Lessons from a stone wall

I covered the west wall of our cabin with stone. Last Friday a friend came over to help me fill in the big mortar joints and we put up the last piece (until I find enough pretty small rocks to justify getting even more obsessive and particular, of course). Now the west side of the building is a stone collage 8 feet high and 17 feet long, less the one window. Here is a photo of the big window-less section.

I started the stone project in order to add thermal mass and interest to the exterior, and I thought it would be fun. The first, very large stones, went up about a year and a half ago I think, and I managed to get it to the halfway point months and months ago. But the project languished. I just couldn't get back to it and since it was on the west side, the piles of stone and slowly crumbling scratch coat were relatively easy to ignore. We always have plenty of projects around here.

Then one morning early this spring I went for a walk to the East-NE. I stood in the wash below the place and looked up. It was so cool how the cabin blended with hill. I had never considered that before. I started meditating on the hills and noticing the stone under my feet, the variety, the seams of color.  Looking at individual rocks and noticing their color, shape, texture, size, and weight gave me ideas. When I pay attention to these kinds of details, I see so much beauty. The beauty is a call to engage.

A lot of the larger stones that I put up were piled up on the hills behind the cabin, gathered by earlier inhabitants. The rest I collected on walks. The wall literally comes from this ground, and maybe from the dreams and vision of the people who preceded us, the people who found and stacked so many of the rocks that are now on the wall or making up our walkways. I like the feeling that I'm participating in the history of the place, maybe even imagining something that other people who lived on this spot also imagined or would appreciate.

The poet Robinson Jeffers built houses and walls and towers of stone at his place in the Carmel Valley above Big Sur. He said, "I think that one may contribute (ever so slightly) to the beauty of things by making one's own life and environment beautiful, as far as one's power reaches." We are surrounded by so much ugliness---ugly objects and places, ugly actions and words. Somehow beauty has become a luxury or a triviality, not something that we tend and enjoy and participate with daily, as part of our place and being. But creating beauty and appreciating beauty are essential to the heart. They are also powerful acts.

I finished this wall while the oil spews into the Gulf, in the company of birds and lizards, to the sound of the wind rustling the leaves of the cottonwoods. As I worked, I thought of the devastation of that place, so many miles away from my home, and I grieved for the life lost and I raged against the greed and stupidity that brought it about. I also felt the rocks in my hands and heard their message of endurance. I learned what they would and would not let me do with them. I meditated on the need to pay attention and respect limits. There is a world out there, a network of matter and being that exists independent of our ideas and desires and theories.

Every day I take an action to curb my participation in our collective oil-based frenzy. And I offer this wall, as part of my efforts to build a more beautiful world for all of us. If you are also feeling sad and angry and powerless, answer the call of the beautiful and make more.