Meditating on Rocks

  In my recent trip to Scarborough Campus at U of T, I marveled at what was called a "rock walk"-- a kind of prosaic walk through some of Canada's geology. I started to reflect on my early fascination with rocks, and how that came to evolve. Geology took the form of early trips to the beach with my dad, collecting rocks (or what sometimes turned out to be fossilized glass) in these big jars that I took home with me. I think that I was as much interested in the physical forces impinging on the rocks as I was on the actual substances themselves. For instance, it amazed me that molten lava could harden in the air to form igneous rocks, after having been buried deep within the ground at a super-hot temperature that liquifies the rock. I was also quite intrigued by how limestone can contain fossils for millions of years, and how the forces of erosion can shape rocks into various shapes that form valleys, cliffs and even mountains. This would truly make an interesting study that can take a lifetime to learn.

   Substances lose their interest very quickly. Rocks that were part of a valued collection soon enough become dusty and unobserved artifacts, like those paperweights we used to have (when we had paper, of course). The only "use" I might have for a rock is to gently massage it when I am anxious, as this gives me a strong sense of solidity and grounding in the present. The point is: when something is taken out of its context, it easily becomes a kind of disembodied artifact, lacking in sense and even "fossilized" by its detachment from other things. To truly understand a rock is to see its relationships engraved upon its surfaces. Geologists don't just study rocks as "things" that sit on the ground: they see, rather, the universe reflected in the rocks themselves, giving them clues about the age of the earth and the kinds of periods that the earth must have gone through for that particular formation to manifest, including the ice age.

   When it comes to rocks and "emptiness", I would have to say that emptiness is the sense of everything containing everything else. The rock contains a record of all things: wind, soil, mountains, erosion, sun, water, living forms...all the things that have acted upon it to make it what is appears to be now. It takes a certain kind of inquiry to see that kind of emptiness: a rock is not "just a rock" that is inanimate, but more so, contains a spirit, a being, an aliveness, that we see by looking at its contours, where it has been and what happened to it. At the same time, this requires that a living and alive mind penetrate beneath the "thingness" of the rock to see its animate nature. Even Schopenhauer was able to see that rocks were animate: they change, they exist, they live, just as we live, and they don't possess a static form any more than we do. But to recognize all this requires that we open up to our own connection with it, and let curiosity see beyond the "thingness" that we can easily reduce things to.