter sunsets. Your body needs to adapt to it; to take its shape - like water... like we must do with all the uncontrollable happenings in our lives.
Today I have returned to a rocky island off the coast of Maine to scatter my husband's ashes at the base of an enormous boulder where his ancestors ashes lie. It is in the sacred harbor where we first met and fell in love 29 years ago. This boulder was a challenge to climb when I first encountered it, but has proven steady, dependable, enduring, as is our love.
So a place which was already special to you is now even more special because of those ashes that you've left there. Lovely; thank you. And I get it; my grandparents' grave has been special to me since I remember my granddad being buried there in 1962. When my wife and I came back to the city we were both born in after 30 years away, I found that I couldn't settle; that grave was a safe place for me until I did. So much so that I buried my wife's ashes there 18 months ago; to pick up on Pádraig's theme for the week, she was my rock. It's a place which triggers lots of happy - and sad - memories.
Elizabeth, my heart is with you today. What a profound thing, to bring him back to that harbor, to that boulder, to the place where it all began. Sending you love.
How lovely, Elizabeth. This month marks four years since my husband died. At his request I took his ashes to sprinkle in a small lake in Michigan where he had been saling since high school. Our later in life marriages had its challenges, but we were always closest on our summer trips to the cottage at the lake. Your memory brought back the lovely feeling of leaving his remains among the water lilies under the eagles' nest.
There is a white box-shaped boulder, maybe four feet across and two feet tall, resting in the water at the Wisconsin edge of Lake Michigan. It’s by a beach where I love to sit and watch the water. The rock is half immersed and the waves travel up and over. There are flakes that have broken off (“like dinosaur teeth,” I wrote) over time and I imagine there will be a day when it is not here anymore, reduced to so much rubble and scattered about. I cannot help but think the Psalmist got it wrong. Even a rock is not unchanging. Eventually, even this symbol of solidity and deep time will erode and disappear. So maybe likewise change is what I might expect of my ideas of God. Or even God’s own self is changing, too.
On a lone walk in Northern Ireland early on a dewy day, a long, long stone wall tapered off into nothingness in the grand distance. At that moment, I revisioned my young child buried back in America where a small plaque in the shape of a butterfly lies on the ground as a marker of her grave. My eyes closed and my head lowered and then my eyes quickly opened again and between my dirty sneakered feet was a stone, a rock really, and small in comparison to other stones like my daughter was small in comparison to you and to me. Driven by a force that flowed through me like blood, like water, like rain on rock, I picked up the stone and it felt like, well, I can’t describe how it felt… but I felt wholesome. I don’t believe I had ever felt wholesome before. I mused for minutes at each rock, each stone in the wall as if I were selecting a perfect rock diamond and I said, “speak to me.” My hand and eye were led to a crevice where it perfectly fit. My daughter’s monument is in Northern Ireland. It is a long, long stone wall that tapers off into nothingness in the grand distance. I could not find that rock again if I tried for a million years and I don’t have to. It is always with me. Thank you all for the sweet and rock solid reminder. -Dwight Lee Wolter.
Your story stopped me. The image of that long stone wall tapering into the mist, and you standing there -- a father whose grief has traveled continents -- felt like witnessing a private sacrament.
The way you describe that small rock between your feet, how it called to you, how your hand knew exactly where it belonged in the wall...that is the kind of moment the land orchestrates when it wants to speak directly to the Soul. What you did there wasn't just symbolic. It was an act of devotion. A placement. A remembering. A returning.
There is something so quietly miraculous about that -- that a stone in a foreign country could gather the scattered pieces of a father's heart and make them momentarily whole.
Your daughter's monument being held inside that wall -- unretrievable, unrepeatable, yet always with you -- feels like the truest kind of memorial. Not fixed in one place, but alive in the body, in the break, in the eternalness of your love for her.
Thank you for sharing this Sacred story! It will stay with me. XO
Walls so often serve as divisions and static barriers. Yet the dynamic prompting that served in moving and freeing thru this act displays a beautiful paradox that somehow holds both… the containment and liberation… captured so well in your word ‘wholesome’. Beautiful!
Such strength speaking through sadness. Your daughter's memory is also strong, holding together a long, long wall which connects you both forever in an even longer conversation.
