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“Everything visible, concrete….is purely an expression of an idea, and thus a mediator of the invisible.” – Dogen

I once lived in the Methow Valley (pronounced, “met how?”) in the North Central Cascades of Washington state in a town known as Twisp. The valley has a great mix of right-wing gun-toting Republicans, living-off-the-land hippy types who began settling there in the 70s, artists, outdoor enthusiasts and quite a few eccentrics.

Out of the numerous aberrants one legendary character, who I never met, still sticks in my mind. I don’t even know what his name was but I do know that he was famous for stacking stones. “When you’re stacking stones all you’re doing is stacking stones,” he was reported to have said when interviewed by the Methow Valley News.

I thought of this guy the other day and I thought to myself, “why am I out here balancing stones?” In the stacking process I find that I need patience to bring stones to balance; anytime that I rush nothing ever comes of my effort. I’ve noted that I must stand back and wait a few minutes to give the stones time to sink into their new place in time. I’ve also noticed that if, after having placed a few stones, I approach the burgeoning piece without respecting the present form – the stones will not participate and everything comes crashing down. As a result I have come up with a process that is beginning to pay off and it is as follows: place a stone and step back to observe where the balance point is on the stone; begin looking amongst the stones around me for the next one to be placed; move to the sculpture with the new stone keeping in mind overall integrity based on the “vertical column” of balance that runs through the sculpture.

With this in mind I thought, “there must be some kind of relationship between time and gravity because the longer I leave the stones in a sculpture to get ‘use to’ their new home the more workable the sculpture is.” Turns out that there is a relationship between time and gravity, but unfortunately it has nothing to do with my experience building living stone sculptures.  Einstein theorized, and it has been tested to be true, that Time is not the same for everybody everywhere. The theory states that time slows down the closer you get to center of gravity of a body like the core of the Earth or a black hole in space. So, Time at the bottom of my sculpture is moving immeasurably slower than five or six stones above it which says nothing about why the sculptures work better if left to settle in.

What else could I possibly be getting from stacking stones besides cultivating patience and being wrong about the relationship between time and gravity? My stone-stacking legend had it right that when you are stacking stones all you’re doing is stacking stones. I’ve experienced moments of this sort of unique clearing of the mind of everything except for the task at hand; but, I haven’t had an hour of it. Maybe that’s what I’m moving towards – the ability to focus all of my mental and physical faculties on the job at hand. Is this goal? Am I searching for inspiration in the moment? If so, what is this curiosity?

I think A, my wife, said it most succinctly when I was trying to explain to her that you can theoretically stand next to a black hole and not get sucked in and that you will only obliterated if you cross the plane of the black hole.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, “how horrible!”

“What?” I queried thinking she was reacting to the thought of being sucked into nothingness.

“No! It’s that you could be so close to something so enigmatic and not be able to look in!”

We humans have a great innate desire to know and are gifted with the ability to muse about things unknown, but sometimes I think our aptitude for wonder is squandered on our egos as we clamor for more. I’m no saint, but I do believe that the natural world just outside our doors holds all the secrets of the universe (imagine that just one tiny seed of a giant sequoia holds in it the engineering plans for a tree that can grow to be hundreds of feet tall.) Through our limitless imaginations we know what’s better for us but we’ve gotten off-track somewhere between the development of our first stone tools and using bombs with nuclear waste in modern warfare.

Hold the world in the palm of your hand

I may never come up with anything but new topics for this blog by stacking stones but there may be someone out there who can do more by heeding the call to our universal muse. At the risk of looking crazy to those around you go out and listen to a river, listen to the wind as it rips through a pine forest at night or get a bunch rocks for your house or apartment and have a stone-balancing barbeque.

So it is with life; we travel and move through our existence and we complete circles. Some circles are smaller like the one going to the market and back; but, some circles take a decade or longer to navigate. I left NYC ten years ago on an odyssey that included soul searching in India, building rock walls in Seattle, guiding rafts and rock climbing in the North Cascades, learning to play Congas, being initiated into Santeria, teaching English and playing Cuban Son in Mexico, teaching English in S. Korea and finally marrying the love of my life in Vegas this past April.

Now I live in Wales with a perfect view of Swndt Bay and Snowdonia (where Sir Edmund Hillary did some initial training for Everest) and I’ve reunited (electronically) with my uber passionate friend Kennedy Moore. I first met Kennedy in Honolulu whilst he was el jefe of a group of seaside bungalows, known as the Compound, that were the scene of art, poetry and some debauchery.

In the Diary of a Genius Salvador Dali wrote, “There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.” This could’ve been engraved over the entryway into the Compound as the motto of those times. While there I saw Kennedy paint, hammer, make coconut lamps and be a gracious host of what was at times unbridled mania. It takes inconsolable passion to continue to engender creativity artfully and “heartfully” as Kennedy has done over the years. We are lucky to have such a synergistic soul guiding us through NYC with Ask A New Yorker! Blaze on brother!

……..

I was just reading Jean-Paul Sartre’s Intimacy and I thought what the world would be like if suddenly the Pope mandated a change in church policy and allowed its priests to marry. I can imagine a great deal of relief emanating from the frozen loins of some of God’s cassocked confessors; the others, whom, for one reason or another know some life near their equators, will have to suss out their perversities and/or move into the light.

I think of how happy so many men would be to integrate the attention of physical love into their lives. I’m sure many priest would choose to live in celibacy; but that would be ok because they wouldn’t be the ones that had a problem with depriving themselves of the flesh. So, there would be one group moving in with their wives, and another finding deeper meditation and sanctuary in things spiritual. Balance would be restored and fewer altar boys would grow up as promiscuous adults with low or no self-esteem.

I think often of these moments in life; moments of sudden release that illustrate the intensity of being. One such moment came to me 10 years ago as I walked as slowly as possible towards the enlivening bay in Palolem, Goa (southwest India). I was participating in a meditation retreat; for 10 days we ate, walked and did everything in slow motion except swimming. I was intensely focused on the sand of the beach; making sure that every moment was mindful when suddenly white foam dashed into my vision. My mind went blank and for a very short tick of normal time; my entire everything that I considered “me” was obliterated. All that I had expected disappeared because of one simple tidal movement.

I still search for ways to discover life altering moments on a more regular basis; and I think I’ve found the promise land. I live in Moelfre, Anglesey Wales, ten minutes from a beach covered in natural stones. Some of the rocks are rounded from the tidal forces that have moved over this hard beach every day for perhaps thousands of years. Most days I walk onto this canvas moving towards the area where I will work; I find my base stone; then I find my first balancing stone; balance it and continue balancing until I have a sculpture that climbs stealthily from the field of thousands.

Moments come in the balancing; like when I release my hands from the act of compensating for weight, wind and incongruities and the sixth stone stays there in accordance with the five below. There is some satisfaction in knowing that I can, without any prior training, complete this aesthetically pleasing simplicity; but, the true pleasure is in that one minuscule particle of time when I release my hands from the sculpture. This is my trice of satori for the day.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master,
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)