Individuality

Even from the same parent material and with very similar histories, no two stones are alike. But there is greater variation between stones from different parent materials and different histories. Stones vary in being dense or light, dark or bright, mottled or monotone, rough or smooth, hard or soft, and simple or complex in form and composition.

Biography

Stones are story tellers; they narrate their histories through their form and composition. The stones above and left are Deer Isle granite; they originated in an island arc of volcanoes off the shore of Protogondwana land, near what is now north Africa, around 600 million years ago. Around 400 million years ago, these plutons accreted to the Laurentian shield, what is now coastal Maine.

Called the Avalon terrain, the magma bowls of these island arc volcanoes cooled very slowly, yielding pink granites with very large crystals. These stones first were fractured from the parent pink Deer Isle granite, and were shaped tumbling on the ocean shore.

The light granite cobbles above were found in Bras d'Or on Cape Breton. They originated in the Miramichi-Bra d'Or island arc of volcanoes off the shore of Amazonia. Like dancers, the Miramichi-Bra d'Or and Avalon terrains slipped sideways to line up and then move together toward the Laurentian shield with the closing of the Iapetus Ocean. They too took their present shape when they fractured from their parents and rolled in the surf.

Above and right are erratics, stones carried from from the north by mile thick glaciers to be deposited on the Maine coast. They are immigrants, but with different histories. The stones above were silt, then siltstone, then buried, fractured, and the faults filled with quartz. The eccentrics at right did not undergo this process of fracture and suffusion with molten quartz. Quartz is harder than siltstone, wears more slowly, and leaves a ridge around the stone.

Some of these glacial erratics are very hard, so that tumbling in the surf gives them a smooth shiny polish. These stones are delightful to hold and rub between thumb and forefinger.

To the right is lava from Mount Erebus, on the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf on the coast of Antarctica. It is flash frozen stone foam; intensely heated molten rock bubbling with gas suddenly encountering ice and cold.

To the left is lava from south-western Iceland, also flash frozen stone foam. This lava comes from the seam where the earth recreates itself, the oceanic ridge where upwelling lava pushes tectonic plates left and right, east and west.

Sometimes the stone records what is happening at the moment it is formed; more like a journalist than an autobiographer. To the right is late carboniferous period sandstone from a beach near Joggins Nova Scotia. It reports the action of the waves on a sandy beach 300 million years ago.

A prototypical stone has integrity; has a form that is distinct, smooth, and simple; and derives the coherence of the whole from the shared history of the parts.

 

It helps if the parent material is hard with consistent internal structure. That is why igneous rocks make better stones than sedimentary rocks.

Weathering and erosion liberate the constituents of stone as free, pure, elemental essences: sand, silt and clay.

These essences lack the integrity, coherence, and distinct form of stones. They are products of the dissolution and passing out of existence of stones and also the material for their rebirth.

Potters take shapeless clay, give it form, and by firing it, subject it to a weak substitute for the pressure and heat that forms true stones. The clay becomes much more stone like; it gains integrity; a distinct form; and coherence. But it lacks the hardness and cohesiveness of natural stone; all its stony qualities will soon be lost.

 

The white kaolin clays of China are prized by potters for its smooth fine texture and the strength and hardness it achieves when fired. Fine china derives its quality from its kaolin.

 

It is an honor to be stone like; the best ceramics are called stoneware.

Glass workers take another essence, sand, heat it until it is molten, and then shape it according to their aesthetics and needs. The result is stone-like; things made of glass have integrity, coherence, and distinctiveness. But they also show the will of a creator in a way natural stones do not. However, when shattered and tumbled on the shore, they gradually lose their appearance as artifacts and return to being natural objects.

Sometimes the material worked into an artifact is stone itself. The stone axes to the left were found in the tropical forest of northern Peru, home of the Awajun.

Sometimes the most beautiful artifacts of all are not produced by humans.

The place where inanimate and animate meet is a fuzzy boundary between stones and non-stones. My sense is that the homes built by colonies of coral above qualify as stones more so than the cockle shell at left, but I am not sure I could explain why I think that. Is it a matter of durability? That one is a collective product and the other an individual one?

Life and stone interpenetrate in other ways. The sandstone at right was found on the beach of an island in the Alexander Archipelago of south-east Alaska. It carries the imprint and remains of a dawn redwood branch and an alder leaf that fell on the wet sands around 50 million years ago.

Sometimes life clings to stone for a secure hold on the world. The barnacle covered granite cobble at left was found in the intertidal zone on a beach near Stonington, Maine.

The stories that stone can tell.

Individual stones can tell us their own personal narratives about their adventures after separation from their parent material. But stone and layers of stone can tell us more sweeping epics of earth history.

When you descend the Bright Angel trail at the Grand Canyon, you pass down through the Kaibab limestone, the Toroweap formation, the Coconino Sandstone, the Hermit Shale, the Esplanade sandstone, the Supai group, the Red Wall Limestone, the Muab limestone, the Bright Angel shale, the Bass Limestone, going ever lower and back in time all the way to the Precambrian proterozoic, to strata laid down before the advent of multi-cellular life. At the bottom, one reaches the crystalline basement, the Vishnu schist. In this descent, you are not just going down a mile in depth and two and a half billion years of time, you are traversing the script of an ancient drama, one with the most ancient of actors, the land and the sea. The text of the drama is written in the stone of the canyon, the strata laid one on top of another are the pages of that play, and it depicts the struggle of those old antagonists over hundreds of millions of years. The limestones were laid down in deep water when the sea had advanced and swept over the land, and the sandstones were laid down when the land struggled back and the sea had retreated, and the shales were laid down when the land and sea wrestled to a draw and shales and siltstones were deposited in muddy estuaries just off-shore. The Vishnu Schist lies in the deepest part of the canyon, where the Colorado River flows and cuts its way ever deeper through earth’s history revealing ever more pages of the drama. The Vishnu Schist was likely formed from marine sediments and lava flows that were pulled deep into the earth and heated and squeezed by the crushing weight of 15 miles of crust, only to come out metamorphosed, transformed by the earth’s hot embrace.

Sacred Stones

Many cultures have recognized that stones can be saturated with the sacred: the stones in medicine wheels, the coronation stone, the Ruknu l-Aswad [the Black Stone] in the Kaaba, and unfound stones, like the philospher's stone. Quartz crystals, in particular, have been seen as having a capacity to capture and focus spiritual force.

Funeral shrines, whether the Taj Mahal or the great pyramids, or grave markers, are often made of stone. At right is a memorial of a saintly dog named Katie Skye, whose ashes were mixed in concrete along with mussel shells that she loved to crunch and other familiar things from her summer home in Maine. Vandals threw her memorial down a cliff to the sea, but it was rescued. Katie Skye (black) and Maggie (brown) are shown below.

Below is a memorial yet to be: two sets of twelve stones and a quartz crystal will link two sacred places.

This meditation on the personhood of stones was inspired by the building of sacred labyrinth in Karala, Saaremaa, Estonia, choreographed by Liina Link..

At left is the artist's rendering of her art.

Like Madame Blavatsky's white dog, the guard dog of the labyrinth is magical.

The ring of twelve sacred stones on the right will complete the labyrinth.

The sacred stones will ring the heart stone at left, just as their sister stones will ring a high point overlooking the sea on Saare Kallis.