Two friends and I once went on a hike in the Rocky Mountains on a rainy day. We came across a large boulder and thought we'd like to try to climb it. Both my friends were able to climb atop it with one or two of us on the ground below to push them up. But when it came my turn, with no one below me to offer support, I just couldn't make it up to join them no matter what we tried. We were all about ready to give up when as a last-ditch and almost non-serious effort I decided to try to take a running start and get as high on the most graded side of the boulder as I could. To my surprise I actually got further up than I expected, and my experience of that moment before I fell back the way I came remains one of the most special moments of my life to date: because my friend, who also didn't expect my running-start plan to work, in the nick of time managed to clock that I'd actually made it halfway up and that, if he lent me a hand and pulled, I could potentially make it to the top and join them. And so in this split-second moment when I needed the hand of a friend, this friend was present and attuned enough to the moment to give me that hand and help pull me up the rest of the way. I'm sure my account doesn't do it justice but I'm tearing up just writing about it. It's an antidote to all the times I've felt alone, unseen, or even abandoned. It's a testament to connection and solidarity and love. I even got video of the whole thing (although I'm sure the video doesn't do the experience, or its meaningfulness for me, justice either): https://youtube.com/watch?v=x8Ucu1EAfgs&si=Jpgr-tLKXLqr-lVq
Adam, I watched the video and oh, those whoops and cheers that was friendship as pure sound, as joy! Your friend reaching in that split-second, no hesitation I loved witnessing that… You're right the video can't hold the full meaning, but even through the screen I could feel the love and relief. Thank you for sharing both the story and the moment itself.
too many years ago now i walked along a dirt and rocky path in New Hampshire with my father as we sorted out a wicked argument! trying to control my anger and pain I looked down and saw a perfectly shaped heart stone. we got very quiet, i handed it to him and now more words were spoken that evening. a few years later as he was about to walk me down the aisle at my wedding he reached in his pocket and pulled it out! tears were already falling as Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring had begun but they were increased by this heart shaped stone of love and loyalty.
This moved me so deeply. There’s something about the way a single stone can interrupt a moment of fracture — how it can soften anger, redirect breath, and open a small doorway back to one another. That heart-shaped rock arriving at your feet in the middle of an argument feels like the earth itself stepped in to say, “Here. Hold this instead.”
And the image of your father reaching into his pocket years later, just as he was about to walk you down the aisle — that undid me. What a tender, wordless gesture of loyalty and remembering. It’s as if he carried not just the stone, but the mended thread between you.
Some objects become more than themselves. They become a witness. A keeper of the moment when love chose to stay.
Thank you for sharing this. It’s beautiful, and it lingers. XO
I have a rock from the fields of the land where my father’s Norwegian family claimed a homestead in western North Dakota. It is shaped like and has the coloring of a potato. 🥔 Potato rock. Humble potatoes have sustained my family and many others long into the long winters of northern climates. (That this land and this rock were taken without consent…is a story for another day.)
I’m reminded of an outcrop called “Dodd’s Rock” on a beach in Co. Wexford in Ireland where my late father used to go to fish when we were on holidays. We misheard the name and for many years thought it was called “Dad’s Rock”, thinking it must have been where all the fathers would to go to fish. I like to think of them there, silent in each other’s company as many men of his generation were, but sharing a companionship all the same…
I was working in western China a few years ago. I took a drive with a friend, a local, along a long road lined with factories. Oozy brown sludge ran along the gutters. Thick grey smoke gushed from every chimney. Breathing was hard. No hint of green in sight. At the end of the road my friend explained that each of those factories produced children''s toys. So I asked him to stop the car. I got out and found a little rock on the side of the road - small brown innocuous - but a memento of that moment. I brought it home with me to Melbourne and I have it still.
The first year of my marriage my ex-husband and I just outside of London. We moved there from the U.S. so he could play, of all things, professional basketball. I was 23. In the deep midwinter, in a fit of boredom and adventure, we decided to meander the smallest lanes imaginable, mere threads of roads, up to Edinburgh for a little holiday. Hours into a journey that turned out to be more midwinter monotony, we noticed a lone boulder just beside the road, not quite six feet high, with "Scotland" painted on its face. With no traffic whatsoever to consider, we climbed out and, to our delight, found "England" painted on the opposite face. That was it. Our border crossing. I still have all the laughing photographs of that freezing afternoon.
