Liza Field

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

Recent columns

• Recalling the start of a movement on the retail front lines
• Don't lose sight of the unseen 'big picture'
• Remember: There's more to life than what we see

I've climbed onto a rock topic, in recent columns. In particular, the past two exulted over the stone of our old Appalachian Mountains, so bumpily and verbosely, there was no room to philosophize about it.

But who can resist digging for wisdom in such a handy location -- our own ancient landscape?

Our mountain stones are "inert" treasure-trunks of potential creekbanks, crawfish, rhododendrons, kingfishers, fire pinks, owls -- whole rafts of flowing, musical life. But ironically, these rocks can only live by eroding -- by dying themselves.

Now here is paradox -- the kind I figure signifies wisdom. Maybe it's one reason so many questioners through the ages have mined the world's mountain rocks for something beyond minerals -- that wisdom the ancient Hebrews called even "more precious than gold."

The holy role of rocks

I grew up steeped in Bible stories that seemed, to me, pebbled with rocks. And because "concrete" images struck me more strongly than abstract ideas such as "salvation," the rocks lodged in my head where I could turn them over.

They communicated to me, for one, that the Bible wasn't always going to make literal sense, as it frequently called God "a rock." I heard one minister explain in a sermon that, to the ancient Hebrews, living in a landscape of blowing sand and sun, a big rock helped. It didn't move; it could provide shade and shelter; it endured.

Jesus compared someone who acted on wisdom to a man who built his house on a rock, instead of sand. I thought about this on childhood hikes to McAfee's Knob. Who would not love a home on one of the great, house-high rocks of its peak, I wondered? Here you could live in peace -- secure and Jesus-like -- waving at buzzards and having a good time.

Later, it struck me that Jesus was homeless. He didn't build himself houses on rocks. He slept on the ground or in a wet, pitching boat in a thunderstorm. His notion of "rock" didn't seem very sturdy.

I was also puzzled, each Palm Sunday, by his comment of riding into Jerusalem.

As the religious authorities tried to hush the hosannas, Jesus objected, "If these were quiet, even the stones would cry out." Marching in with the children's choir, stiff palm branch against my jaw, I wondered if Jesus had been joking. How could a stone make noise?

Jesus also gave Peter his name -- "Rock." Peter then went around recommending that everyone become "living stones." How, I wondered, could a stone "live"?

Cling not and be great

Much later, it dawned on me that people were, in fact, living stones. Here we were, walking around wearing dissolved rocks. And rocks did sing -- as frogs and coyotes, hawks and church choirs.

Apparently, we're made as living rocks -- singing, flowing into other lives. But humans also have an opposite instinct -- for self-preservation.

Philosopher Alan Watts said that Westerners especially were obsessed with it. Comparing life to a plummet off the edge of a cliff, he said the Westerner grabs onto a broken-off rock chunk as he falls -- and clings to this "security" the entire way down to his grave, terrified to let go.

"Get a piece of the rock!" an old insurance ad advised.

I relate to the rock-clinger. I never want people, animals, seasons or even one day to dissolve. But I see how futile this clinging is, amid our common free fall.

And I've noticed how fear and self-preservation cause rigidity, graspiness and wars. Petrified people tend to "stonewall." Suspicion hardens the cynic. Apparently, a survival instinct gone haywire assumes that such petrifaction will protect us.

But a "hardened heart" always seems the main problem in those old Bible stories. Isaiah said God wanted to exchange people's "hearts of stone" for "hearts of flesh." Yet we human beings like to petrify even God himself into a concrete image (ours, that is) -- like those wayward Israelites who kept worshiping gold calves and other knickknacks.

A stone God, of course, can't live. Apparently, "stone hearts" can't either. As the Chinese sage Lao Tzu said, "the hard and rigid belongs to the company of the dead." In fact, it seems that sages from many cultures recommended dissolving, waning, eroding.

It's hard for us, today, to want to erode or "drop the rock." Even if it makes us unhappy and ill, we've been trained in petrifaction and clinging.

But we also have many nonclingers to encourage us -- those who have dared to dissolve into greater life. Socrates, Buddha, Moses, Paul, Helen Keller, George Washington Carver, Eleanor Roosevelt, maybe your mother, father, or the elder next-door, one nobody sees eroding every day in love or pain or prayer for the world.

In reality, of course, everyone must erode, like mountains. Perhaps it helps just to know it's not a loss but far-reaching gain -- that we continue dissolving for life.