THREAD
1/
I’m lying here in the dark, waiting for the sun to rise and thinking about the Fortingall yew.
Experts place its age at around 5,000 years old. A path leads towards it, and along the way, stones mark the events in human history that it has seen. It’s seen a lot. Too much, maybe. It looks tired.
And yet stones are not remembered this way, though they have seen more.
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@kristiedegaris Maybe that's why they are so heavy. The heaviest I have lifted came from the bowels of what's now a hill. Spat up a thousand or more years ago. They call the hill Mt Horrible. Why I don't know. It's bauxite now acts as a seawall on our port. Early built houses, Churches and commercial buildings.
Other stones in our rivers washed from further up mountains only weigh half by size in comparison. Greywacke.
My wife's father would collect stone and crystals from rivers and clay banks. He would cut some stone into sections to expose the beauty the rather ordinary outer shell had hidden inside. He built sheds to store his work in. All in small trays he made from anything wooden.
Stones are so interesting and hold so many tales of time.
Your work must bring you so much pleasure. As it did to my father in-law.
2/
Stones have seen everything. The rise and fall of every civilisation, every birth and death on this planet, and every one to come. Stone is compressed life. Captured time. Old forests. Ancient bodies. It’s strange we don’t pay more attention to that. We treat stone as permanence, but it is memory too.
3/
These days, when I feel the weight of a stone in my hand as it finds its place in a wall, I think less about the past and more about the future. It’s hard to know what the world will look like in ten years, never mind hundreds or thousands, the lifespan of the drystone walls I build.
4/4
Now, the great longevity of stone feels less like a record of how much time has passed, and more like a measure of how much time we might have left.
END
Every atom of every person is made of star stuff.
Your constituent fibres are many thousand of millions of years old, and could have seen much.
And yet, we are unable to connect with the ancient heritage of our bodies.
Nor is the stone able to do this.
Neither is the yew tree