I have thought of that boulder often over the years. What simple things mark monumental change. A labor pain or a headache. An encounter. The tiniest doubt. A misstep. A wrong turn. A right one. The great rolling tides of our lives marked by the unremarkable. What a delight that Scotland journey, and many parts of my 20-year marriage, turned out to be. Today, unremarkably, would have marked our 40th anniversary.
I love rock and rocks, similar to the way I love trees. They feel like wise old friends. Beloved and grounding. I was on the island of Hawaii's west coast last year and the that land is some of the newest in the world, having been made by volcanic eruption in 2018. It is black and shimmery, sometimes smooth as molasses and other times sharp as puppy teeth. I loved it all and found it endlessly fascinating, gorgeous. Depth on the surface.
At a moment in my life when I was feeling especially lost, I went for a long walk through my Indiana city and was stopped by some beautiful sedimentary rock that had been exposed by the construction of the road cutting through the area. I stopped and put my hand on it, feeling its depth and coolness. The phrase “rock bottom” came to mind and it occurred to me that some people fall a lot longer before hitting rock bottom but maybe that is because they have such depth to them. Here, where the rock was so close to the surface, it didn’t take much digging to hit solid rock. The rock was very crumbly, so I broke off a piece and took it with me and still keep it on my desk as a reminder of that moment when it felt like I had been falling for so long and finally found something solid to touch.
I have kept a rock, shaped like a heart (looks somewhat like your rock Pádraig, but a bit larger) in my upstairs desk drawer for years. One side of the rock has been painted lavender, possibly by my granddaughter. I can’t exactly remember where or when I got the rock. However, it was important enough to keep (and I am typically not a real collector of stuff). I guess, it reminds me of something primal; yes, nature gives. It is time for me to pass along this rock to someone else.
As a North Carolina resident & a Virginian native, I was blown away during a visit five years ago by the expansiveness of Utah. When we visited Zion National Park, I was awestruck by the size & majesty of the rock formations; I felt humbled in the land of giants.
I live in some of the oldest mountains, where mind-bogglingly ancient peaks have been rounded by so much time and weather. I have always felt it is the deep bedrock here that helps write the story of our lives… it sends me to other places to meet other rocks.. and pulls me back again to tell about it. Ken Wilber once used a rock as an example of something that will not respond to you if you speak to it and I felt so unimpressed by his inability to relate. I agree with Don McKay about the eloquence of rocks. I’ve never once addressed a rock that did not address me back.
I’ve heard that if you really want to commit to something, tell a rock about it. I once told a pleasingly smooth chunk of sooty basalt that I wanted to be free from the chokehold of my father’s abuses, and we are still in this good conversation.
I once carried seven large stones in the back of my pick up truck--it was like divination, to see their configurations after each drive. I had a mysterious incident in that truck, in which I did not die, and not long after that, I carried these stones on a canoe, with my beloved, and dropped them near the center of an 800ft-deep lake. I return to them in my mind often, to learn about those deep, impossibly deep places.
When I am in need of grounding, I find some exposed bedrock and sit with my back to it. I imagine my bones are remembering something from the stone, or that the stone is listening to me through my bones.
I can’t wait to hear everyone’s stone stories here!
Jo, your writing always moves me, and this is no exception. I love all of this. But the idea that rocks address us back, that your bones and the bedrock are in conversation? Yes. Thank you for this gift.
Thank you for being with me in this <3
Dear Jo,
This is exquisite! You write like someone who knows stone not as object but as ancestor.
Everything you said -- the eloquence of rocks, the basalt that still speaks with you, the seven stones divining themselves in the back of your truck -- it all felt like reading the field notes of a fellow witch.
And that canoe journey...dropping those stones into the dark center of an 800-foot lake...this is ceremony. That is spellwork. That is ritual and release. Deep-time prayer. That is the kind of offering only someone who listens to stone could make.
Your practice of leaning your back against bedrock so your bones can remember -- yes. That's how I listen too. Stone speaks through marrow.
Thank you for this story. It's a gift! XO
wow, thank you for this reflection
What you say here brought some emotion for me which I will write about later in this glorious New England day!
“I’ve never addressed a rock that did not address me back”. They do have a way with language. Our own existence, depending on what you believe, may have come from an explosion.
Thank you for this Jo.
I love the image of your canoe trip to drop the rocks. I wonder about their configuration now!
Yes! me too!
Jo i feel just as strongly as you do about the prescience of rock.
i love knowing this
Love that, Jo (and am smiling drily at your response to Ken Wilber...!)
