A la Node

46 – Story of a Small Stone

It is the fate of small stones, so it is said, to be ground away into dust by the actions of life and the cruel mechanics of the world. It is true of most, in fact, though a few undergo the opposite transformation, accreting layers of mass in the warm wet interior of a kidney, or the cool wet of an oyster. Some, in the vacuum of space, gather into planets.

One small stone, granite that surely had been part of a very large stone, perhaps a mountain not so long ago, sat on the curb outside of the library, alone and out of place on its high concrete perch.

How much had happened to me in my life, I thought, that had never happened to this small stone. It had been a part of some large mass, and then came into being as a piece of gravel when the larger rock was crushed. From there, some form of transportation brought it to the road outside the library, and its life since then has consisted of little more than being kicked about, stepped upon, driven over, dissolving by degrees into dust. So unlike my own widely traveled body, my catalog of experiences, my loves and losses and thoughts and stories.

Of course, one could argue the stone’s mineral constituents have lived a billion years of geologic drama, its atoms an even longer lifetime since their birth in some far off star. But then, my own atoms have no less illustrious a career. It is only my own personal arrangement of them that exists as an individual, someone with a story to compare to the story of a small stone. And that small stone, did its story begin with the crushing of a larger stone? Or did it begin with the melding of quartz and mica and basalt deep in the earth? Where do you chose to place the beginning of the narrative?

There are those who like to point out humanity’s insignificance in the face of cosmic immensity. There are those who like to say that an animal is only a gene’s way of making another gene. We have moved, so it is said, from the very center of all creation, its greatest product and primary focus, to a mere speck of dust as we have discovered that the earth moves around the sun, that other planets move around the sun, that the sun itself moves around some central galactic mass, and that our galaxy of trillions of stars is only one of trillions of galaxies. Yet… Yet where do you decide to start telling the story?

To whom is humanity a mere speck? By whose standards do we consider ourselves mere specks of dust? Who decides a small stone is merely an insignificant bit of gravel rather than the glorious end result of a billion year mineral legacy?

As far as I can tell, the stone has no capacity to examine its own situation and history. It is there because of human labor. Its current and past status and story exist entirely in human consciousness, as does the story of the chicken and the egg, the gene and the organism, the earth and the planets and the sun and the galaxies. So far as we know, we are the only ones who know, the only ones who care. The stone, the stars and all of history revolve around us, because all of them are only our own very human story.

Until the stone cares to speak, the only story that matters is the one we tell.