Stones

Makes me think of soup.
Makes me think of walls.
Makes me think of the way it feels to walk barefoot on sand. Small and large intermingled, sometimes sharp, sometimes smooth, always static, stoic, even when moving, somehow.
I remember the first time I encountered a stone stair, soft and rounded by time. I suddenly had a sense of just how long we’ve been doing this. How long we’ve been building stairs and climbing them, to the extent that our soft fleshy feet can wear them down.
I think about hag stones and how much I’d like to find one. A hag stone (if you weren’t sure) is a stone that has naturally had a hole made in it. Whether it’s been worn there by dripping water or a nearsighted woodpecker, I can’t say as I’ve never found one. But how much dedication and focus would it take to wear a hole right through a stone, without cracking or splitting it? How much patience, which isn’t actually patience because that suggests there is something I’d rather be doing but no I have to patiently sit here and let time/water/life erode at me until I’ve changed, utterly. Still me, just holier. Whole-ier? At any rate, patience is a very human trait because it’s something we work on, where stones just have it.

How am I so arrogant that I might decide to resist change, might balk against shift, transformation, evolution, when a stone, something which could end my entire existence if tossed from a sling just right, cannot and does not resist such things.

It could be that I’m prone to considering the feelings of stones because of how relatable they made Pyornkrachzark, the Rockbiter from the Neverending Story, but I think there is a good chance I was already this way, and find the anthropomorphization of the world around me reinforcement of what I already suspect to be true.

Well, one could argue that stones don’t have an awareness of time the way people do. And while that is true, it would not do to disregard that stones have an awareness of time. They are, in fact, a fairly dedicated form of measuring it. Something shifts and there is suddenly a cliff where there was land before. The walls of that cliff will tell stories as readily as the rings of a tree, but in the form of an epic, a saga of time that we cannot conceive of. So who is the better judge of how time passes? Something which has the perspective of centuries? Or creatures who are pretty much just a squishy blink in comparison?