;)
Serendipitiously, this poem by Forrest Gander just appeared in my inbox - it's about the rocks he encountered as he travelled through all fifty-eight counties in the state of California...
https://emergencemagazine.org/poem/fifty-eight-faces-of-california-spring/?utm_source=Emergence+Magazine&utm_campaign=eb71e4a82b-NEWSLETTER_20260517&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-b208eadbce-160731634
thank you for sharing this!
Mystical and mythical — the really real. Thank you, Jo.
the really real :)
thank you, Michael
Divination.
this word, as you have shared it here, brings me joy
Hello Pádraig and friends,
Thank you all for another week of generous, thoughtful writing. Thank you, Pádraig, for this prompt and for Don McKay's voice in my ears. His description of rocks as "extremely visible, extremely eloquent” and the way they give us access to deep time struck a chord with me.
The first thing that came to mind from your prompt is a memory from an essay I wrote for Family Stories a few years back about meeting my brother Miles. My brother Miles was adopted before me, though he's younger, as an infant. I arrived on the scene years later at the age of 8.
Here's the extract:
My adoptive parents brought me into the house before the placement was even finalized. During that first full day and night with them, I was certain that this would only be trouble. I didn't trust a soul and had seen from experience that adults were not to be trusted.
Miles took me by the hand and showed me the house. Then the two of us slipped out the front door, sat on the cracked front stoop for a minute, where I stayed silent, pouting. After a few minutes of side-eying me, he pulled me over to the side of the house, where he showed me some rocks.
"This is mica, and they call this 'fool's gold,' and this is my favorite sandstone," he said.
"What's so great about sandstone?" I asked, kicking at the grass.
He took a pale red piece of sandstone, picked up another larger rock and broke the soft red rock into pieces, crushing it with the harder rock. He ground it down as if he were using a mortar and pestle.
Then he picked up the hose, filled a plastic bucket with water, and returned to me. He cupped some water in his hand and let a few drops fall onto our mound of red rock dust. Then, he rubbed it between his fingers to form a kind of paste. He then — very seriously — drew lines on my cheeks and forehead, after his own, and said: "Now we're ready for anything. War paint!"
That red sandstone held everything Miles was trying to tell me. You belong here. I've got you. We're in this together. He called it "war paint”, borrowing language from childhood imagination, not understanding its weight, but what he meant was simpler and deep. We're a team now, we're protected, we're ready. The rock became a bridge between two kids who didn't know how to trust anyone yet, and somehow, through dust and water and ritual, we began. Don McKay was right, rocks are eloquent. That pale red sandstone spoke for my brother when he couldn’t find words himself.
Gorgeous writing of a wonderful story. As a 16 year old father who with my then girlfriend offered our newborn child for adoption and who, as a birth father, began my search for my daughter on her 21st birthday, and with whom I was reunited two years later (it took that long) and with whom I have been in relationship with fir 25 years, I see this story from many beautiful angles. I will forward it to my daughter Linda. Her son, my -what? - birth-grandson (?) is getting married in October. It is all so strange. I met my daughter when she was 21, both of her adoptive parents are dead, as is her birth mother. I am all that’s left. Our reunion has had its twists and turns. I am her father but a different man was her Dad. I “gave her away” but I was also the one who searched and found her with war paint on her cheeks, brows, and in her eyes. It’s still there but somehow different now. Your story helps me know my daughter better and more clearly. You help me heal. Thank you very much.
-Dwight Lee Wolter.
Dwight, thank you for trusting us with this. The way you speak of all these angles, birth father, searcher, the one who found her, "father but not Dad”, with such honesty and care is deeply moving. That image of war paint still in her eyes, but different now, after 25 years of relationship and all its twists and turns…That's the truth of reunion, isn't it? Not simple, not always tied up neatly. I've written about searching for and finding my birth mother, and also documented the search for my birth father, and I recognize so much of what you describe. The strangeness, the layers, the healing that happens slowly. I'm honored that this story helped you know Linda better. Congratulations on the upcoming wedding, and every good thing to you, your birth-grandson, (yes!) and the rest of your family.
Lisa and Dwight, I read your interaction to my wife in a coffee shop as we were travelling. Tears flowed… so much here that moves and touches the heart and soul so deeply. Thanks to you both for sharing this!
David! How gorgeous, thank you for reading and for bringing us into the coffee shop with your love.
