Even in all our busyness and rushing around to get things done, much of our thoughts and efforts are directed to someday discovering that elusive quality in life which may be described as 'low maintenance' Sadly this state of bliss, which is so commonly sought after, is rarely achieved. At every stage of an individual's life, there is something that needs to be hacked back, fixed, changed, updated, moved or taken to the dump. Ironically, we find we have even less time for any of the things we had little time for before.
However true that is, in the great scheme of things, and quite providentially, there is an activity available to us which is blissful and which the bible describes as, 'a time for gathering stones' . Now, granted at first glance, this hardly seems like something you would describe as low maintenance or an activity which is anything other than labour intensive, but perhaps you need to reconsider.
There is a time for gathering stones. There is indeed lots of time for gathering stones. And while we may not have time for anything else, when we make time for ourselves, in the form of a vacation, a walk on the beach, or a hike along a trail , we often return with stones in our pockets gathered along the way.
Stone gathering is a primeval activity and timeless. No longer vital, it does involve the old elements of hunting and gathering. We may nowadays have inadvertently structured our lives so as to include very little else that is 'timeless', but picking up stones is something many of us still find time for. It is, in fact, more essential to our being than we realise.
The fact is, gathering stones is a strangely rewarding activity. That we may not have any plans for the stones we collect, doesn't really matter. However, if we do have a project in mind, the whole enterprise becomes even more enjoyable. This is the time when undertaking something like a dry stone wall on our property becomes a very sensible idea. Many of us realise that the time for building dry stone walls here in Canada has come. It is not a difficult transition to make, mostly because gathering stones is something many of us do so well anyway.
It is rewarding to collect stones from our jaunts back and forth from the cottage, or from visits to friends in the country. The pleasure of spotting a well- shaped moss or lichen covered rock, under some leafy hiding spot, and the enthusiasm felt , carrying it back home and imagining where it will go in a wall, is something magical beyond description.
The gathering of stones is not something that takes time, because you can stop any time you want. Gathering enough stones to build a wall, may take forever, but the joy that comes adding each hand picked specimen to our pile outweighs the magnitude of the task undertaken.
This is the strange thing about rocks and time. Onlookers may see the work as labour intensive and a waste of time, it is in fact the very opposite: gathering stones becomes a way of transcending time and slowing down. What could be more maintenance free than a rock? A dry stone wall is simply a well stacked pile of maintenance free objects. Any section of wall we finally build, no matter how long it takes or how small it is, becomes a profound monument to our decision to step outside the demands of modernity with all its hustle-bustle. We have entered a world that is calming and therapeutic. There exists a healing benefit, a type of inner maintenance, free to anyone who takes time to gather and stack stones.