Rocks And The Language Of Silence

Silence Speaks Volumes - pen and ink from my sketchbook

Hello -

I hope you're all well, that you and your loved ones are healthy and finding calm amid very calamitous times.  I'm well, as are my family and friends, and that is enough to keep me steady right now.

It seems there's plenty of information out there about how to handle this virus situation - both the practicalities of how to stay healthy and support others, and recommendations of how to occupy the extra time we may have on our hands.  So I'm going to talk about rocks.  And advocating for what we love.

I've been on a journey, that started months before we'd all heard of coronavirus, of studying rocks.  Not from a geologist's perspective, although I've been picking up some of that information too, but more from an imaginative point of view.  I've looked at how they sit in the landscape, how gardens grow around them, how they might have landed where they have, what's growing on their surfaces and out of their fissures.  I've contemplated the possibility of rock consciousness and considered rock time. I've been drawing them and I've been paying them visits.  And I've wondered, "What is it that rocks would tell us if we could understand their language?" 

Of course there are no clear explanations or answers to many of the things I've wondered but, as I've been imagining the secret lives of rocks I've recently come to this...

It's quite possible the language of rocks is silence.  And given silence, what is it we hear?

This question seems apt right now as the noise of our busy lives has suddenly shifted to a much quieter place - the confines of our home and the company of only our closest kin.  So what is it that is speaking to you out of this newly acquired silence?  Has the lack of noise allowed you the space to consider or see things in new ways?  Have these new ways been given the room to flourish whereas they might previously have been buried under busy noise?

In this quiet time, I've taken to this notion I heard from an interview with the writer and poet Ross Gay (On Being: Tending Joy and Practicing Delight).  He pondered “I often think the gap in our speaking about and for justice, or working for justice, is that we forget to advocate for what we love, for what we find beautiful and necessary. We are good at fighting, but imagining, and holding in one’s imagination what is wonderful and to be adored and preserved and exalted is harder for us, it seems.”

This idea of advocating for what we love and holding in our imagination what is wonderful has captured me and I'm giving it this time of relative silence to let it expand.  It feels like the place I've been working to get to, explained in a few short words.  And I've been considering how making art can be a part of advocating for what I love, how writing notes to you is a part of it, how participating in the Four Corners community at large is a part of it.  And certainly, how spending time contemplating rocks and learning about the power of silence is a part of it.

As always I'd love to hear your responses and thoughts - on what has flourished for you during these quiet and very strange times, how you advocate for what you love, or whatever else might come to your mind.

Thank you for taking the time with this.  Stay well in all ways.  Lots of love to you.

~ Rosie