Birth mother here. I've faced the war paint. What a lesson!
Color me curious.
Dear Lisa,
This is extraordinary.
The way you wrote about Miles -- the sandstone, the dust, the water, the war paint -- it felt like watching trust form in real time. That pale red rock became a bridge, a language, a belonging. Children know how to speak through ritual long before they know how to speak through words. Believe me -- I work with non-verbal children, so I am well-versed.
Your story reminded me how eloquent stone can be. How it holds what we can't yet say. How it becomes the first elder some of us ever meet. Thank you for sharing this memory -- it's beautiful. XO
Danielle, thank you for these reflections and for your very kind words!
Speaking of eloquence, you write with such beauty and clarity. Thank you for this reflection, Lisa!
Michael, how kind. Thank you for reading and connecting.
That was so moving, Lisa Marie - thank you for sharing...
Thank you, Anne, for reading and for always being so supportive.
So beautiful, awww and the war paint too !
Thanks Sonya! My brother is my favorite human.
what a beautiful story
Thank you, Barbara.
The wisdom of children. Thank you for sharing this, and you.
Thank you, Sean. Your writing is so moving.
My rock is part of the coast of Genoa, Nervi. Not everybody likes it because it doesn't take the shape of your body when you lie down to either sunbathe or watch the winter sunsets. Your body needs to adapt to it; to take its shape - like water... like we must do with all the uncontrollable happenings in our lives.
My rock is from Lourdes in France while visiting.
It somehow fits into my left palm.
A comforting sensation
🙏
I KNOW that sensation, Ioana, how beautifully you’ve put it!
I can't wait to get back to it. A piece of focaccia whilst watching the sea.
Today I have returned to a rocky island off the coast of Maine to scatter my husband's ashes at the base of an enormous boulder where his ancestors ashes lie. It is in the sacred harbor where we first met and fell in love 29 years ago. This boulder was a challenge to climb when I first encountered it, but has proven steady, dependable, enduring, as is our love.
So a place which was already special to you is now even more special because of those ashes that you've left there. Lovely; thank you. And I get it; my grandparents' grave has been special to me since I remember my granddad being buried there in 1962. When my wife and I came back to the city we were both born in after 30 years away, I found that I couldn't settle; that grave was a safe place for me until I did. So much so that I buried my wife's ashes there 18 months ago; to pick up on Pádraig's theme for the week, she was my rock. It's a place which triggers lots of happy - and sad - memories.
Elizabeth, my heart is with you today. What a profound thing, to bring him back to that harbor, to that boulder, to the place where it all began. Sending you love.
How lovely, Elizabeth. This month marks four years since my husband died. At his request I took his ashes to sprinkle in a small lake in Michigan where he had been saling since high school. Our later in life marriages had its challenges, but we were always closest on our summer trips to the cottage at the lake. Your memory brought back the lovely feeling of leaving his remains among the water lilies under the eagles' nest.
So lovely Elizabeth. I feel so sorry and just want to reach out to you.
So profound, thanks for sharing <3
There is a white box-shaped boulder, maybe four feet across and two feet tall, resting in the water at the Wisconsin edge of Lake Michigan. It’s by a beach where I love to sit and watch the water. The rock is half immersed and the waves travel up and over. There are flakes that have broken off (“like dinosaur teeth,” I wrote) over time and I imagine there will be a day when it is not here anymore, reduced to so much rubble and scattered about. I cannot help but think the Psalmist got it wrong. Even a rock is not unchanging. Eventually, even this symbol of solidity and deep time will erode and disappear. So maybe likewise change is what I might expect of my ideas of God. Or even God’s own self is changing, too.
Yes yes yes, "God’s own self is changing, too."
A new way of saying, "there is no rock like our God"!
Profound. And all stemming from the “dinosaur teeth”!
On a lone walk in Northern Ireland early on a dewy day, a long, long stone wall tapered off into nothingness in the grand distance. At that moment, I revisioned my young child buried back in America where a small plaque in the shape of a butterfly lies on the ground as a marker of her grave. My eyes closed and my head lowered and then my eyes quickly opened again and between my dirty sneakered feet was a stone, a rock really, and small in comparison to other stones like my daughter was small in comparison to you and to me. Driven by a force that flowed through me like blood, like water, like rain on rock, I picked up the stone and it felt like, well, I can’t describe how it felt… but I felt wholesome. I don’t believe I had ever felt wholesome before. I mused for minutes at each rock, each stone in the wall as if I were selecting a perfect rock diamond and I said, “speak to me.” My hand and eye were led to a crevice where it perfectly fit. My daughter’s monument is in Northern Ireland. It is a long, long stone wall that tapers off into nothingness in the grand distance. I could not find that rock again if I tried for a million years and I don’t have to. It is always with me. Thank you all for the sweet and rock solid reminder. -Dwight Lee Wolter.
