The earth is quiet beneath our feet. It sits in silent testimony to the ages. Slowly it weathers; slowly it grows, ever watchful of the quick minded short sighted organisms that creep across its back.

 

When you look at a piece of stone, you are witness to the result of millennia's growth and change. You are seeing the spirit of the world, encapsulated in a single moment, a symbolic snap shot of our collective beauty. If you are quiet, you can hear the heartbeat of the earth within that pebble.

 

Reach out; hold it in your hands. You can feel the strength. Even a child knows, instinctively, that it will not chip, it will not break. It is the eternal monument, standing in the long line of time, so that we don't have to.

 

And yet, not all is quiet waiting. There is a savagery to stone. It is that same primal power that was realized in the first human who fashioned flint to blade, and made a kill. It is the cry of our ancestors, impotent against the world, yet still savagely screaming against the night, beating it back with whatever they had at hand, even the rocks beneath their feat.

 

Today are lives are plastic molded buttocks cushioned melodrama. We take risks for pleasure and profit rather than survival. There is little that is constant in our lives, save the man made monuments to our own humanity. And that is of course, just a dream. The reality is still out there, but we don't see it.

 

Stone is no longer the bedrock of our world. Now it's concrete, a fashioned product of superior quality, but inferior beauty, perfect, straight, corporate, and aligned. In such a world, stone is the rebel. It is the outsider, screaming into a world that can't hear over the din of its own traffic; screaming about ancient truths, long forgotten.

 

And yet, within such a world, the call of the stone is the most important thing, because it forces us to grow. Being outside of the box, it gives us new eyes, to see and experience things which others will not know. It exposes us to new worlds, and inspires us with new ideas.

 

And so the primal spirit lives on, quietly, waiting patiently through the ages, ready to burst open at any moment. Within the unchanging eternal face of the rock, the stone, the mountain, we can see the face of time itself.