We’re denizens of an infinite pebble drifting via the cosmic ocean of pure spacetime — a planet made a world largely by its rockiness. Rock gave us mountains and seashores, bridges and kitchen counter tops, gave us the primary Promethean fireplace that sparked civilization. A rock is a reliquary of the story of life on Earth — the open face of a canyon, its lined strata exposing evolutionary epochs; the fossil undusted on the forest path, embodying the haunting fact that “we are all potential fossils still carrying within our bodies the crudities of former existences.”
This, maybe, is what makes rocks so comforting, so pleasing to the contact of hand and thoughts. Lining my bookshelf are stones collected from locations I’ve been: a superbly spherical pebble of milky quartz from Puget Sound, a darkish piece of basalt with dazzling white veins from Huge Sur, a glittery piece of metamorphic schist from the Rila Mountains of my native Bulgaria — a form of altar to deep time and to the reminiscence of the Earth.
That’s what Leslie Barnard Sales space celebrates in her poetic e-book A Stone Is a Story (public library), illustrated in soulful watercolor by Australian artist and bookmaker Marc Martin.
The story begins with that almost all primal of delights — a baby on a seashore selecting up a stone — out of which unspools a tunnel into deep time: the lava oozing from Earth’s magmatic depths to make the rock, the mighty roots of historic timber sculpting it into form, the glaciers grinding it and sending it down the river, till it’s “floor all the way down to a speck of sand and despatched to sea.”
There
it has waited
for hundreds of thousands of years.
Bits of seaweed and shell and bone
have piled on high of it
have turn into a part of it.
A stone has felt the sluggish drifting
the sluggish shifting
of the floor of the earth.
Of their sluggish formation, rocks turn into the planet’s most steadfast witness — we see the dinosaurs come and go, we see the primary people make the primary music, we see mountains rise and crumble, till they turn into the pebbles on the seashore by the wonder-smitten youngster.
Each rock we contact is the emissary of timescales we can’t start to grasp with out confronting our personal transience, and but radiating from it’s also the quiet assurance that the world goes on and on, that we’re a part of one thing huge and sumptuous, that beneath all of the tumult and turmoil of our human lives there’s a steadfast continuity that anchors life to eternity.
Complement A Stone Is a Story with Rita Dove’s beautiful poem “The Fish in the Stone” and Temujin Doran’s lovely quick movie about the life and death of mountains, then revisit this illustrated love letter to rivers.