Dear Dwight,
Your story stopped me. The image of that long stone wall tapering into the mist, and you standing there -- a father whose grief has traveled continents -- felt like witnessing a private sacrament.
The way you describe that small rock between your feet, how it called to you, how your hand knew exactly where it belonged in the wall...that is the kind of moment the land orchestrates when it wants to speak directly to the Soul. What you did there wasn't just symbolic. It was an act of devotion. A placement. A remembering. A returning.
There is something so quietly miraculous about that -- that a stone in a foreign country could gather the scattered pieces of a father's heart and make them momentarily whole.
Your daughter's monument being held inside that wall -- unretrievable, unrepeatable, yet always with you -- feels like the truest kind of memorial. Not fixed in one place, but alive in the body, in the break, in the eternalness of your love for her.
Thank you for sharing this Sacred story! It will stay with me. XO
Thank you so very much, Danielle. I feel seen and heard. This is the first time I have shared this story with anyone.
Dwight, this is sacred. That small stone in the wall, perfect and unretrievable and always with you. A profound act of love and remembrance.
It is also, Lisa Marie, a profound act of love and remembrance for you to write this note to me.
Walls so often serve as divisions and static barriers. Yet the dynamic prompting that served in moving and freeing thru this act displays a beautiful paradox that somehow holds both… the containment and liberation… captured so well in your word ‘wholesome’. Beautiful!
Such strength speaking through sadness. Your daughter's memory is also strong, holding together a long, long wall which connects you both forever in an even longer conversation.
Two friends and I once went on a hike in the Rocky Mountains on a rainy day. We came across a large boulder and thought we'd like to try to climb it. Both my friends were able to climb atop it with one or two of us on the ground below to push them up. But when it came my turn, with no one below me to offer support, I just couldn't make it up to join them no matter what we tried. We were all about ready to give up when as a last-ditch and almost non-serious effort I decided to try to take a running start and get as high on the most graded side of the boulder as I could. To my surprise I actually got further up than I expected, and my experience of that moment before I fell back the way I came remains one of the most special moments of my life to date: because my friend, who also didn't expect my running-start plan to work, in the nick of time managed to clock that I'd actually made it halfway up and that, if he lent me a hand and pulled, I could potentially make it to the top and join them. And so in this split-second moment when I needed the hand of a friend, this friend was present and attuned enough to the moment to give me that hand and help pull me up the rest of the way. I'm sure my account doesn't do it justice but I'm tearing up just writing about it. It's an antidote to all the times I've felt alone, unseen, or even abandoned. It's a testament to connection and solidarity and love. I even got video of the whole thing (although I'm sure the video doesn't do the experience, or its meaningfulness for me, justice either): https://youtube.com/watch?v=x8Ucu1EAfgs&si=Jpgr-tLKXLqr-lVq
Adam, I watched the video and oh, those whoops and cheers that was friendship as pure sound, as joy! Your friend reaching in that split-second, no hesitation I loved witnessing that… You're right the video can't hold the full meaning, but even through the screen I could feel the love and relief. Thank you for sharing both the story and the moment itself.
too many years ago now i walked along a dirt and rocky path in New Hampshire with my father as we sorted out a wicked argument! trying to control my anger and pain I looked down and saw a perfectly shaped heart stone. we got very quiet, i handed it to him and now more words were spoken that evening. a few years later as he was about to walk me down the aisle at my wedding he reached in his pocket and pulled it out! tears were already falling as Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring had begun but they were increased by this heart shaped stone of love and loyalty.
Dear Martha,
This moved me so deeply. There’s something about the way a single stone can interrupt a moment of fracture — how it can soften anger, redirect breath, and open a small doorway back to one another. That heart-shaped rock arriving at your feet in the middle of an argument feels like the earth itself stepped in to say, “Here. Hold this instead.”
