A Rounded Rock
On this sweet quiet Sunday morning, I am reading Astra Lincoln’s essay “Lessons on Vanishing” from the latest Authors Guild Bulletin. Here is a simple student’s quote from that piece that went straight to my heart just now, describing the effect of experiencing the fraying edge of the Juneau glacier:
“A river stone is round as a way of carrying everything that happens to it.”
Simple but profound. Let that sink in for a minute. We shall return to it below.
Yesterday my friend dragged me away from the stress of trying to sell my house and working so hard to make this big, transformative move and physical and spiritual expansion of my life possible. We went to Oak Harbor, a full-sized town less than an hour away with a Walmart and Safeway and fast food chains. Oh boy! But, they do have three Thai restaurants and a cheap Asian grocery store where I can buy 25-pound bags of carrots for my goats, as well as my beloved glutinous rice, good sesame oil, and Chinese greens and Japanese rice crackers, so I went. At the restaurant, I ran into two neighbors who I hadn’t seen in a few years. After some happy hugs and catching up, one of them just let it slip that “I haven’t seen you since your hair went grey.” And the conversation moved on with no marked break. Except that that little comment popped up in my thoughts just now when I read the sentence above about the roundness of the river rock.
I always carry little round beach stone with me, in my purse, in my truck, in my swimming bag, and in every pant pocket. Black rocks have been my friends ever since I taped a small one to my belly button for protection in a horrendous legal deposition about ten years ago. That rock then mysteriously disappeared afterwards, presumably when I went swimming in the Willamette River in my underwear right in downtown Portland on the advice of my sweet, concerned, wise attorney after the shitshow was over. The round black rocks I now collect and drag aroundI wherever I go serve their purpose and then get released back into the earth, sometimes returned to the beach where I found them, sometimes deposited on a different continent when my purse gets too heavy with additional rocks I pick up.
As a person who has lived on so many continents, started life over so many times, gained and lost a steady stream of human and animal friends among my neighbors wherever I make my home, my natural environment is what “grounds” me, what reminds me that no matter where I am, I am in fact home. As a desert tortoise taught me about two dozen years ago on a solitary desert retreat before I left Arizona to move to New Mexico, some of us get to carry our home with us in our bodies. Maybe the fact that I require beauty in my natural surroundings indicates a lack of something else that allows “normal” people to live in urban jungles full of concrete, cars, and discarded cardboard boxes. Not good or bad, it’s just who I am these days. The rocks are my way of keeping my beloved beach, forest, or mountain close when I have to enter that other world to teach or to visit my family, reminding me of home and guiding me back. And now I have my grey hair as my own embodiment of this process of rocky edges being ground away. “It’s not suffering. It’s erosion,” Astra Lincoln quotes Chuck Palahniuk in that same paragraph cited above. My grey hair is here to remind me of the intensity and speed of my life experience these past few years, like a river rock passing through a stretch of steep terrain that accelerates and intensifies that process of rounding. My friend Lillian always told me that these experiences are the polishing that allows the gem to shine when the overlaying rock and dirt get ground away.
This past month has been one of those crazy tumbling stretches when, all of a sudden, an opportunity arose for me to face the uncomfortable fact that I have outgrown the physical confines, the literal smallness of my current home, and that I need to act on that. My instant gut response to this message from the universe took me by total surprise, but has been too strong and clear for me to deny it. And then without much thought, when my current home didn’t sell and I knew I had to get creative, I declared my dream publicly, putting it out there to the universe, in the form of the crowdfunding project and then the online auction, to see whether I really could make this work. And the response has been phenomenal!
I promised myself going into it that I would give this vision everything I had, I would exhaust all my options to make it happen. But in the end, if it didn’t work out, I would accept that verdict and make peace with the fact that I tried but that it just wasn’t meant to be. That the situation required DIVINE TIMING and if the time wasn’t right, then this just wasn’t the path I was supposed to take. No regrets! I stand by that.
I have lowered the sale price of my current home to the lowest I can go, and the only reason I could do this is because of all of your donations and support, giving me the courage to take this step and the trust that my business will continue to flourish and support me. That retreats will happen, students will show up, and colleagues will join me to teach the small events I envision there. And that my creativity will flow, my writing will flourish, and new books will materialize to fly off those additional shelves I will be building for Happy Goat Productions in the new studio space for many more fruitful years, which my body will need to sustain.
No matter what happens with my physical space, my grey hair is a reminder of the metaphorical erosion of the past few years caused by the jagged edges of life that my pebble of a soul has tumbled and stumbled through: pandemic isolation and loss of livelihood, death of two of my closest companions, the destruction of my physical space from a literal windstorm that caused a metaphorical tsunami in my spirit. Today, I appreciate the confluence of my friend’s innocuous comment about the visible toll that the past few years have had on me, with my morning read about the beauty of the rounded rock. At this stage of my life, I am indeed a nice round polished rock, smooth like that special spot between my cat’s ears, strong like the cedar outside my window, steady like my goat’s insistence on being loved up after the morning milking, and still vibrant like my pup when I grab his leash. And that hard-won roundness is making it easier at my age to roll with the current rather than putting up a futile fight. We shall see where that current lands me… Thank you for being part of that current that has given me the roundness but also cradled my falls.
