Liza Field

Liza Field's column appears twice a month in Extra.

Recent columns

• Don't lose sight of the unseen 'big picture'
• Remember: There's more to life than what we see
• From suffering can come growth, joy

Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.

-- Psalm 61

How softly these mountain rocks are adorned, and how fine and reassuring the company they keep.

-- John Muir

Rocks fascinate us. Kids love to climb on them, climbers to scale them, tired hikers to sit on their cool slabs, jewelry-lovers to wear them.

I like to ponder them. Literal and symbolic, metamorphic or metaphoric, their silent presence magnetizes a certain mineral stillness in me that doesn't respond to noise, high speeds or commotion. Perhaps my slow brain is drawn to their pace.

The late American psychologist-philosopher Scott Peck developed a reverence, later in life, for ancient "standing stone" sites in the British Isles. He and his wife would travel as pilgrims to gaze in wonder at these giant rocks, their shadows, the looming holes between them.

How did the stones get there, upended -- and why? Peck liked the fact that no fact explained it. No guide could pave it over with data, no tourist could quite fall asleep under a smooth smotherment of answers. The standing stones poked through every mental ceiling. They alone knew what had happened, and they weren't telling.

Or were they? John Muir said that rocks had a language. Just as he read scriptures from the mountains and heard choirs of birdsong, he considered the rocks "words of God," like wildlife, waters and people. "We all flow from one fountain soul."

And Muir meant, literally, "flow."

"Everything is flowingly going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water ... while the stars go streaming through space."

Explanations not enough

A sense that everything is holy and flowing doesn't solve the mystery of standing stones. But those anthropological puzzles are, to my mind, no less weird than the entire Earth -- a vast stone of liquid, solid and gas we did not produce and can't explain, even as we walk around wearing it in our chalky leg bones and iron blood, expressing and dreaming it through flutes and quilts, stained-glass windows and key-lime pies, baptisms and bandannas.

It seems this bizarreness gets forgotten under the drum of daily activity, even under the conviction-filled science-versus-religion battles over the topic.

Richard Dawkins, for instance, can explain with airtight certainty the history of the universe and life, how things moved with nonchalant normalcy from initial fireball to summer ballet, from chaotic explosion to King's College Choir -- but it is not normal to me. Where Dawkins observes an obvious natural progression, I see vast, unnatural gaps, deep as intergalactic space, as unsolved as "why?"

Nor can Ken Ham's "Answers in Genesis" close the hole of my stupefaction by explaining how God made Creation in six days, 6,000 years ago. Even containing all the answers inside a Creation Museum can't close the gap of wonder for me, despite the automated dinosaurs picnicking among Adam and Eve mannequins under spotlights.

Because, although visitors are invited to the museum up to one hour before closing, the exhibits are then locked-in and ourselves locked-out with the expanding universe of exploding black holes, unexplained dark matter, the dream world, even the "ordinary" stones we are composed of, related to the stars and being turned -- even now -- into life.

The many lives of stone

Instead of visiting a science lab or museum, we could just hike to McAfee Knob on Catawba Mountain, whose high, ancient boulders ("Devil's Kitchen") are so majestic, giant and profound, one could spend days among their lichen-scabbed, cool and holy rooms, contemplating their activity.

"No activity is occurring," you might say at first, still winded from the climb.

But look again. See how these primeval, moss-riddled "standing stones" are girdled in humus, wildflowers and acorns, huckleberries, the scat of bears who eat them, the grubs eating scat, pee-wees who eat grubs and fly up into the sky, piercing the place with music?

All of it, this entire ark-load of life, is composed of stone -- the rock of this mountain.

Once as high as the Himalayas, our Appalachians have slumped down through time, like shrinking, old, life-giving mothers.

Because these ancient rocks have been dying -- eaten for millions of years by moss, lichens, rain and weather -- they have now become bears, tulip poplars, wildflowers, incense-breathing pine straw and strange music.

Is this not confounding, that a rock would die, get resurrected to grow, bloom, stand up and walk, begin to sing and even fly to South America?

Yet this story of stone is the story of Earth -- maybe the whole Cosmos -- still exploding, burning, dying to whatever it was last year, so that we get to be here a moment, astonished (yes, even the word comes from "stone"), unable to own, contain or explain it because (thank you, God) the story lives on.