And the image of your father reaching into his pocket years later, just as he was about to walk you down the aisle — that undid me. What a tender, wordless gesture of loyalty and remembering. It’s as if he carried not just the stone, but the mended thread between you.
Some objects become more than themselves. They become a witness. A keeper of the moment when love chose to stay.
Thank you for sharing this. It’s beautiful, and it lingers. XO
I have a rock from the fields of the land where my father’s Norwegian family claimed a homestead in western North Dakota. It is shaped like and has the coloring of a potato. 🥔 Potato rock. Humble potatoes have sustained my family and many others long into the long winters of northern climates. (That this land and this rock were taken without consent…is a story for another day.)
Lovely, all the way up to the ending. Thank you.
I’m reminded of an outcrop called “Dodd’s Rock” on a beach in Co. Wexford in Ireland where my late father used to go to fish when we were on holidays. We misheard the name and for many years thought it was called “Dad’s Rock”, thinking it must have been where all the fathers would to go to fish. I like to think of them there, silent in each other’s company as many men of his generation were, but sharing a companionship all the same…
What a sweet memory, Anne. Wonderful where your little girl mind took it, and then your grown self as well.
Thanks, Lisa Marie - like so many memories of him now, it's bittersweet, but good to have.
I was working in western China a few years ago. I took a drive with a friend, a local, along a long road lined with factories. Oozy brown sludge ran along the gutters. Thick grey smoke gushed from every chimney. Breathing was hard. No hint of green in sight. At the end of the road my friend explained that each of those factories produced children''s toys. So I asked him to stop the car. I got out and found a little rock on the side of the road - small brown innocuous - but a memento of that moment. I brought it home with me to Melbourne and I have it still.
The first year of my marriage my ex-husband and I just outside of London. We moved there from the U.S. so he could play, of all things, professional basketball. I was 23. In the deep midwinter, in a fit of boredom and adventure, we decided to meander the smallest lanes imaginable, mere threads of roads, up to Edinburgh for a little holiday. Hours into a journey that turned out to be more midwinter monotony, we noticed a lone boulder just beside the road, not quite six feet high, with "Scotland" painted on its face. With no traffic whatsoever to consider, we climbed out and, to our delight, found "England" painted on the opposite face. That was it. Our border crossing. I still have all the laughing photographs of that freezing afternoon.
I have thought of that boulder often over the years. What simple things mark monumental change. A labor pain or a headache. An encounter. The tiniest doubt. A misstep. A wrong turn. A right one. The great rolling tides of our lives marked by the unremarkable. What a delight that Scotland journey, and many parts of my 20-year marriage, turned out to be. Today, unremarkably, would have marked our 40th anniversary.
I love rock and rocks, similar to the way I love trees. They feel like wise old friends. Beloved and grounding. I was on the island of Hawaii's west coast last year and the that land is some of the newest in the world, having been made by volcanic eruption in 2018. It is black and shimmery, sometimes smooth as molasses and other times sharp as puppy teeth. I loved it all and found it endlessly fascinating, gorgeous. Depth on the surface.
"Sharp as puppy teeth" — great description!
I love this about rocks and trees too feeling like wise old friends :)
At a moment in my life when I was feeling especially lost, I went for a long walk through my Indiana city and was stopped by some beautiful sedimentary rock that had been exposed by the construction of the road cutting through the area. I stopped and put my hand on it, feeling its depth and coolness. The phrase “rock bottom” came to mind and it occurred to me that some people fall a lot longer before hitting rock bottom but maybe that is because they have such depth to them. Here, where the rock was so close to the surface, it didn’t take much digging to hit solid rock. The rock was very crumbly, so I broke off a piece and took it with me and still keep it on my desk as a reminder of that moment when it felt like I had been falling for so long and finally found something solid to touch.
I have kept a rock, shaped like a heart (looks somewhat like your rock Pádraig, but a bit larger) in my upstairs desk drawer for years. One side of the rock has been painted lavender, possibly by my granddaughter. I can’t exactly remember where or when I got the rock. However, it was important enough to keep (and I am typically not a real collector of stuff). I guess, it reminds me of something primal; yes, nature gives. It is time for me to pass along this rock to someone else.
As a North Carolina resident & a Virginian native, I was blown away during a visit five years ago by the expansiveness of Utah. When we visited Zion National Park, I was awestruck by the size & majesty of the rock formations; I felt humbled in the land of giants.
Cathedrals of rock. They stay with you.