Respect for Stones

1. I go out to court the stones in my courtyard.  It seems only fair since I keep saying I spent quarantine with 40,000 friends.
2. I mean, I go out to count the stones in my courtyard. As a sign of respect.
3. Everything I learned I learned from stones.
4. My meditation guide keeps urging me to understand that everything arises in consciousness, but I consider this disrespectful to stones.  I consider it a kind of imperialism of human consciousness over all other things. It is related to but not the same as anthromorphism, which I also consider disrespectful to stones and all living things.  I believe truly that the stones are here with or without me. The don’t need my consciousness to arise, they don’t spring into existence when I turn my attention to them.
5. I’m sure I’m misinterpreting and misrepresenting the meditation guy. He knows that stones do not arise in my consciousness.
6. Meditating on stones I have come to understand the opposite: that my consciousness arises in stones.
7. “Grace Under Pressure” – wasn’t this perfectly good term ruined by some stupid television show about someone named Grace? – But rocks are grace under pressure. – (Pressure is objective. Grace is perceptual.)

And, sorry, I’m anthropomorphizing here. But wait. Maybe there’s another way to look at it. The stones are real and I am real, if more briefly real. My thoughts arise from them (again, the opposite of what the meditation chief says.) I perceive, etcetera, but it doesn’t make them any less real. And impenetrable, both object and perception. All of it, impenetrable.

8. There’s August sun on the weeds and rusted structures that grow along these train tracks.
9. “Weed” is a disrespectful word for a kind of plant. “Rusty structure” is a disrespectful term for this railroad shed. Once it came together out of parts, with heat and grease, and the good intention to build that can’t be undone by bad construction, corruption, underpayment, etcetera, because at its heart it is creation and transformation even if it’s just a crappy railroad shed.
10. This train is passing through the station called Campo di Carne. Translated, that’s Field of Carnage. So named after the Second World War.
11. We take just a few seconds to fall apart, a bit more slowly than the weeds, faster than rusty structures. All of us much faster than stones, which flow on continuously through what we call eternity.