We are stardust. We are Golden. And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden —Joni Mitchell
It started out as a triage project. A parking-sized space in my humble front yard, well-bordered and layered in pebbles, with a lone milkweed and a few weeds sticking out here and there. It was oddly blank and confusing, since there is also a driveway exactly where the driveway should be. “What’s that for?” a visitor might ask, and I could only shrug. One day an old man walking by with an old dog solved the mystery: “Used to be they’d park a little camper here,” adding (in case I was getting any ideas): “can’t do that now, ‘course, not legal.” At first I figured I’d just scrape away the pebbly patina and reclaim this rectangle as yard space. But the rocks ran deeper than I’d first thought, and I was surprised by how quickly and heavily they filled my little bucket. Nor was I especially eager to create and tend more monoculture lawn. So I stepped further back and looked again, as if this space were a clean canvass or a blank page in my notebook.
Once the decision was made, I jumped right in without much planning. Because I needed to start to start, to throw some initial words up on the screen, I began carving divots into the deep uniform layer of small, multicolored tumbled rocks. At first I used a flimsy spade I’d found in the garage, but quickly figured out that I was better off with a tough little hand rake and my own scrappy fingers. During those first couple of grueling stints I wore rubber kitchen gloves, scrabbling and scraping away the stones in eight-or-so inch circles till I struck earth. I roughed up the liberated dirt, sprinkled in wildflower seeds I’d picked up at the hardware store, and covered it over lightly with potting soil. My watering regimen those first weeks was obsessive. I did exactly what I knew I should not, keeping vigil over the moist dark circles, willing sprouts to appear, like a disciple waiting for Christ to emerge from the tomb.
And even though I know (vaguely) that and how seeds work, I was still jarred when the tiny green nubbins actually appeared and began to thrust upward. Up toward the sun, to the sky, and to ME. Standing barefoot on the damp morning lawn, I was tempted to shout at passersby: “Witness the miracle! Behold how the earth sends up countless, tender emissaries…and in response to even the slightest and humblest invitation!” Emboldened by “my” success, I went to a garden store. I bought a rosemary plant, some proper gloves, and a babyhead-sized boulder the color of the Maltese falcon. I planted the herb without fanfare—and other scrubby little plants have followed—but, despite that initial glory of growing greenness, it is the little boulders that have won me over. There are about a dozen of them now, holding council in clusters just a few yards from my window. They have even crept into my dreams.
In one dream—and I should specify that this was not a nightmare even though, yes, I know how it sounds—I walked slowly along the banks of a swollen river, the comforting heft of their weight tugging down the deep pockets of my long black skirt. Bathed in the morning mist, I could smell the silt, the smooth heft thudding gently against my thighs as I moved toward the inky water. In another, I lay in shavasana, supine on a silky white beach, warm stones forming a line up my abdomen and chest. Like densely-bodied cats sleeping on top of me, they seemed to breathe, a metronome for my own respiration. I awakened from both dreams bathed in a sense of well-being, of community and companionship, that delicious feeling of cosmic not-aloneness.
And now I suppose I am well and truly a batty old woman because the stones speak and sing and call to me on a regular basis. Those previously inert lumps have woken up and have things to say. It could be a lone fieldstone in a Michigan prairie where I’m walking with my dog, or a chorus of them from man-made culverts where they’ve been pressed into service as drainage fodder. And it feels important to clarify that even the song of an “ordinary” stone is not at all ordinary for it is sung in geological time, a paean to the Big Bang, to physical creation itself. For the first time in my animal life, I experience stones—stone that is— as of a piece with me. No more or less a part of things, no more or less substantial or present, no more or less alive. To me, the small huddles of fieldstone that now congregate in my parking pad garden among mint and lavender and sage, are as solemn, purposeful and noble as the Buddha sitting in meditation.
But just in case this all sounds just too earnestly SPIRITUAL, I will describe the silly chipmunk who comes at dusk. Because more than the birds and the squirrels, more than the deer or the rabbits, the chippies seem drawn to this space. This evening, for instance, I watched as one first scampered from sage to lavender, twitchily sniffing as tiny rodents do. Then, in a flash, she sat high on her haunches atop a cluster of small boulders, appearing so suddenly she might have been teleported. She stayed there a long while (in chipmunk-time terms), as if impressed by the view. She gazed out over our little patch of land as if it were brand new. As if she’d never really seen it before.
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